Faesong is the music of Melera, still leaking into the world from her prison. When Azus chained her, a single ripple of her song escaped — the music that cracked the Alarian stack and flooded the world with Ezz at the Rift, some twelve million years ago. The crack never sealed. Her melody goes on seeping through it, faint but never absent: one of the four sources of magic in Alaria, and the counterpart to the Psywinds.
Nature
The Psywinds carry the thought of living beings, the ideas and memories and intentions that move through Ezz. Faesong carries emotion and harmony instead. It is not made by mortal minds. It flows from Melera herself, one melody running under everything.
Faesong is subtle, and most creatures never hear it at all. Those who do describe a harmony pitched just below hearing: a sense of rightness when the world is in balance, a wrongness when it is not. It does not spread evenly. It moves like water and it pools — thin across most of the world, thick in a few places, the old groves and certain springs and the deep green folds of forest that has never been cut.
The fae are the song
Where Faesong pools thick enough, it does not merely linger. It condenses. A pixie is what it condenses into — the emotion-current of one exact patch of living world, gathered until it wears a small winged body and a self. The Faeja are the same thing in the deep jungle of Lethos; the water-fae and grove-fae are the same thing in their springs and their old trees. These are the forest fae, and they are not visitors. There is no separate country of the fae, no plane and no realm of them behind the world. A fae is the place's own song made local flesh.
This is why the fae behave as they do. A fae does not work Faesong the way a druid works it; a fae is Faesong, and it answers for the patch of world it condensed from. Where the current runs clean it tends the place and guards it without mercy. Where the current sickens, it feels the wrongness before anything else does, and it either flees or turns lethal on whatever is fouling it. Their courts rank their members by emotional resonance rather than size or strength, ordered by a logic no outsider can hear — because rank, for a thing made of feeling, is simply how much of the song is gathered in you. The deepest reservoirs hold the oldest and densest of them. At the center of the thickest sits the Queen of the Forest, the apex of that logic. See Pixie and Faeja for the fae proper.
Who hears it
The fae do not so much hear Faesong as consist of it. Everything else only listens.
Druids are mortals who have learned to attune to the song. Their magic is neither Kethic nor Deoric but a direct harmony with Melera's music — a creature of Azus's ordered creation, learning to hear the melody of the one Azus imprisoned and to answer it. Bards who tune to Faesong reproduce fragments of it, often without knowing what they do; a room moved to sudden tears or sudden courage may simply be hearing Melera's harmony under another name. This direct-tuning tradition is not the same as Gaeic Melodies, which echo Gaea's ancient Kethic creation-song rather than Faesong.
The Faeries are the snare in this. They hear Faesong plainly, and so do the Sprites and the Nymphs that come down with them — yet none of these are made of it. They are beings of light, children of Aurus, native to the Astral Plane, and they owe nothing to the deep forests or to the Queen who rules them. A thing woven of soul-light sits close enough to the emotion-substrate of Ezz to catch Melera's melody, the way a druid catches it. Hearing the song is not the same as being the song. Mortals, meeting small luminous song-hearing things abroad in the warm months, lumped them with the forest fae and called both by one word. That word marks a resemblance, not a shared origin: the forest fae are Melera condensed, the Faeries are Aurus's, and the only thing they share is the ear for the song.
Faesong and Psywinds
Faesong and the Psywinds are counterparts, the two ambient forces that move through all of Alaria:
| Aspect | Faesong | Psywinds |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Melera's imprisoned song | Collective thoughts of all living beings |
| Substance | Pure harmony and emotion | Flowing Ezz carrying thought |
| Direction | Flows from Melera outward | Flows between all minds |
| Perception | Felt as harmony or dissonance | Heard as whispers and images |
| Users | Druids, fae, bards | Telepaths, syncopaths, psy mages |
They are not two separate forces. They are two faces of the same Ezz, the substrate Azus and Melera made together, equal parts thought and emotion. Psywinds are the thought-face. Faesong is the emotion-face. A being who could perceive both at once would be perceiving the full current of Ezz itself.
When the song sours
A pool of Faesong can be poisoned. Corruption upstream travels the current the way it travels a river, and where it reaches, the song does not fall silent — it turns. A cut grove goes quiet; a soured one keeps singing, and the singing is wrong. The fae of such a place feel it before anything else does, and the worst of the soured reservoirs is Melera Skeyad, whose music has gone hungry since the Surrey Mahaila sickness reached it. Because the current is one current, the wrongness carries far: the things that are made of the song feel it at a distance, a kind of harm that is neither the axe nor the chain, and that the deepest of the fae have only begun to notice.
Melera's influence
Melera is imprisoned, but her presence reaches wherever Faesong runs strong. Places of great natural beauty hold a stronger resonance, and music or art can briefly raise the song in a single room or grove. The druids site their groves where the song pools and gathers, and the oldest of their teaching holds that Melera watches Alaria through the Faesong, waiting for the age when one rises to break her chains. It is a prayer, not a forecast — and what waits in the deepest reservoirs is not certain it shares the wish.