Pixie

When Melera's stolen ripple of music cracked the Alarian stack and let Ezz flood the world, the emotion did not arrive evenly. It moved like water, and it pooled. Faesong, the feeling-half of Ezz, runs thin across most of the material world and thick in a few places: old groves, certain springs, the deep green folds of a forest that has never been cut. Where it runs thickest, it condenses, and a pixie is what it condenses into. They are not visitors from some separate country of the fae. There is no such country. A pixie belongs to the exact patch of the living world where the music gathered enough to make one.

A pixie hears the Faesong the way other creatures hear sound, the same melody Melera plays from her prison, and through it feels the emotional weather of everything nearby. This is less a gift the pixie uses than the thing it is for. Where the current runs clean, pixies tend it and guard the place without mercy. Where it sickens or thins or turns, they feel the wrongness before anything else does, and they leave or they fight. Their courts rank their members by emotional resonance rather than size or strength, which is why a pixie hierarchy can look, to an outsider, ordered by a logic no outsider can hear.

Mortals lump the pixies in with another small, luminous people they are no kin to at all: the faeries that come down each Faesummer, who are no condensation of anything but children of Aurus, descended from the Astral for the warm season. The two get one word because both are little and bright and both can hear the song. But hearing the song is not being the song. A druid hears it; a faerie hears it; a pixie is it, the music of one patch of ground given a body and a will. A faerie is a guest who can hear the melody playing and owes the Queen of the Forest nothing. A pixie answers to her, because a pixie is made of the same thing she is. The word fae marks the resemblance, not a shared origin.

A spring in the Nykotheryx understory where the moss grows in a perfect ring. Stand in it at dusk and the air hums just under hearing. The pixies will not suffer the surrounding trees to be cut, and three logging concerns have learned this the hard way. The fourth pays them, and not in coin.

A pixie can simply appear: where the song gathers thick enough, a self forms out of it, owing nothing to any parent. An established court does not leave the next one to chance. It works at it — drawing moonlight, flower-nectar, and the pooled feeling of the whole court into a bloom, then setting that bloom where the current runs deep enough to take it. After a gestation of exactly one lunar cycle a new pixie steps out of it fully formed, carrying the physical traits of its makers and the emotional memory the court folded in, so that it is born already knowing some of what they felt. Blooming is not a second kind of biology standing apart from condensation; it is condensation that a court has learned to tend and aim, the way a gardener seeds a spring instead of waiting on the ground to weep one of its own.

What a pixie is for is to tend the current it came out of, and almost every pixie does. The Ikriel are the standing exception — pixies who took up the worship of Kryviel and learned to feed on emotional warmth rather than guard it, condensed song turned to preying on song. The other courts do not like to speak of them, because the Ikriel prove the worst thing a pixie can know about itself: that the line between tending the current and consuming it runs through every one of them, not safely around them.

Vitals

• Size: Minuscule
• Height: 6-10 inches
• Weight: 1-3 pounds

Heritages

• Zelle — Theocratic pixies of Zelidia, condensed from a Faesong pool gone discordant; their High Priestesses feed the hungry current with sacrifice and hide their realm from the world.
• Ianovko — Wandering illusionists who negotiate a city's Faesong into a brighter remembered copy of itself; the people walk out happy and the streets empty behind them.
• Ikriel (Icehearts) — Pixies who take up the worship of Kryviel, daemon of winter-as-entropy, and feed on the emotional warmth they were made to tend.
• Luma (Grove Keepers) — Grove-bonded living libraries of Nykotheryx Amberylika; translucent wings carry captured tree memories stretching back millennia.
• Iliko (Truth-line Pixies) — Jungle pixies of southern Ve who navigate by truth-lines, invisible currents of meaning only they perceive, and pity the half-blind world around them.