Domains: Hearth, shared meal, village memory, the table that everyone returns to whether they were invited or not.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~5,400 BSD). Cohort: current. Nellwen rose with the consolidation of the halfling village pattern across the Expansion-era settlements — when the shared-meal tradition spread through the scattered halfling enclaves as the one custom every clan recognized in every other.
Worshipped by: Halflings of Arinsfold, Belenstrope, Dengar, Fieri, Hookling, Windorf, Wispen, and Shelwin, each in their own local form. Wispen tracker-villages count her among the few patrons their silver-touch tradition acknowledges without ceremony. Shelwin river-coastal halflings keep her rites with one inflectional change — the table is set on the river-stone instead of the hearth-stone — and Shelwin doctrine treats the change as a courtesy to the river. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Nellwen and Mjulya are not the same daemon, though halfling villages worship both and have done since the Expansion. Mjulya is the daemon of the act of giving across kin lines — the loaf carried to a neighbor whose harvest failed, the coat given to a stranger at the gate. Nellwen is the daemon of the place the giving happens. A non-halfling community of mutual aid worships Mjulya, and Mjulya is enough for them. A halfling village worships both, because the halfling tradition holds that the act and the place are different prayers, and that to lose one is to lose the other within two generations.
The practice is the shared meal. Every halfling village of any size keeps a long-table — a single timber bench at the village center, oiled to a dark grain, that any villager may sit at and any traveler may approach. The table is set at sundown each day with whatever the village has cooked in common, and the rule is that anyone who sits is fed. The custom is older than the worship; Nellwen ascended around the custom rather than the other way around. Halfling doctrine teaches that the daemon's first act of attention was the noticing of the long-table — the recognition that the halflings had built a religious institution in the shape of a piece of furniture and had not yet noticed.
The shrine-rite Nellwen is most strictly associated with is the empty-plate setting. At sundown the eldest at the table sets one plate that no one is to sit at, with food on it, for the unseen guest. The plate is left for the meal. Sometimes the plate is empty afterward and the food is gone; sometimes the plate is untouched. Halfling doctrine refuses to distinguish what took the food. A village child who asks is told that the answer is not the point of the rite; the point is the setting of the plate. The lore-handle the long-tables carry, recited by the eldest at the laying of the empty plate, is: set a plate for the unseen guest; sometimes the plate is empty afterward. The pause before the second clause is the worship.