Hai-Taihe, a minor spirit known in the rural north of the Nekhuatseth forest, seen in the spaces between major towns and cities.
She is described as a mangy, heavily scarred bitch bearing signs of past pregnancies. She's mostly a normal looking dog but closer inspection reveals paws with unusually long fingers and distinct thumbs, and the tail and eyes of an elowey. She appears to lone travelers in the wilderness, almost exclusively on moonless nights. She will sit down at the fireside and strike up conversations in fluent (though antiquated and overly formal) Nekh, and it's usually only after she disappears that one notices that it's "kinda weird" that a dog was talking to them.
She is variously interpreted as a protective local spirit who guards travelers, and as a minor god of death that guides the living through moonless nights where the boundaries between the living and the Otherworld of the dead are thinnest. Sightings where she does not speak are regarded as omens of impending doom.
This folklore is contemporary, with the Hai-Taihe figure only showing up in stories from the past couple centuries and having no obvious presence in older mythology. Some scholars connect her to relics from the Sethym culture, extinct for almost a millenia. They left few direct records and their histories are distorted by generations of oral retelling, but motifs of a dogheaded elowey figure are common in the area, often in conjunction with sword imagery. The figure is often found on intricate metal amulets left as grave goods for high ranking clanmothers, and in stone or clay figures left in the boundaries of settlement territories (the latter commonly depicted as heavily pregnant)
[The meta reality not known in-universe: Hai-Taihe is an actual physical entity, a living god once known as [NAME FORGOTTEN] who was worshiped as a tutelary deity to the ancient Sethym. She was conceptualized as a mother to the people and the tutor of the sword, companion to the hunting god [NAME FORGOTTEN], who taught the people the spear.
The demon [NAME FORGOTTEN], a god of cannibalism and the dishonorable hunt, is said to have devoured the tutor of the spear. The tutor of the sword was chewed on and spat out half-dead while trying to rescue her, and her consumed companion was twisted in the demon's stomach and excreted as something new and terrible.
The tutor of the sword lost her identity with the cultural extinction of her worshipers and has found new life as Hai-Taihe, unable to distinguish the boundaries between her own mythology and living memory, both of which are half-remembered at best. She feels a great affection towards mortals and wanders in an endless, futile search for her companion, the devoured god now known as the spirit Arweny. She wishes to kill her, as an act of mercy.]
