Tortoise — Roleplayer Guild

The Fourth of the Farfolken

Government Form:
Dual Monarchy / Theocracy

Demographics:
One Fae Breathes for Every Nine Farmen
And a Half-Fae for Every Nine Hundred and Ninety-Nine

Population:
Ten Million Souls Walk the Roads of the Hollow

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Plane Description:
The Farfolken once lived in a green, damp place in the world of old, full of rain and fog and life, where will-o-wisps would lure away children who went unattended, and one sometimes spotted unicorns through the trees. But they were not the Farfolken then. They were men and fae of Gaia. They were born to a world of sun and clouds and stars.

When they left that fair birthplace behind during the Cataclysm, when they set foot on the other side of their Rift, their hearts sank. There were no stars in that new sky. No light at all, only pitch dark all around, so that you couldn't see your hand passing in front of your face. They waited hours for the sun to rise- though it felt like days- before they gave up hope of any sun existing in the place they had found. The ground beneath was like stinking mud that stuck to your feet, the air was unusually warm like the inside of a body, and every now and then, a chill breeze ushered through with a sound like a shuttering breath. Some asked if they had fallen into the stomach of a giant.

As the fairies wept for lack of sunlight and air, the men named this place what it was: Hollow.

Although the fairies strangely lost their power of flight when first they entered the Hollow, the men did not lost their tools, nor their curiosity- the two real strengths of mankind. The "giant's stomach" theory was dismissed when iron shovels broke the soft earth, finding rock and ore. Likewise, a wandering child found something akin to trees (nicknamed "velvetwoods," for their purple-ish color) growing all about. Their wood is both harder and more flexible than that of Gaia. Nothing edible exists, so before the Rift closed, the refugees-colonists brought over animals, seeds and farm tools. For a little while, things seemed on the up. But thinking such thoughts always leads to disaster in this place. The Rift soon did close behind them, and being truly alone in Hollow for the first time, they discovered something much worse than darkness and strange sounds.

History: 

The fae felt something in the air.

The Rift had just closed, the people who would become the Farfolken were alone in the Hollow for the first time, and the fae felt something.

And they started to scream.

(OOC Note: This history is long! If you just want to get the gist of it, the first two sections are probably enough to understand the broad strokes.)

Three hundred people went mad the first night. It's not certain how many died.

Before the Rift closed, the early foundations of what would become the first city of Daithe had been laid. Sheep bleat and cows moaned, their smell polluting the air under coal torches. Drakins, simple-minded relatives to the drake, slipped through the streets and tripped up children. Daithe then looked more like a small town, not at all the imposing, sprawling fortress of black stone that it is today- it was only made from birch wood, beech, elm. Gentle colors. And it had no feytorches. 

It didn't stand a chance when the light of the Rift went out and that pitch darkness fell. The mass of man of and fae realized then that something else lived in the Hallow with them, a Presence that they could feel now as if it had always been there, something heavy and dark that pushes inwards, like a shadow suddenly coming over your soul and whispering that it had been waiting for you all along. It was alive. It was everywhere. It wanted to know them. And this, dear readers, is when the fae began to scream.

You couldn't run from that feeling- whatever it was- but people tried. Animal instinct. They escaped from the panicking, elbowing mass of Daithe and sprinted into the empty-dark lands about it, until they came wandering back hours later, minds broken and gibbering nonsense. The ones who returned, at least: some of them didn't.

Inside the city, all the warning signs of a stampede. The throng jostled and pushed, shoved to find a place to hide from whatever it was they just knew was after them. A man slipped in the muddy ground and was trampled underfoot. Your whole body screamed to run, hair standing on end, but where was there to go?

A kirk- a church, a temple, a place-of-worship- had already been built in this early settlement, and the priests of it tried to calm the people. An eager, bright-eyed young woman climbed high onto the rooftop to sing a familiar song of praise to The Teinn- but just as she hit her crescendo, something like yellow lightning arced through the sky behind her, and she fell spasming and foaming at the mouth. Her body sunk into the soft earth.

This was their second hint at what they were facing: not just that it drove you mad, but that it understood who to strike at. There was an intention behind this. Any who raised their voice to calm the crowd was next to fall foaming, so that there was no release at all from the sheer panic staring to grip them.

So many got lost in the dark.

It could have been for hours that this went on. The thrashing in the dark, a sensation of pursuit, a scream in the night. Their salvation came in a strange way. A fairy child named Tyeir was pushed by the crowd into a barn, where she was alone without torches or light. And she was afraid of the dark. But fae are magical creatures, like anyone knows, and sometimes miracles happen when they most need them to. At only six years of age, Tyeir- without having the slightest idea how she did it- summoned a tiny flame into her hands. It was green like her favorite color. It was not only a flame, either, but something magical that became everything she needed it to be: it pushed back the darkness, it pushed back the Presence. It's flickering green light chased away the spiritual attack, made you feel warm and safe instead. The child realized what she had.

A century passed after that horrible night. Two massive cities now existed, Daithe and its new colony Tor, both lit always by "feytorches," the flickering green flames a fairy child accidentally summoned a hundred years before. Tyeir had ran out joyously from the barn and showed her fire to her friends, who also felt safer in its light. They showed it to their parents, and it spread from there. There is even a rumor that every feytorch was lit from that very first one she made, that nobody can really create a new one- and that if one day they should all be blown out, there would be no more defense against the Hallow.

But for now, the people stayed safe inside their cities. Torches were placed haphazardly every few feet. The whole sprawling mess was painted green by that light, from the markets to the homes to the kirk to the mansion of the mayor, down to the struggling farms that spun around the outskirts of it all. And those farms were struggling. Pushing back the darkness was a first step, but there was something else about the Hallow that made problems: it doesn't like to let things grow.

Maybe that sounds like anthropomorphizing, but it didn't to the early settlers. They actually went to the kirk and prayed against the Hallow's strange way of destroying good crops. They watched their food come out of the murky earth already sick, covered in poisonous purple sores that tasted like ash in your mouth. If they grew at all. Sometimes, a seed would be buried, watered, cared for and then simply... never sprouted. And when the farmer dug it back up again to see what happened, it would be gone, just as if someone had plucked it from the muck.

Starvation happened.

It's easy to imagine the excitement that was felt by a wealthy farmer named Cormac, when he thought he had found a way to fix it all. One of his lambs wandered too far, got struck against the face by a scythe in harvest. Its blood soaked the soil, and behold, next year's harvest was much better only in the spot the lamb had bled over. He went to tell the his local kirk that The Teinn had blessed him with an answer.

The priests of the Kirk nodded along with Cormac's story, to his surprise. They weren't shocked at all to hear this. In fact, they confided in him, they had expected something like this would happen soon. They had noticed the same trend a long time ago: the flowers always bloomed brighter around the headsmen's block.

"Do you mean that human blood works too?" he must have asked them. It did, and more than that, it worked better than animal blood did. The garden behind one of Daithe's kirk had been a testing ground for months, sprinkling some plants with goat blood and some with the priest's own. Those that had tasted human blood grew taller and more beautiful, totally free form the Hallow's touch. It looked just like everyone imagined the flowers of Gaia must have. 

So the clergy had devised a plan: take blood from the people and put it into tithing bowls, then douse all the earth in it until the harvest was strong. They told Cormac this because of his reputation as a devout man, a beloved figure of the community who could convince the people to go along with it. But he was horrified- how could so-called servants to The Teinn embrace blood sacrifice?

Instead, he fled from the Kirk and tried desperately to warn the people. As the priests had said, he was indeed a beloved figure, and they believed him. 

Riots broke out against the Kirk- and the Crown too, when the king at the time tried to come to the priest's defense. Daithe was the location of this unrest, and it threatened to consume the entire city. They sent messengers to request aide from Tor, but when they crossed the plains and passed the canyon separating the two, they found the gates would not open to them. The priests and High Clansmen of Tor had already heard about Daithe's trouble, and decided they didn't want any part of it. They also had plans to use human blood; they weren't going to risk the rebellion spreading to their city.

Tor stayed shut while its sister-city boiled over. Soon, the Daithe leaders had to give in to the demands of the populace: animal blood sacrifice could be used, but human blood was sacred. Tor went the other direction. This was the Split. Their Kirks also grew apart, when the Kirk of Tor began to bless blood sacrifices on behalf of The Teinn, and this was called the Schism.

After the Split and the Schism, another century passed without any great horror descending again on the people. Instead, their animosity focused mainly on one another: the city of Tor grew fast, far faster than Daithe. Human blood carried them along. One new practice, the "blood teind," meant that every male and female over the age of twelve was gathered together monthly, where they bled into little bronze bowls that were carried out into the fields to wet the soil. This was a necessary evil to the men of Tor, and an abomination to the Daithe.

The first war came after Tor established its fifth sister-city, Rutlin. They were no longer now a lone city, but a country which had Tor as its capital. It meant an entire nation that ran on human blood. And not all of it was voluntary: in the Torlands, executed criminals were not put down by axe or sword any longer, but by a slow process that drained every ounce of red fluid from their bodies and sprinkled it on the earth. Some of them Daithmen travelers. The people of Daithe (and it's three sister-cities) heard of these things, and boiled in rage.

Then the Hallow played a little trick on them.

There is a canyon that worms between the two main cities, circumnavigating the original site of the Rift. They aren't very far apart, nearly visible to each other- and the canyon is made from the same dark stone which the Farfolken had long been building from, a hard surface that echoes sound so easily. In the quiet never-ending night of the Hallow, Daithmen thought they heard screams coming echoing through the canyon. They could hear people moaning, and then a cry for help in their own accent. The dots were connected: the Torlanders are torturing a Daithmen, probably draining him for blood.

It was Yr. 223 After-Era when a hastily formed Daithe militia launched a surprise attack against Tor.

The men surrounded the enemy's gate, battered on the door with rams and even with fists. Progress was slow, for Tor was strong. But they made holy signs across their chests and swore that they would stand out in the darkness, torches flickering, until the gate fell and they could rescue their comrades. But there were no comrades; this time, the Torlanders really didn't have any foreigners prisoners.

It started to rain.

For the first time in the Hallow, out of all recorded history, it was raining. Little white droplets hit that moist and stinking earth, made it to flow like mud outside the walls of Tor. The people within marveled. Both at what they saw, and that not a single drop of it touched them; the liquid dissipated into steam as soon as it came near their flickering green torches. They had to watch the rainfall from atop their city's walls.

The mud started to move. It took shape, animal and insect, rising from the ground to become... life. Real, breathing creatures, things like deer or flies, but not quite deer or flies. Strange things that reminded the very old fae of the things they glimpsed in the forests of their youth. Now they watched these broken reflections of them stumble about outside the walls, on sets of two or three or five legs. With, sometimes, their internal organs made external, stomachs and veins trailing on the ground behind them. It wouldn't be right to call them "disemboweled" only because they were never truly emboweled to begin with- something had created them this way. Long had scribes and priests of the Errant Kirk expected that the Hallow was possessed by something intelligent, but now they were sure. Looking down from their towers at the horrors it wrought, they called this unknown god of the Hallow by a new name: Abomination.

The terrified yells of the Daithmen outside their gates reached the watchmen's ears.

Like his ancestor a century before, he did not open it to them. 

The invaders vanished outside in the slurry of mud and horror, never returning home. This was the final straw between the two nations, and a reminder: that even as twin kingdoms fight each other, there is another enemy above them both.

Two centuries of war. Daithe always the underdog, but never soundly beaten. Men and fae fought at the gates and in the fields, in the Screaming Canyon that rounded the place where the Rift once was. Their blood purified the earth. They still fought even long after the White Rain first spurred them into conflict. 

After a while, perhaps, war becomes its own end. Maybe it wasn't about how the war started, but about getting revenge for each new battle lost. Maybe there is no need for a greater motivation then "they killed your brother." 

A few moments of peace did shine through. Forty years after the White Rain, a Torlander army laid siege to Daithe until- after thirty-six months- starving defenders opened the gates to them. The King of Tor at the time proudly proclaimed himself King of Tor and Daithe, Emperor of the Hallow, and called his reign the Second of the Farfolken (the First having been the time before the Split and Schism). But he soon fell foaming at the mouth on a risky journey between cities, and infighting tore them back apart again.

The Third of the Farfolken went in a similar manner. This time- strangely enough- it was the Daithmen who managed to route out the Torlanders, but just as they celebrated victory, disaster seemed to strike again on all sides. And the wars continued.

Some within both Kirks were now wondering: is the Abomination doing this? Is it intentional? What could it be gaining?

Others blamed something else. The problem, generals and soldiers said, was that the cities are getting to be nigh-impenetrable. A few generations of siege warfare and people catch on to the usual tactics. You can always just wait and try to starve them out- but that takes time and resources. Some men even took to riding on the backs of drakin, flying themselves into the cities, but there are never enough of them, and it's comically easy to shoot down a slow-flying drakin. These wars will drag on forever if you can't find a way to get past the walls a lot quicker. 

Someone must have heard the soldier's prayer: because around this time, a Torlander scholar nicknamed "Dark Fionn" became the first Farfolken to unlock the secrets to creating golems. Not any golems, but specifically golems made from the strange mud that splatters the ground in all the Hallow. They were slow, stupid and almost blind, but they had one saving grace: what can kill mud? The only thing that seemed to really hurt them was fire- and, thinking of fire, the armies of Torland came up with a mad plan.

The Clay Rain: to literally catapult mud golems over the walls of a major Daithe city, armed with nothing but a moth-like instinct to seek out fire. They will find the feytorches that keep the settlement safe, throw themselves upon them, burn up and hopefully smother the fire in the process. And when all the flames have gone out, darkness will rush in and the Abomination can have them.

Two cities fell in a month. Nobody could say precisely what happened to the men and women inside, but none came out. The Abomination wasn't playing games anymore: yellow lightning arced triumphantly around the darkened towers, and rescue teams found only corpses littering the streets.

Another city fell. And another. It had all the makings of a genocide. 

Tattered and pleading, Daithe finally asked for peace negotiations.

The result of the Clay Rain and the following peace negotiations is the Fourth of the Farfolken, a final reunification of Daithe and the Torlands. It was arranged by a marriage of the Tor queen with the Daithe king. It brought with it a rejoining of the Kirk into one ecclesiastical body. It promotes human blood-sacrifice, but only in those cities which are historically a part of the Torlands. It has lasted for forty years, three months and four days, and it will soon end.

That is what everyone believes, at least. Ask the poorest beggar on the streets of Tinlow or the richest Kirk priest, and you'll hear the same answer from them all: this union will end soon. The Fourth of the Farfolken, just like the Third and the Second all the way down to the First, will fall apart, leaving the twin kingdoms of the Hallow at each other's throat.

It shouldn't be this way, but it is. You see, the original plan was very clever: the king of Daithe was a human, but the queen of Tor at the time was a fairy. So long as they were married, they both ruled their respective kingdoms jointly. But a fae can live forever, not so human beings: eventually, the king of Daithe would perish from old age, and the Fae Queen of Tor would live to rule both kingdoms. It was a soft surrender on part of the Daithe- a way of giving up while making it look like an alliance, to save face.

What went wrong? Broccán came into the world. Thirty-five years ago, the half-fae child of the King and Queen was born crippled and disfigured in such a way nobody has ever seen. He cannot walk, he struggles to speak, his eyes wander about the room aimlessly and- here it is- he cannot ever have children. This new royal line ends with him. The scholars quickly poured over the genealogy, and all confirm it: when Broccán perishes, there will be multiple conflicting claims to the throne from relatives of both his parents, and a war of succession will certainly begin.

The only option would be for the Fairy Queen to simply live forever, never letting her broken son inherit the throne. It's too bad she was assassinated six months ago.

Long live the King?

Culture and Society:

When men and fae fled through the Rift, they had to leave much behind, and with it much of their culture. Only a few things remain of the people who would become the Farfolken: a tradition of clans, faith in a god called The Teinn, an instrument called the bagpipe, a dance called the reel.

All else of Farfolken culture formed after the Rift closed behind them, and they stood alone in the Hallow. It has emotional impacts, the Abomination does. It touches your mind. Fae feel it more strongly than humans do, and the weight of that dark god's touch has left them flightless. But the human mind also senses it, in a more subtle way: a slow depression in your subconscious, a feeling of sadness and heaviness that follows the Farmen about their lives. It makes one prone to introspection: compared to others, the Farfolken are more given to lengthy conversation, to writing and thinking, to philosophy and religion and alcoholism. All in an attempt to find an answer for that seeping dread at the back of their minds. If the government tracked it- and had something to compare it to- they would find that the suicide rate is higher than it should be. But the people of course do not realize this, because they have never been free of the Hallow's touch. They don't know what it is to feel otherwise.

This curse reveals itself in all the works of culture: music, art, clothing. The Farmen dress like mourners and play slow, weeping songs. Their paintings are never of springtime or sunlight, which they would not have seen either way.

There are bright spots. The cultural relics of the past we mentioned earlier, which have carried through the five centuries since the closing of the Rift, haven't yet lost their shine. An old, happy song can still be heard at the most ancient of festivals, passed down through tradition. Young women still wear old, bright clothes for dancing to them. These memories of Gaia provide relief from the world they inhabit today.

And, of course, many turn to their god for comfort.

An answer sent from a Daithe priestess in response to a young student's letter, circa Yr. 223 After-Era:
The question in your letter has caused me great disturbance, young student. Not because I do not know the answer to it- but because the answer is all too obvious, and the fact that you have to ask at all reveals something about you. I am not sure I like what I see.

You wish to know why we are called the Errant Kirk? I should ask you, child: what else would we be called? I presume your problem is not with the word "Kirk," our people's common word for "church" since even before the Cataclysm? No, it certainly isn't that. I can only assume, then, that you take issue with the term "Errant," a word that means having erred, being in the wrong, having gone astray.

Dear child, don't you see that this is precisely what we are?

The Teinn gave us breath countless eons ago, a time lost to even our well-recorded histories. He formed humanity out of His own two hands, gave us His own spirit as life, and gave charge of all the world to us. We were at once His partners in creation, the caretakers of Gaia. We were to honour it and rule the land in His stead.

Tell me, where is Gaia today?

You see it now, I am sure. Your teachers speak too well of you for you not to grasp this. As you read this letter, you are beginning to understand for the first time the sin we all bear: that Gaia was our charge, and we let it fall. That The Teinn Himself made us in His image- and we could not live up to it. It slipped from our fingers like water that is spilled upon the ground and cannot be gathered up again. Our residence in this world, the Hallow, is not the mistake some reckon it to be. Living here is what we rightly deserve. No, it is less than we deserve. Far less. Am I wrong?

We are but prodigal heirs to a legacy we could not keep. We have erred- so we name ourselves the Errant Kirk. Like all mankind must, we do not hide our sin, but proclaim it openly: so that The Teinn will hear us and forgive. Perhaps, one day, He will reopen the Rift and give us the chance to restore our first home.

The Errant Kirk is the current name for the church of the Farfolken. Earlier in history, it was simply called the Kirk, and then it was the Far Kirk, and then it was split into the White Kirk of the Daithe and the Red Kirk of the Torlanders. When reunification finally came, a new and neutral name had to be chosen- for reasons explained by our priestess above, "Errant" became the official title.

This fits with the Kirk's general themes and beliefs. They believe it is important to acknowledge the bad things within the world (disease, war, poverty, death) and then to acknowledge the bad things within one's self (envy, pride, dishonesty, shame). To ignore the bad within the world makes one a fool, and to ignore the bad within one's self makes one an arrogant fool. No sin nor wrong, the Kirk would tell you, has ever vanished without first being acknowledged. You must confess your sins. And then you can work to overcome them.

The Teinn is an aide in this. He is the one benevolent and all-powerful creator, separated from His creations only by their own choices. He gave His children free will, and they freely chose to walk away from Him. If they choose freely to walk back, He will again embrace them. He stands ready to receive you into paradise, and the only thing between Him and you is your own wrongdoings. You must vanquish them like you would your most hated enemy.

It should be clear: they are not a religion that assures you all is well even when all is not, but neither are they one which offers you no hope. The stereotypical image of a Kirk priest is a harsh judge, who will mercilessly pry out all your flaws and wrongs until, at last, you admit to them in tears, and then they will immediately offer you forgiveness. It is this tightrope the Kirk walks: condemnation and then mercy, judgement followed by absolution. How else can life be made brighter, if the darkness is not rooted out of it? This is an important part of their faith. As is saying the truth even when it might be painful: truth-speaking is a sacred act for the worshippers of The Teinn, and sometimes, so is secret-keeping. Knowing when to do which is part of a believer's duty.

And that, finally, feeds into the more scholarly branches of the clergy. With most of the population illiterate, the Kirk has taken it upon itself to keep records and fund magical studies. Almost all writers, historians, inventors and academics work directly or indirectly for the Errant Kirk. Just like their harsh philosophy, this is a double-edged sword: it means that knowledge is always being gathered, but also means that all of it is filtered through the priesthood.

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Governance and Politics:

Since the reunification of Daithe and the Torlands under a single throne, the politicking of the Farfolken has been dangerously unstable. 

Well, that is a bit of an overstatement. The politicking of the Farfolken has always been dangerously unstable, and the reunification is but a tiny flame prepared to burn it all down.

Let's begin.

To start with, both Daithe and the Torlands have a divided power structure, split between the monarch and the religious clergy. All power technically flows from the monarch, but a king does not rule alone. And the kings of the Farfolken have been traditionally weak (for reasons you will see below), so that they especially rely on others for the work of governance. The Errant Kirk has taken over much of the administration: their many scribes and scholars represent most of the literate population, so that the king can scarcely hire a servant able to read unless that servant is from the Kirk. This gives the priests a lot of power over the day-to-day government. Certain scholars have even suggested that their clergy could have totally overtaken the monarchy by now, were it not that the people demand a strong king in times of war- and that the Farfolken have always been at war.

The Errant Kirk and the Crown therefore share power: each exert some authority over the other in some ways, but still bow in others. The Crown is able to select certain administrators for the Kirk, but the Kirk must approve those in positions of power close to the King. The few times the Errant Kirk has refused to bless an advisor or general of the Crown, he is later discovered to be criminal or inept. Always. The priesthood takes this as proof of their divine discernment, and often grumble that the Crown in turn should have any power over their organization, when it is so clear that The Teinn is on their side. At times when the king is especially unpopular, their complaints do not go unheard: even the High Clans will sometimes ally themselves with the priesthood, against the Crown, when they think they can weaken the King without weakening themselves. They often succeed.

Speaking of, most Farmen are part of a clan: a loose network of interconnected families that they are born into. High Clans are those wealthier, more powerful clans that have been granted special privileges by the Crown. They have members with places in the government, guarantees of royal protection when travelling, trade laws written explicitly to their benefit, etc., etc. Bribing the High Clans is one of the king's main moves to strengthen his position. Unfortunately, the Kirk also draws much of its members from the High Clans, so many clansmen have relatives in the priesthood. When the Crown and the Kirk squabble, they find themselves torn between them. 

All other clans are Low Clans, and nobody cares what they think. They have a simpler sort of politics of their own, feuding with one another in the crowded city streets. The Malleries have been trying to kill the Low Flems for two hundred years. But other Low Clans will sometimes work better together, will sometimes even band into vast interclan unions that involve dozens of "lower" clans working as one, momentarily rivaling the power of their High Clan cousins. Momentarily. Always, some old feud or squabble will cause that union to fall apart, and the Highs have the last laugh. They have ruled over the poor for centuries.

There is really but one way out of the trap of poverty most Low Clans exist in, which is trade. The Highs have their power in pedigree and warfare and royal favor but, every now and then, a Low will rise up with the kind of cleverness that comes only from clawing your way up the totem pole. With the two kingdoms united and trade opening up, such men have formed a class of nouveau riche. They don't have the lineage of High Clans, but they do have money and growing influence. Not least because few people actually want to be merchants: travel between cities is dangerous under the constant threat of the Abomination. Those few who have braved the roads and been made rich by them are called "merchant princes" by the farmen, and "men of lucration" by the fae (who have a fondness for made-up words.)

So, putting it all together: power is divided between the king and the Kirk. Both have to compete for the approval and support of High Clans and the merchant princes, with the Low Clans or fae occasionally showing some smaller influence as well. The Kirk itself is divided between Daithe and Torlander interpretations of The Teinn, and the king is currently very weak.

This constant back-and-forth of politicking without resolution is how the Farfolken have existed for five centuries. Sound exhausting enough?

The king's sterility has not helped matters. You see, Daithe and the Torlands have slightly different rules regarding succession: when King Broccán dies childless, the Daithe will want the crown to move to his closest paternal relative, and the Torlanders will expect its movement to the closest maternal relative. If the King does not soon bear sons or even daughters- if he dies alone as the people fear he will- there will be two successors with equally valid claims to the throne. It will not matter then what the Kirk thinks, nor the clans nor the courts. Only civil war can follow.

Technology Overview
Lately, a few signs of a new period of invention and discovery have been spotted. Plate armor has grown more common and more covering. There is news of a mixture of chemicals, involving saltpeter, that burns like hellfire when lit. Telescopes have been created, and (good news for many half-blind scholars in the Errant Kirk) the very first eyeglasses have also been invented.

OOC note here: Basically, the Farfolken are getting into the early renaissance, with the exception that they've only now rediscovered gunpowder.

Now, the Errant Kirk takes credit for all of these discoveries. And, truthfully? It isn't lying. With the constant war between the two kingdoms, with the fighting to survive in a plane that wants them dead, it is unlikely much of this research could have been done were it not for a religious body that donates so much of its resources into record-keeping, scholarship and literacy. Not to mention, of course, that the magics they use naturally lend themselves so well to study and invention. Speaking of...

Imagine a monk in service to the Kirk, meditating somewhere within the walls of a dark cathedral. A candle is lit in front of him- it's been lit for hours- as he watches the flame slowly burn, dripping wax like a drum-beat rhythm, pulling him into a trance. He keeps watching the flame. And he is the flame. He has left his body behind to inhabit the fire. This is an act of Soulwork.

The Crown and Kirk keep this particular magic on a tight leash, far tighter than the other two kinds. The fae's Whimsy, after all, they cannot control. And the results of Thaumaturgy are universally beneficial. But what other kind of magic than Soulwork would allow a man to see the world as an animal, or to leave his body behind and walk into unknown places?

That last one in particular is a popular, dangerous tool. A man who has become spirit can go anywhere he wants, past barred gates and into the private chambers of a king (or the king's daughter) to hear things he should not. It would be the ultimate weapon of a spy, were it not for the fae, who spot spirits like humans spot clouds. Soulwork has made the role of the "fairy watchman" a common posting in every area of importance. If you approach a general's tent during a long siege, you'll find a fae sitting outside of it, watching for spiritual spies.

As one delves further into this art, other strange knowledge reveals itself. Soulworkers gain power to craft souls like a potter does clay. They delve deep into a man's heart to relieve age-old agonies. They can recreate identity. Some claim to have spoken to demons from other Planes and seen the face of The Teinn- the Kirk has never been quite sure how to respond to them, and public opinion on this power has swayed back-and-forth over the ages. Only one display of Soulwork has been universally well-received: the mudmen.

Oh, what a strange creation. Mudmen are a recent innovation, formed only in the last century. The first was breathed life into by the mad scholar, Dark Fionn. It was a wild attempt to prove the Kirk’s creation story to be true: that The Teinn created mankind from mud mingled with His own blood, and breathed life into the first man. Dark Fionn reasoned "Life therefore can be likened to an alchemical recipe, the ingredients of which are mud, blood and spirit. And we already have access to all these things." 

The first two ingredients were simple: Dark Fionn gathered together mud and cut himself over it. But breathing on it, obviously, could not stir it to life. Nor could leaving his body and walking into it as a spirit. It remained, despite great effort and decades of mystical expertise, only a pile of red mud on the ground. Many would have dismissed the idea then- except that Dark Fionn was something of a fanatic. He spent the next two decades in frantic experimentation, exploring esoteric and unknown avenues of magical research in a search for the answer of life. Roughly half of today's Soulwork can be rooted back to the investigations he made then, accidentally spawning endless new fields of research in an attempt to solve this one problem. Still, it alluded him. He created a dozen new spells; none of them created life.

History has lost exactly how, after 23 years, he came to his final answer. One dark day, Dark Fionn rushed into the Kirk carrying two glass vials, one empty, one swirling with a multicolored mist none had seen before. He said it was full of souls. Having some authority in the Kirk, he ordered thick mud spilled onto the ground and fashioned into the rough shape of a human, and ordered men to cut themselves over it. (He did not offer his own blood this time.) Some hesitated, some obeyed. Those who obeyed would fall dizzy and faint as Fionn unstopped the soul bottle and poured it into the crude mouth of the golem. All would stare with shock and disgust as he filled the other bottle with the mud from the creature in front of him, and drank it. He started to cough, choke, act as if he couldn't take a breath.

But the mud begin to breathe.

Dark Fionn recovered soon, and through his demonstration, mud golems or mudmen have become an almost-common sight in the century since. Whoever has ingested a bit of their substance (as Fionn did) forms a spiritual link with the creature, and can force onto it simple directives. Follow, get, fight, kill. They are indeed full of souls, but they have no mind; they a low kind of life to be treated expendably. The souls to create them are harvested from sacrificed animals, and they return to the earth when they perish.

Excerpt from "How I See It," by the half-fae scholar Dark Fionn, Yr. 381 After-Era:

"Fairy eyes aren't like ours."
A common saying, that one is. "Fairy eyes aren't like ours." You hear it every time a fae seems to know something that men think they shouldn't. Sometimes they know that you're in a bad mood before you do. Sometimes they call out the name of whoever is at the door, before the knock has come. Sometimes they wink and imply that they somehow know that you and your secret lover are together, when you're both sure you haven't let any signs slip. Occasionally, they see spirits. 

Then, always, out come the magic words: "Fairy eyes aren't like ours." 

But it's not true.
 
My eyes are human eyes. I took after my father, two deep brown orbs in my skull. I don't have the unnaturally bright eyes of a fae. I didn't even want to have them because- as a child- I believed that those eyes were cursed: that they would make me see awful things. I prayed to The Teinn that He would never let me have "fairy sight." Alas, in His wisdom, He did not answer, for soon I begin to see the Connections. I call them this for I have no better word for it. I saw the natural links between things, so obvious yet so hidden, in a way that pure humans cannot. I perceived the bonds between my father and our neighbor's wife, hovering in the air as plain to me as butterflies or books or knives. At ten years old, I knew my father was an adulterer.

It was a hard thing for a child to know.

Another time: I visited the gravesite of my fae mother, found dead after some events. I noticed suddenly at her tomb the bond between her corpse and myself, saw like bright colors the love and familiarity that held us together still. I do not know what happened next. But in seeing that bond, in seeing the flashes of memory, I begin to see her, still alive. But not. I saw her spirit. We spoke that night. My father died the next day, and his spirit I never saw.

Why, Divine on the Other Side, do You curse me with this knowledge? Oh, how can I ever explain it? 

My friends, the secret of Fae Sight is not at all in the eyes. It is in the mind. It is in the ability of a fae's mind to spot the bonds between things, and in seeing those Connections, see all. They- we, me- see the things that are already there, so obvious if you would just look. But you can't, can you? Your mind doesn't want to see it, does it? The human mind rejects the truth. But I stray from my purpose here, The Teinn forgive me. I only wish to convey a simple fact, another thing that you should see but you do not:
Fairy eyes are just like yours.
It is our minds that are different.

It is hard to define the magic of the fairy folk without slipping quickly into guess-work and analogy. Human scribes have tried to understand it for 500 years, and been mocked by the fae for that same length of time. It is an art, they say; you can't put it in a bottle. 

What is understood is that it seems to exist in a shadowy somewhere between Soulwork and Thaumaturgy, the two magics favored more by the humans and their priests. But, unlike them, this is not a scholarly pursuit. Soulwork is born from the kind of focused concentration and meditation that would make a fae scoff, and Thaumaturgy demands a real knowledge of material things. 

Compared to them, fae power is all innate and instinct. It is humorous, it is (as the name implies) whimsical- it is sometimes cruel. The powerful fairy Tyeir, the so-called Shadow of Mab, once turned a flatter's tongue into honeycomb, and sparked great (human) debate about just how she could do such a thing. When they asked about it, she claimed "I have only made his tongue as sweet as its words."

But how is it that she did so? She didn't know either. Only that- like Fae Sight- it had something to do with the connections between things: the way in which his tongue was already like honeycomb, the way that stars are like the sun, the way that a raven is like a writing desk. As in their Sight, therein lies all fae magic. If you roll your eyes at that mysticism, the fae would only roll theirs right back, and ask "You've never read a poem?"

Speaking of writing: names are important, as they confer identity. And spoken agreements are important, as they confer a pact. Fae never break promises. Fae loathe to tell strangers their names. Nicknames and half-truths are the order of the day. It is likewise wise never to tell a fae strong in Whimsy your name if you do not trust them: men have been known to wake up with a new one, and find none of their friends know them as the same person anymore.

But we could go on for many hours about the odd things fairies do. In the end, this power is like the fae themselves. Rarely useful for war or governance, strange and unpredictable, petty and playful. You could not decimate an army with it. You might just make a flower dance, though.

"Miracle-working," it means. Thaumaturgy is the science of miracles. "Science" is the correct term, too, as it requires true and intensive research. It is a magic unique to the Farfolken: old folklore traces it back to alchemical practices, but this is unlikely. A close study of the genealogy of famous thaumaturges reveals that every practitioner has fae ancestry, somewhere along the line. A great-great-grandfather, or a great-great-great-grandmother. This puts it in a similar category as Soulwork, then: a kind of magic given to humans by fae-bloodedness, but strangely absent in the fairy folk who walk today. The Errant Kirk counts it as a grand fortune that so many Farmen have a drop of fae in them- this thaumaturgy is a vital art.

Like the lost art of alchemy that it is sometimes confused for, thaumaturgy has an emphasis on transforming materials. It is said that the alchemists once tried to turn lead into gold. The thaumaturges have already accomplished this feat and, on the way, learned how to make wood into stone, how to make bricks soft like pillows, how to make steel flow like water, and how to fuse split skin back together. They reshape the world.

It starts with a rare substance, called flowsilver, which must be ingested by a would-be thaumaturge before she can perform her acts. It is a white, pale and light drink, tasting like rainwater, and its production is a closely guarded secret of the Errant Kirk. Nobody outside of the priesthood knows how it is created; thaumaturges buy it from their local clergymen.

Flowsilver purchased and consumed, a practioner will focus their eyes onto an object (a cloud, a cart, a person), and watch as it begins to "unravel" itself in front of them. In the external world, nothing happens. But to the thaumaturge's eyes, the entire makeup of the object is being splayed out visually: its elemental composition, its indivisible articles, every piece and component, right down to the core. The information is chaotic and useless to one who does not understand what they look at, but for a well-read scholar, it's more than comprehensive. They can spot the needle buried in a haystack, or the cancer in an old woman's bones.

In a strange way, it is all very akin to Fae Sight: but while the fae see spiritual truths, the thaumaturges see physical truths. And then they have the opportunity to change them. Because when you can fully understand an object, when everything about it is plain to you, then you will discover that you can will it into being something else. By magic backed with knowledge, they have the ability to transform things. This technique is how the thaumaturges heal a broken arm, or change lead into gold, or water into wine.

Speaking of: water plays a role. It's not necessary, but holy water does often help in the process of transforming one thing into another. A struggling thaumaturge pours water that has been blessed by a priest over the object she wishes to change, and lo, it is "softened," made malleable to her commands, made less resistant to changing. As with the flowsilver, nobody outside of the priesthood rightly understands how this works: combined with their monopoly of flowsilver, this gives the Kirk the last word on who performs thaumaturgy and for what purposes.

Military Overview: 

Three centuries of war has honed the Farfolken's blades, and five centuries in the Hallow has made strange their ways of using them.

Siege warfare is, as the histories tell, the order of the day. With the Abomination ready to kill or drive mad anyone who steps foot outside without feytorch, large cities make up most of the Farfolken's economy, and capturing one is the most important act of war that can be made. Nothing else matters as much as the city. If it falls, victory. If it stands strong until backup arrives- or until a foul wind blows out your feytorches- defeat.

This has caused both kingdoms to build up their cities to a level of defensiveness that would seem bizarrely paranoid to someone from another Plane, essentially being massive forts. The plentiful strong stone of the Hallow is used to build towering walls, double-thick and mounted with jutting towers. Arrowslits pepper them, like a thousand eyes. Even the largest cities only have one or two gates along the entire wall, always with multiple portcullises and "murder holes" above. Boiling oil is poured down on invaders who break past the first gate. 

Divisions within the cities are also common: each district of the compound being divided by an internal wall, so that an invading army that breaks into the gate has not always claimed the whole of it. They must then break into the next district, while resistance within the city tries to reclaim the gate from them. This back-and-forth, tug-of-war for control can sometimes go on for years, leaving the city in ruins until it is- ironically- hardly worth fighting over any longer.

All this means that one of the main goals of the Farfolken in combat is circumnavigating defenses. Here's where the mudmen come in: as in the Clay Rain of history, mudmen can be catapulted over the walls of a fortification, where they will cause havoc on the other side. And many High Clan cavaliers ride the drakin, little beasts related to dragons, which can fly over them. No city can be fully conquered by mud soldiers or a flying cavalry raid, but causing chaos behind enemy lines is always helpful.

But let's get past the siege for a second. Putting aside all the walls and the towers and the drakin, there are occasionally fights that really do happen in open spaces in the Hallow, no cities in sight. For the sake of safety from the Abomination, generals usually agree on these spaces beforehand, line up their troops in plain sight of each other, and clash honorably until one side falls or surrenders. Altogether, even with the emphasis on taking cities, the armies of the Farfolken are fairly tough in non-siege combat.

But... they aren't invincible.

They are, after all, adapted to a very specific environment: a place with little weather and no extreme temperatures. A place where you must carry bright torches at all times, and men walking alone are prone to going missing. They have no concept of guerilla warfare. A large group carrying torches makes for poor ambushers. They have even less of an idea of how to march in snow, desert, or heavy rains. The ideal fighting place for the Farfolken is an open field with hills to take a stand on, warned in advance of enemy approaches. They will have to learn to adapt to other Planes.

---

Additional Info: 

"Cattery" is a crime punishable by execution in both Daithe and the Torlands. I will not elaborate.

Dark Fionn is alive today.

Bottled thoughts, created by a combination of soulwork and thaumaturgy, are available for sell in public markets.

Irr and Lady are very good RPers.

There is a Traitor.
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