Thowan

The Thowans—formally known as The Good Dhyllie Folk of Clan Thow and sometimes disparagingly called Rootdiggers or Rootpickers—are a clan of Dhyllie fae that both created and presently occupy the Thow Pit. Though they are a small clan by numbers, Clan Thow is perhaps the most well-known of dhyllie clans in the wider fae world.
Like most dhyllie, Thowans refuse to trade in hard currency. Unlike their more common brethren, however, they don't trade in trinkets and tchotchkes. Instead, Thowans elect to exchange goods exclusively via barter for mining equipment—such as pickaxes, shovels, wheelbarrows, and lamps—beasts of burden, and supplies. This is in service to the singular goal of the clan, which is to dig ever deeper to find the bottom of the Thow Pit.
The story of the clan's origin may seem absurd to most, but upon further examination of the Thowans, one will be hard-pressed to not at least find the story plausible. As Thowan lore goes, the clan came to being as a result of an idle question that snowballed from a philosophical curiosity to an academic dispute that has yet to be resolved despite a multi-generational project to do just that.
The question was rather simple. "How deep can a tree's roots go?" one dhyllie philosopher asked another. They had their own ideas and could not agree. Others had their own ideas and, before long, the whole matter devolved into an all-out academic brawl. Before things could come to blows, it was decided that a practical demonstration was in order. A neutral panel of dhyllie chose an unremarkable Thow tree, in an unremarkable part of an unremarkable forest, and set a group of labourers to start digging around it to find how deep its roots went. Many centuries later, the work continues with no end in sight.
Though the Thow Pit is more the product of idle curiosity, it is still the source of a number of valuable materials that would have resulted in the Thow Clan being rather wealthy if it were not so singularly-focused on the resolution of the original dispute. One of the Thowans' most prized exports are spherical bundles of roots encased in silver. They are highly sought after for their prettiness by common fae, but some few creatures with the necessary insight to see the baubles for what they are seek them for what they contain. Unbeknownst to most, the baubles contain a trace of the energy of the dark and secret things that rest beneath the bedrock of the world.