Hynafiad
When the Ancient Kingdom of Destra was destroyed, what remained of its people fled into hiding in the Destra Wetlands and became the Hynafiad. There they have remained ever since, living up to the elven word for ‘wanderer’ from which they have taken their name and remaining a people in exile, looking to remove themselves from the outside world as much as possible.
Naming Traditions
Family names
Since their self-imposed exile following the destruction of the Ancient Kingdom of Destra, all Hynafiad have abandoned the concept of having family names and instead the all bear the name Hynafex after their forename.
As there are relatively few Hynafiad and they live in small communities, the fact that they all have the same family name doesn’t tend to present many problems for them. However, it can make life difficult for outsiders who are seeking a specific individual, even more so when they don’t know to which community the individual belongs.
With regards to their forenames, the Hynafiad tend to stick to naming their children with the traditional names of their forebears, which means that they often carry rather archaic sounding names such as Haman, Joram, Zibiah and Sherah.
Culture
Major language groups and dialects
Despite there being few Elves amongst their population, the venerable roots of the Hynafiad people and the close trade connections that their ancestors had with ancient Elven civilisations such as the Kingdom of Thaleros means that most of the inhabitant of the Ancient Kingdom of Destra spoke elven as fluently as they did common.
This legacy has remained within the Hynafiad in the form of the strange combination dialect of archaic common and old elvish that they speak. As their dialect is neither one nor the other, speakers of both elven an common can mostly understand, at least the sense of what someone of the Hynafiad people is saying, but detailed or technical conversation can prove to be rather difficult.
Art & Architecture
Architecturally, there is little to remark upon with regards to the Hynafiad. As a nomadic people they prefer function over form and their buildings will either take the form of stiff, water resistant tents or more solid structures of wood and reeds that they can easily disassemble when they move on to their next locations.
In terms of art, instead of producing new works of art, the Hynafiad have instead perfected the technique of repairing items, to the extent that it can be considered artful in itself. Clothes are repaired using vibrantly coloured threads, different to or even clashing with the original colours of the garment. Broken metallic and ceramic objects are fused back together using veins of gold and silver, reclaimed from precious objects found within the ruins of the Ancient Kingdom of Destra. For the Hynafiad, this practice is also symbolic of themselves as a people – that even things that are broken can be remade and even take on a new life of their own.
Common Customs, traditions and rituals
The history of the decline and fall of the Ancient Kingdom of Destra has strongly shaped the customs of the Hynafiad people as their descendants. To begin with, magic that is not rooted solely in nature is treated with great suspicion by the Hynafiad, and those with a strong and obvious connection to the arcane are often shunned or even driven out of Hynafiad communities. Whilst druids and rangers can find a home in Hynafiad communities, with their abilities being valued, yet still viewed through a lens of suspicion, and member of a Hynafiad community who sought training as a wizard, or who made a pact with another planar entity for magical power would be exiled at best. There are even cases where children who are believed to be sorcerers are driven out of their community and left to fend for themselves, and most likely die, in the Destra Wetlands.
Equally, the key role that monstrous creatures and particularly Dragons played in the destruction of the Kingdom of Destra means that the Hynafiad treat all Dragonborn and humanoids deemed to have a connection with more monstrous races with deep suspicion and generally outright hostility.
Finally, the destruction of their ancestral home means that since that time the Hynafiad have remained a nomadic people, though their historic ties to the Destra Wetlands region means that their patterns of travel never stray beyond the borders of the wetlands. They tend to avoid contact with outsiders, only approaching non-Hynafiad people or travelling to the only permanent settlement in the region Desheart to trade in the most dire of circumstances.
Religious Customs
The Hynafiad are one of the few groups of people who have developed a strong, non-academic connection with and have developed a routine pattern of veneration for the Divine Az. Az’s divine interests in history appeals to the Hynafiad, who use their worship of him to both remember their past with fondness, but also try to divine future hardships through the lessons that their past can teach them.Birth & Baptismal Rites
When the time of birth approaches, Hynafiad women will travel to the ruins of buildings built when the Destra Wetlands was not the waterlogged wilderness that it is now, but was instead the Ancient Kingdom of Destra. They will then give birth in one of these buildings, a practice which the Hynafiad believes ties them to their ancestors and ensures that though the home of their ancestors has been destroyed, the Hynafiad remain connect to their illustrious past.
Funerary and Memorial customs
When a member of the Hynafiad dies, their body is weighed down with stones and submerged within one of the many ponds, rivers and lakes that carpet the area of the Destra Wetlands. The Hynafiad refer to this practice as a ‘homecoming’ and they believe that internment in this way will ensure that the soul of the deceased is able to view their ancestral homeland as it was in its glory days when it was the Ancient Kingdom of Destra before passing on beyond the veil.
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