The Ianovko are a people of the pixie, not a separate bloodline — diaspora illusionists and city-killers whose compulsion to move on is a way of being, not a heritable divergence from pixie stock.
The Ianovko are pixies who cannot stay. Wherever a band of them settles for more than a season, the place around them begins to die, and they have always moved on before it finishes. They do not appear to decide this. It is simply what their presence does to a town, the way damp does to plaster.
Like all pixies, the Ianovko are condensed Faesong — the emotional music of the world gathered into a body — and so they hear that music running under everything the way other creatures hear sound. The Ianovko do more than hear it. They negotiate with it. A band settles into the shared imaginative life of a city the way a tenant settles into rooms, and from inside it they revise. They soften a real street into the remembered version of itself. They swap the taste of the well-water for the taste people expect. They replace the thing with the agreed image of the thing, and none of it looks like harm. The first sign is usually that the bells sound slightly wrong, as though rung in the next room over.
The decline after that has a shape, and people who have watched it happen in more than one place know the order it comes in. Music goes first. Instruments hold their tuning for an afternoon and no longer. Then the children stop. A child is a genuinely new thing, an un-negotiated fact entering the world, and a city living inside the Ianovko's revised copy of itself cannot make new things. It can only recirculate the ones it has. The last generation born is simply not replaced. After that the people leave, though they would not call it leaving. They go to visit kin, or to see a market two valleys over, and they do not come back, because the city they carry in their heads has grown brighter than the one made of brick, and they would rather live in the bright one. The brick one empties. By the time the wells turn and the roofs sag, the Ianovko are three hundred miles away, and have been for years.
Their patron is Ikvanel, daemon of illusion and the negotiated reality, whose followers measure status by the size of a prank and the timing of its collapse. A dead city is the largest prank the form allows. The craft of it, by the Ianovko's own reckoning, is not the killing, which any of them can manage simply by staying. The craft is being elsewhere when the collapse comes, so the ruin can never quite be laid at their feet. They are very good at this. There is no Ianovko word for the thing they do to cities, which the towns downwind of them consider the most damning fact about the people. The clearest proof of it stands in the Wastes of Al G'hesh, where the dead city of Istori Agnostus keeps a market that still sounds crowded at dusk though no one has traded there in three hundred years.
When the pixies with the dark wings ask to winter in your walls, you let them, and you smile, and you send your daughters to your sister in the next valley that same night. They will not stay long. Nothing they like ever does. — a caravan rule kept along the Tarkhon roads
A great many cities have learned the rule too late. The Tarkhon Empire learned it in time and did the cold, profitable thing. When an Ianovko band drifted into the strait-towns two generations ago and the first instruments went sour, the imperial factors did not raise a militia. They negotiated, the way Tarkhon negotiates everything. They paid the band to leave: coin, safe passage, and a letter of introduction to a rival the empire wished gone. The Ianovko took the offer and moved on downcoast, to a city that had not paid. Tarkhon's strait-towns still stand. The empire keeps no record of which city took the band next, and declines to be asked.
This is why the Ianovko hold no homeland and never kept one for long. The groves they are said to have come from went the way of every place they ever loved. They drift now in bands of a dozen or fewer, illusionists for hire and guests no one can refuse cleanly, pleasant company for exactly one season. They have learned not to ask for two. Asking makes people refuse, and a refused Ianovko only finds the next town that will not.
Aspects
- Reality is negotiable
- Gone before the collapse