Fae

The Faerie or Fae are a species of Others that are living, beautiful lies of pure Glamour.<ref name=":9">“The Fall fae is younger than you’d think, for a Faerie. New to your world, new in many things. Still old enough to not remember coming to be, but… no faerie I’ve met remembers.”

“Where do Faerie come from?” Verona asked.

“New Faerie? Some say a human is taken, drowned in glamour, traded through hands until they pass under the noses of the oldest and most powerful Fae in the winter court, and then have the last traces of their old lives taken. All that is left is the glamour and the general shape of them. Other stories are similar, saying that a man who lives a lie can become more lie than person, they find their way to the places where Fae dwell, and the person is lost. The lie becomes elaborate enough to have its own personality, and then you have a nascent Faerie.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.2</ref> Unlike their lesser Fairy cousins, each is a unique individual. Those who work with Fae are usually called Faerie Mages and like their tutors/subjects/rivals come in a wide variety.

Description

Faerie come in many shapes and sizes, male and female, but generally speaking, they follow trends that change over time. Faerie manipulate things to distract, to addle your senses so you aren’t paying attention to the fact that it doesn’t fit with reality, with Glamour. Faerie are weak to crude materials and direct behavior, as a result of it challenging their beliefs and self-delusions. Additionally Silver is a solid defensive measure against all things Fae, as long as they aren't in Winter.<ref>Cutting Class 6.3</ref> Psychologically they are easily bored, to the point where some throw away their minds or lose them in order to start fresh.^{[citation needed]} It is said that once faerie become bored they become monsters of the worse kind.

Faerie typically don't get along with Goblins and it has been revealed that some time in the past they actually enslaved and bound some goblins, during a changeover in the courts, its colored their relationship since.<ref>I got |the sword and unwrapped it.

“Geeeeez.  I’ve heard about this sort of thing.  Faerie used to enslave and bind goblins, during an era when the courts were changing over.  Mixed up relationship between the two.  Many powerful goblins agreed to take up certain forms, as part of treaties.  This thing isn’t small potatoes.” - Excerpt from Subordination 6.8</ref> Their personalities and abilities tend to be opposite as well. Goblins refer to them as the unfair folk.<ref name=":10">The goblins shared stories between one another about what goblins were and why metal was so problematic. The usual story was that when a Wise man drank from a cup while dining, the bits of food that got into the cup and lingered after the drink was done accumulated. Except it was workings, not drink, and bits of self, not food. Greasy fingerprints left behind when touching something beyond the veil. Bits of skin that should have grown and the hairs that should have fallen from one’s head, that didn’t, because they were wearing different skin or hair, and the stuff that wasn’t had to end up someplace.

There was another story that said that the unfair folk were people once, and they chopped off all the bits they didn’t like, and those bits became goblins, but Buttsack didn’t like that version.

Fuck the unfair folk. Being magic hairballs for humans, fabricated of their dust, scum, grease, pubes, and stress, that was one thing. Being of faerie? Fuck that idea sideways and backward.

Whatever the case, many stories had one or two common elements. The goblins were leavings, discards, scrap given form. The earth called to them, to decompose them like it was meant to devour and decompose all leavings, and the metal was the earth in distilled form. Or maybe the process that made goblins was - Excerpt form Signature 8.1</ref>

When it comes to humans they prefer to deal with attractive ones,<ref>Fae were prejudiced in their own way, choosing attractive people to associate with, so [Toadswallow] could ballpark an area, look for the most attractive person, and check they were moving in the right direction.  There.  A person, touched with Glamour in a brief exchange with one of the Fae.  A woman in a short linen dress with scalloped edges at the bottom, hair in curated waves.  Attractive, like the Fae liked, stinking of, as he’d joked with the Kennet practitioners, ninny glitter.

[...]

- Excerpt from One After Another 10.e</ref> or presumably where this is hard to gauge those with symmetrical features

Thanks to their immortality, their love of sophistication, and the benefits of glamour, Faerie are generally inhumanly skilled at what they do. They map to anything on Deals and Interaction in practice.<ref>Is an alternate table you could work with, for example. Some stuff's only going to slide left and right or up and down, but you could stick Fae-something in any Deals column thing or Interactions row thing. You could also reach into any of these things with a high enough Schools stat in a practice, in Pactdice terms. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref>

Given their reputation most practitioners will steer clear of them even if they're used to dealing with more horrific things.<ref>“I’m trying to think about what we should do,” Miss said, standing at the far end of the unlit room, by the head of the bed, where it was too dark for even Verona’s sight to penetrate.  Verona wondered if she could hit the light switch, but there was no guarantee it wouldn’t hurt Alpeana for the room to be that bright.  Miss went on to say, “I might step away for a moment, stir up the goblins, and ask John to patrol.  The problem is, what would we do with them, if they were close enough to find?  Murder would invite more problems, anyone that close may be too determined to easily scare.  A disappearance invites further investigation.

“Guilherme, Miss,” Alpeana said.  “Ask him, aye?  Many a man who’ll face doon a bogey-sort and still walk double-time away from a Fae, now.”

“I suppose we must.  I’ll do that.  John and Guilherme, a quick patrol around the boundaries of Kennet.  See if anyone has camped out somewhere, or if they’re sending bound Others in as tools.  If they’re stealing eyes and using them to make observation tools, there’ll be a supply chain.  As for you four…” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.6</ref> The threat a fae makes are believed and their habit of saying one thing and meaning another is well understood.<ref>“What happened with Guilherme and [Nicolette]?”

“He caught her in the woods north of the city.  They talked, and I listened in.”

“What did they say?”

“That he would let her go if she forgot the particulars.  She eventually agreed.  He then said that if she returned, he would be a gracious host and give her what she came for.  If it was wrath in her heart, he would give her violence.  If it was greed, then he would give her what she coveted.  If it was envy, he would give her lessons and raise her up, so she had no desire to take what others had.  And so on.  She’s a knowledgeable enough practitioner to know he would follow through, and what that might mean, coming from a Faerie.”

“Kind of making me reflect even more on the gifts,” Verona said, as she walked up to where Lucy was, peering into the trees.

“She was told the same went for her family, or anyone else who came at her behest.  All they had to do was enter Kennet. - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.8</ref>

Origins

The origins of Faerie are disputed. Some say they began as human Practitioners who cast off their ugly sides (which became the Goblins)<ref name=":10" /> and/or simply buried themselves so deeply in lies Glamour there was nothing but the facade left, which took on a life of it's own. Others say they are the ultimate form of the Glamour Drowned victims of the fae, transformed by the winter court until every trace of their humanity lost and nothing but glamour in their general shape remaining.<ref name=":9" /> Another theory is that they are lies that become stories that become people and anon.<ref name=":9" /> Different stories may be true for different Fae, of course.

Faerie never seem to remember their own origins,<ref name=":9" /> presumably excepting those born to faerie parents.<ref>If [snowdrop] could talk to the ‘staff’ face to face, then maybe there was a chance.  Faerie were smart, and fairy things were like Faerie.  Toadswallow had explained it all, a few weeks ago.  Fairy-with-a-y were things that had some glamour but they were old and followed more precise rules, or it encompassed things that were a bit glamour-y but also a bit goblin-y, or a bit abyss-y.  Every Faerie was a bit different but fairy things tended to be uniform and when they had kids, if they could have kids, the kids were like the parents. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.x</ref><ref>“You named the bust?” Raquel asked.

“After a cousin.  I had custody of my child’s child, after my son was lost in war.  This scion of my scion… a rare thing for us, you call them…”

“Grandkid?” Verona guessed.

“Yes.  Grandchild.  We have so few children and fewer grandchildren that we exist long enough to see.  And my cousin turned her into a fish and fed her to me.  I smile when we meet but I’ve named the bust after him.  Perhaps one day he will chance upon this market at the same time I demonstrate how the needle is used.” - Excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.6</ref>

Types

Courts

Main article: Faerie Courts

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. - Excerpt from Damages 2.5</ref><ref name=":5">“I see,” Sandra Duchamp said. “Here’s my counteroffer: what if I offered a messenger?”

“The Queen won’t listen,” Padraic said, sighing.

“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.”

“Springtime,” Padraic said. “Mm. That would have been a good offer. Paved the way for an insurrection of sorts.”

“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.” - 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. - 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. - 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?”

“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.” - 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.” - 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.” - 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.” - 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.” - 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.”
  
  “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.” - 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.
  
  “There is,” Guilherme said.
  
  “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.”
  
  “That you get bored?” Verona asked.
  
  “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.” - 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. - 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.- 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.

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.
[...]
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.

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.

Named Faerie

• Letita
• Padraic
• Keller
• Arthild
• Essylt
• Maricica
• Guilherme
• Grey Isbold

Trivia

• Beings recognizable as faeries, or the rough equivalent, can be found the world over.

References

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