Editing Fae (section)

==Types==
=== Courts ===
<blockquote>''Main article: [[Faerie Courts]]''</blockquote>The term '''Faerie Court''' or '''Courts''' refers simultaneously to the [[Realm]] of the Fae, their leadership, and to the system of sub-divisions all Faerie are divided into. 

When they have exhausted the potential of a specific Court system, the Faerie will overthrow their rulers and institute a new dynamic, often using glamour to make it appear older.<ref>The Faerie go through trends, fashions of a sort. Mixing notions, styles, and past ideas into new forms until they’ve run completely out of ideas. Then they rebel, they overthrow the court, and a new season begins with a different foundation. Light faerie versus the dark, for example, or a court with a true king and queen and a dynasty that they’ve glamoured up to extend back through the centuries. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/02/01 Excerpt] from [[Damages 2.5]]</ref><ref name=":5">“I see,” Sandra Duchamp said. “Here’s my counteroffer: what if I offered a messenger?”<br><br>“The Queen won’t listen,” Padraic said, sighing.<br><br>“To other banished Faerie, in other cities and towns. Until our family line ends or the Queen is replaced and the court dynamic changes up once again.”<br><br>“Springtime,” Padraic said. “Mm. That would have been a good offer. Paved the way for an insurrection of sorts.”<br><br>“Perhaps,” Sandra Duchamp said. “''That'' would be dangerous for my family. I was thinking of maintaining some connection to the courts, in a peripheral manner.” - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/01/21 Excerpt] from [[Damages 2.2]]</ref>

When [[Johannes Lillegard]] met [[Faysal Anwar]], there was more than one Court, including a "winter court" that was also known as "the sunless court" and held "the darker faerie".<ref>One of the darker faerie, a lucky find, his ace in the hole. He’d spent four months screwing with the rat population until something took notice. He’d expected a spirit, he’d picked up the faerie instead. '''One from the winter court, the sunless court.'''- [[Interlude 14]]</ref> During [[Pact]] in 2013, there seems to have been a singular Court<ref>As your partner Rose already said, they’re weak against the unrefined, against crude things. That includes attitudes. Their court is one of dancing around subjects, allusions, games, masquerades, and complex plots that unfold over decades and centuries. [...] She wasn’t so good she could become part of the story they were telling in the court. [...] Some defy the court and try to change the game in another way, trying to bring about a larger change, and they get banished when they fail. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/02/01 Excerpt] from [[Damages 2.5]]</ref><ref>Exiled faerie were kept out of towns with Lords as a matter of course. The Court apparently didn’t want exiles making deals or gaining power, so they stuck them only in small villages and towns, or even in areas well out of reach of humans. - [[Signature 8.2]]</ref><ref>The Duchamp family works with the Court and the Court may well wonder what happened to its fine allies, to the highborn and noble faerie who were given as pets to the Duchamp families. [...] Sandra wasn’t Faerie, but she had picked up some things in her time as the Duchamp ambassador to the Court. - [[Interlude 13]]</ref> with a single hierarchy<ref>Padraic would be unhappy, but he wouldn’t take it further from that. I know Faerie superior to him in the court, and I would act as the middleman, putting you at minimal risk.  - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/07/22 Excerpt] from [[Signature 8.6]]</ref> led by a Queen.<ref name=":5" /> There were some Exiled Fae as well.<ref name=Exil/>

As of 2020 there are seven Courts.<ref name=":0">“There’s courts?”<br><br>“Seven courts,” Guilherme explained. “My court is one of wine and adventure, romances and tragedies, and simpler ballads of those led astray. Heroes, courage, and the threads of epics braiding together and into one another. The great bard wrote of us. The court of nature and summer, touched by sun.” - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13 Excerpt] from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref> Three seasons each divided into high/bright/above/sun and low/dark/below/shadow Courts, plus undivided Winter:
* High Spring - "emulates human aristocracy and celebrity".<ref name=":2">“The courts below are dark shadows of the ones above. The High Spring emulates human aristocracy and celebrity, the Dark Spring does away with the humanity and replaces it with the monstrous, dressing themselves in chitin, spiderwebs, and skins while they deal in nightmares and upstaging one another in the torments they can inflict. The Dark Summer instead lost their Faerie nature, mingling too much with distant and opposed Others, because they fought them for too long, or they took them as allies one too many time. Imagine the monsters of fairy tales, and you would not be far amiss.” - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13 Excerpt] from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref>
* Low Spring - monstrous aristocracy.<ref name=":2">“The courts below are dark shadows of the ones above. The High Spring 
emulates human aristocracy and celebrity, the Dark Spring does away with the humanity and replaces it with the monstrous, dressing themselves in chitin, spiderwebs, and skins while they deal in nightmares and upstaging one another in the torments they can inflict. The Dark Summer instead lost their Faerie nature, mingling too much with distant and opposed Others, because they fought them for too long, or they took them as allies one too many time. Imagine the monsters of fairy tales, and you would not be far amiss.” - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13/stolen-away-2-2/ excerpt] from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref>
* High Summer - "Adventure, festival, and pleasant debauchery".<ref name=":3">“Yes, I do think it scares '''him''',” Maricica murmured, and she slid her bare arm out from beneath the wings she had wrapped herself in, along Verona’s neck and shoulder, pointing at Guilherme. “The court of  High Summer is the court that loses the most Faerie to Winter. Adventure, festival, and pleasant debauchery can only tide you over for so long. Of import: The court of Autumn Below loses the least.” - '''[https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13 Excerpt]''' from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref>
* Low Summer - those who have become non-Fae [[Others]].<ref name=":2" />
* High Fall - "melodramatic and brooding, tangled in human ways"<ref name=":1">“High spring, aristocrats and gilded things, parties, fine craftsmanship and even finer, craftier lies. High fall, melodramatic and brooding, tangled in human ways and things, they play for keeps, with beginnings and endings in mind.” - '''[https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13 Excerpt]''' from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref>
* Low Fall - focus on "transformations and curses"<ref name=":4">“The court of Dark Fall is the court of the wretched, if not the most piteous and powerful,” Guilherme said. “When a Faerie of another court is cursed to carry a scrabbling rodent in her womb for every rodent born in her country, the penalty of a game lost or offending the wrong noble, she might crawl to the court of Dark Fall, to seek assistance and to become a different kind of Fae that can bear the curse and still function.”<br><br>“Grey Isbold,” Maricica said, like she was amused. [...] “They grow inside her, they scratch and writhe, they’re eventually born, and they dart into dark corners, where they summarily disappear. Their job is done, you see. She’s learned to manage them, in more ways than the one. My home court is one of transformations and curses. I do think it’s the most interesting and subtle.” - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13 Excerpt] from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref>
* Winter - Fae who have lost themselves to boredom, stasis, and repeated patterns.<ref name="won">“Is there a winter court?” Avery asked.<br><br>“There is,” Guilherme said.<br><br>“He doesn’t like to even think about it,” Maricica murmured, walking behind the three girls. Avery averted her eyes, turning a bit. The Faerie woman went on, saying, “Faerie live for very long times. Grey Isbold’s offense was done in an era when men held swords, not guns, and she had been around for thousands of years before then. But as much as our bodies are immortal and we are ageless, our minds grow restless. There are only so many things to see and do, so many stories to tell or adventures to participate in. After a while, you start to see that stories tend to have the same underlying structures. Then you see that ideas come from the same places. There is precious little that is truly original in the world. The courts are in large part defined by how we approach that problem.”<br><br>“That you get bored?” Verona asked.<br><br>“That we ''become'' boredom. After thousands of years of listening to music and making our own, we might hear something new, and it entertains us for a few hours or days. Then, trained by hearing thousands of years of music and its variations, our minds jump to the obvious conclusions. We guess how the rest of it goes and what might come of it, and what follows from that new thing is only minutes, now, of entertainment or distraction. Do the same for music, for interaction with others, and we fall into a kind of stasis. Habits become personal rules, become inevitability, and the personality ceases to be. ''That'' is the winter court. Doomed to stasis, often powerful, but more automaton than individual. Like your computers playing chess against one another, getting the same results over and over again, if you watch long enough.” - [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2020/06/13 Excerpt] from [[Stolen Away 2.2]]</ref> The winter court is largely stable no matter what the greater dynamic among other courts.
===Exiled===
Exiled Faerie, those who are banished, are not allowed to: directly harm [[Innocents]], appear in large cities, or interact with [[Lords]].<ref name=Exil>Exiled faerie were kept out of towns with Lords as a matter of course. The Court apparently didn’t want exiles making deals or gaining power, so they stuck them only in small villages and towns, or even in areas well out of reach of humans. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/07/12 Excerpt] from [[Signature 8.2]]</ref> If they're lucky they'll be in places where they can still manipulate social fabric to get the things that a fae needs,<ref name=Cap/> even being sent into the remote wilderness.<ref name=Exil/><ref>The Heroic spirits that could manifest here weren’t strong.  And outside of this corner of reality, they couldn’t really exist.  So they remained.  And the scattered few Fae- Avery could only guess why some remained.  Apparently a lot of Faerie nobles liked to exile lesser Fae to remote wilderness, and some were established around here, sneaking out or sneaking over to do business and amass wealth or power that would potentially help them in the future.- [https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/2022/06/25 Excerpt] from [[Crossed with Silver 19.9]]</ref>
====Vagary====
The feral shipwrecked survivors of fairyland; rawness and desperation lead to a kind of efficient anthropophagic madness. These unlucky fae get sent to places where they have nothing of what they need to thrive, so necessity breeds invention and they modify themselves into a form able to survive; they are, terse, tough, tenacious and as always theatrical things that try to last long enough to escape their exile.<ref name=Cap>A Fae that fails to work within the systems and plays of the court may be exiled, sometimes an actual breach of law, sometimes trumped up, rarely straightforward.  Most of the time, the exile is to the realm of man, but other times, the Fae is sent somewhere where they will be *deprived*.  Deprived of stories, deprived of interaction, deprived of glamour.  Such Fae don't have a strict title, because they are relatively few and far between, and those Fae who are equipped to track them don't generally like to dwell on the subject, but they are sometimes called Vagary, Caprices, or, just as often, Exiles of [Insert Fae name and title here].  That last one because they tend to appear in groupings - not as *groups* for they are often alone, but when one Fae noble decides to exile Fae to interstitial spaces, Abyss, or some desolate pocket world, they tend to do so to a number before it starts becoming too trite.<br><br>Much as a human who is stranded without easy food, water, or human contact may gradually devolve into something neanderthal, the Vagary becomes something more raw that most Fae would not like to dwell on or stare at for long.  Starved of what it takes to make glamour, they fabricate makeshift coverings and trappings, or modify themselves into something that can survive and retain glamour in the same way a camel could store water.  Expect to see the overwrought and dramatic, alongside personalities of few words, and a ruthless willingness to go after anyone they might.  They might possibly pause to verify by keen eye if the target might help them get free of exile, but most often they attack and forcibly extract those essential things they need to generate glamour, of which they pull out just enough to subsist, and turn the rest into more dramatic coverings.  Ad infinitum.<br>[...]<br>They take that glamour to make the tools and equipment, but yes.  There's a lot of element of surprise, and being a danger/hazard that attacks from an angle that most don't know how to deal with.  Spend too long in (Pale) the desert world behind the rightward fang of Altais (a tooth that sucks you into a pocket world that acts as a giant antlion trap, gradually moving you toward a desert temple where you'll be sacrificed and regenerated until the next person that the tooth gets who takes your place), and most predators are going to be, like, mindless desert lizards and giant insects.<br><br>The Vagary doesn't want to be sacrificed, so it manages a way to stay clear of the trap at the center and stalks the outer rim.  Someone used to fighting the lizards won't know how to deal with a crude, graceful fighter with some powers of illusion (and whatever adaptations they've made to avoid falling into the antlion trap) - Wildbow on Discord</ref> Almost always alone in their exile, though others might get sent to the same general location, they are not spoken of in polite fae society.