Needle Fae
Species - Bestial - the Other A faery is composed of a
flurry of ornately patterned insect wings arranged semi-regularly around a small, roughly globular core of muscles and organs, from which extrudes a single metallic blade.
The extending wings are by far the most visible aspect of a faery's appearance, and can vary in reflectivity and structure according to its genes, and size and number according to a combination of genes and age. Fae wings most commonly resemble the triangular wings of iridescent butterflies, but can be opaque, transparent, long, curved, tailed, or even
plumed, and might not resemble any living insect. Each faery has its own design and motif that is applied to all of its wings once they are fully grown; Immature wings may not yet have developed the full pattern or colour range. Serious chromosomal mutation can result in a single fae that expresses two different styles, but these individuals are infertile. Wings vary in number from six to nine at birth up to about thirty, averaging at fifteen for most adults. The largest breeds of fae have a mature radius up to forty centimetres long; The smallest, barely two. Average values for size vary greatly by climate but rarely exceed a fifteen-centimetre radius.
All fae internal organs and muscles are contained in the core, barring their blood, which inflates the wing veins and some of which is compressed intradimensionally due to the necessities of their metabolism. A core is a rather fragile, drably coloured thing, with almost no skin or exoskeleton, but emits a slight glow if sufficiently energised. A few small bones stiffen the structure and act as struts for ligaments pulling on the wing bases via the tangled surface muscles. Slender, tentacle-like antennae extend from the core to taste chemicals in the air and respond to subtle changes in wind and pressure, and also serve as hollow
probosci to take up nutrients. Even in the very largest fae, the core never exceeds five centimetres in diameter, and it can be mere millimetres wide in the smallest.
The only other notable part of Needle Faery's anatomy is its namesake: The needle. Though not a true needle in shape, this metallic structure is long, thin, and sharp at both edge and point. It is flattened, and between half-again and twice the length of the wing radius, like a miniature rapier. Strong, light, and flexible enough to avoid breaking even under rather harsh duress, this blade deteriorates only slowly after the death of the faery, and can therefore be used by sentient races for a great variety of purposes. Like an odd compass, the living needle always tends to point directly downwards when at rest, even if the faery becomes imbalanced somehow. A grounded faery will stand on the point of its needle like a spinning top. From the core of the faery around the base of the needle is secreted a viscous black ink that coats the blade, and contains the hermaphroditic gametes of the species.
Larval fae are nothing to be looked at. Before their first and final moult, they appear to be fat, featureless, maggot-like entities, little more than a writhing, fluid-filled
black bladder.
Life Cycle: Adult Needle Fae spend their entire lives looking for a suitable mate in the air. They perpetually release a cocktail of pheromones with which to signal their availability to other fae. Upon discovering a scent, fae will immediately follow it until it leads to their kin. Once two fae have successfully found one another they will proceed to perform an elaborate courtship dance in the air, comparing themselves to one another in terms of dexterity, aerial agility, endurance, and sensory response time. If there is the slightest difference in the reproductive viability of the pair, they will duel.
Fae duels can take seconds or hours, depending on the difference in strength and on the distinctive fighting style of each breed, but are always fought to the death. The combat is generally a mix of stabbing, tearing, slicing, and parrying of blades, and the stronger party, of course, tends to survive. Well over 95% of encounters between Needle Fae result in the death of one or both specimens. The instinct to kill those weaker than oneself is so strong that fae gathered together in large numbers lose their self-restraint and simply destroy every other fae near them rather than risk allowing a weakling to survive.
On occasion, however, two fae will find themselves completely evenly matched, though not always according to the same set of biological skills. During these encounters alone will Needle Fae choose to mate, momentarily injecting gametes into each other's cores using their blades before fleeing. This heralds the end of the faery life cycle, though they rarely live longer than a few years anyway. The fertilised fae will descend to earth and lay about a hundred tiny eggs in different locations along the ground before death, often in supplementary sources of nutritious matter, such as decaying plant material or animal corpses. Maturation takes a few days to a week, though given time eggs will absorb enough energy from their surroundings to mature anyway. Interestingly, from a mortal perspective, this means that fae are most often perceived to have landed on or around dead creatures.
Description: Needle Fae were designed for one role above all else: Energy dissipation. A faery under duress can absorb and metabolise truly stupendous amounts of power each second from a sphere originating at its core and terminating at a metre radius. The forms they can absorb in this way are primarily heat and electromagnetic radiation, but even such forces as fluid pressure, electromagnetism, and gravitational potential are not exempt from being simply consumed by a faery. On stormy days in Galbar, it is not unheard of for a bolt of lightning to simply stop mid-descent, annihilated by the tiny, winged entity it tried to pass through.
Their rate of absorption is proportional to the amount of energy in their vicinity, but even under normal conditions, the air around a faery is cold and thin and causes magnetically-sensitive devices and radiometric equipment to undergo distortion. They will always appear dark when observed by flash photography, and their absorption of light causes them to cast a shadow that is
vast and tangled and wholly unlike their actual shape. Their ability to nullify the force of gravity gives them their powers of flight; Fae wings are actually just steering rudders and channeling tools. Fae even drain interdimensional potential energy around them by stabilising their local plane-space, unwinding any looped-up planes nearby other than those which run into the Gap. This can yank nearby dreamers out of Raka and force them to wake up or sleep dreamlessly, and tends to muddle with precognitive psychics.
The energy absorbed by a faery generally goes to waste- Trying to actually store or use it would destroy the little creature. After a small amount of it is filtered into the bloodstream to maintain the faery's metabolism, the rest tends to simply flow into the Gap, especially in the case of a sudden overload, such as an attack by light or fire magic. If the faery has some time to adapt- Such as being put in a slowly heating oven- It instead converts this energy into Galbaric mass, safely emitting hydrogen atoms or neutrons or fusing nearby hydrogen into traces of other elements.
The only form of energy that Needle Fae have trouble dissipating is, ironically, the easiest for mortals to master: Kinetic energy of solid matter. Smashing a faery with a club will kill it just as easily as it would any other soft-bodied insect. A keen-eyed slinger or archer can simply pick off fae with projectiles. Fae, of course, will slice each other apart and be helpless to absorb the movement of the incoming blade. However, it should be noted that the final action of every slain faery is always to dissipate the movement of the object that destroyed them- An arrow piercing a faery's core will not travel much further, and a sword striking a faery will lose its previous momentum at the point of impact, which can be a little jarring to the untrained warrior.
It is also true that while fae excel at taking in energy, they have almost no way to emit it, and are therefore vulnerable to forms of magic that work by removing energy from a system- Specifically, cryokinesis and anything that can lower the ambient air pressure to the point where the faery body ruptures due to decompression. Their constantly chilled and thin surroundings do ensure that faeries have at least some amount of biochemical resistance to these factors, but they cannot return their environment to equilibrium from this side of the spectrum.
Beyond this quirk, fae don't 'do' much of anything. They hatch, metamorphose, fight, breed, and die like any other insect. Any use that may be made of them must be instigated by other species, such as in hain coming-of-age rituals. Their blades and ink are both valuable and easily available resources, however, so netting and harvesting fae is a profitable business for any sentient species.
Interactions: The same frequencies of Gap distortions used by Sculptors will render Needle Fae highly susceptible to suggestion, far more so than fiberlings. Jvan and her children can override the will of hundreds of fae in their immediate vicinity, controlling their actions utterly and even blinding their destructive instinct. The range of this control begins to falter at about forty metres, and the channel is one-way; Sculptors can sense the approximate position of surrounding fae but do not otherwise receive information from them. Large amounts of fae are also difficult to control individually, as the mental signals tend to scramble one another, and thus complex formations are quite rare. Sculptors tend to keep a small swarm of twenty or so fae around them most of the time to provide a buffer, however small, in case of attack by dragons, elementals, and hypothetically Realta- or to use as knives and chisels for creating art.
Sculptors that
know they run a high risk of attack will compel their faery companions to breed, and assist them in finding places to do so. A well-prepared (or extremely paranoid) sculptor may travel under a scintillating blanket of over a thousand fae, using them as a mobile shield against magical onslaught. A fae swarm does not typically move faster than a human can run, but when times are tough, Sculptors may still try to use them offensively due to the fact that they have pointy bits attached. A decent set of plate armour can protect a soft-bodied organism like a human very well, and species with especially tough hides or exoskeletons, such as dragons, white giants, and brush beasts, have nothing to fear from a faery's blade. Hain, too, are superficially protected, but a large swarm can carve gashes in their skeleton with each pass.
Ashlings can infect both faery and Sculptor. Interestingly, the behaviour of an ashling-faery is not all that different to that of a normal specimen. They will target anything that moves rather than just their own kind, and cannot restrain themselves long enough to mate. Ashling Sculptors- Rare though they are- retain most of their ability to control both normal and ashen fae, but their heightened propensity for violence makes it difficult for them to suppress the murderous impulse of a swarm, and must replenish their numbers constantly.
The blade and ink of a faery is part of a global hain tradition. Upon coming of age in their society, a hain will find and kill a faery, and use it to etch its own shell with flowing fractal patterns and abstract renditions of Jvanic life. Due to the source of the ink and the subject of the tattoos, this is a rather distressing procedure for the phobic hain, and may take several weeks and quite a handful of fae. This body art lasts until it is moulted five-thirds of a year later. The experience is uncomfortable and undignified for the hain, though other species might consider it pretty. By the time the welcome relief of new plates grows in, the young adult has grown less sensitive to its instinctive repulsion towards the All-Beauty's designs, and is inspired with the confidence to exploit and destroy such creatures without superstition or stress.
To keep a faery as a pet is possible, but ill advised. A captive faery must be kept in a glass box or attached to a short leash if its owner does not consider a sharp blade sticking out between the bars of a cage desirable. Although pretty to look at and very easy to maintain, fae are quite stupid, and languid when not fighting or trying to escape. Overall a captive faery is more like an ill-tempered, pointy goldfish than a parrot.
White giants respond negatively to fae, and can sometimes be seen chasing them almost whimsically.
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