The Fae Lands
"Consider, Karisma. There's no logging, no heating homes with fire. Industry isn't necessary, when various Fae have the time to grow what they need, and the others live spastic, but short growth cycles before coming round again. So what's the atmosphere like without a glut of carbon dioxide? The Fae Lands function without fire. It serves no purpose but destruction, unless you're a sequoia. A few kamikaze fire breeders. Think about how macabre the Middling Plane and other Realms look to them, building furniture out of their corpses. Using their ancestors to keep us warm." "Never really thought about it, when I was there." "I didn't either..." "Until? Leaving me hanging, parental unit." "Hmm? Sorry, was thinking of an old friend." Caleb smirked the drive of his eyes to sting at thought of Tuija.Many pieces of folklore surrounding the Fair Folk seem to centre around the Fae Lands being somehow outside of time. This is ridiculous. Few dimensions and Realms are outside of time other than the Theosian Realm of The Spheres. All the myth and folklore engaging with this idea of timelessness stem from one specific, but once acknowledged, irrefutable fact. The Fae are sapient plants. If the Fae are to interact with the Folk in other Realms, needs must speed them up, or slow them down a bit. No leap in logic is necessary once the established fact of the Fae's divergence into floral sapience comes into heady focus. Yes, of course, if a man was to be enticed by a particularly provocative faerie and step into the Fae Lands, he would return to Midgard after a few weeks has gone by for him, but a century drifted by on the Middling Plane. How else would Fae whose lineages span from the wildflowers to the mighty trees interact with another sapient at all? Trees and most plants take time to grow, and while there are primrose, violet, pussywillow and all sorts of fledgeling Fae who pop up like the dandelions to live a short, frantic life and fade in the summer sun, the majority of Fae known outside Faerie are the hearty bushes and trees. Thus, there are no buildings in the Fae Lands, which were not hollowed out of rock for the guests who happen to be fauna, no palaces of hewn logs, but the bodies of Fae who are literal living pillars of the community. Growing to massive heights toward the sun's balmy rays. Everything is organic, and thoroughly alive. Scents of flower, bud and resin permeate the air, which fire never knows unless some malignant spark set it alight. Fire is the greatest danger of Faerie, caustic and destructive. Once a sapient understands the relative flow of time for the various beings who make up the Fae, one can see flipping well how chaotic the Fae Court is on the daily. A Realm of forests, meadows, sea shores and verdant valleys between hills, the Fae Lands are best expressed as a clutch of microclimates stacked together like jewels on a necklace.Ginnungagap by Sapha Burnell
Geography
Gently rolling hills undulate under perpetual forests, which make way to the emerald sea in one span, the golden desert on another. Between them, Faerie sprawls in a gardener's paradise, tended by the few humans who agreed to live out their lives in a blink back home, or the few who remained from the Changeling days, and never got around to becoming fertilizer, yet. Faerie is awash with floral life, of every variety and size. Stalwart and brave oaks, sequoias, aspens. Mischievous flashes of wildflowers with their condensed lives, sleepy perennials waking up slightly off from the way they were before.
The mutability of plant life, how quickly some plants can evolve while others take centuries, makes Faerie a tricky sort of place for mammals, reptiles and amphibians. A few clutches of creatures bustle through the elder mountains toward the selkie's sea, evolved from visitors brought over by the mischievous fair folk at one point or another.
Every acre of the Fae Lands is full of flora unseen yet in the Middling Plane on the manicured edges, centreward to increasingly ancient species of plant life until the tangle of brambles clear away. Fir and pine and basam clear away. Rose bushes halt their fragrant march. The majority of the Fae live around the edges and middle of the Fae Lands, as time recedes, thick as eons of the collective Realms. Only the bravest, hardest of plants grow beyond the Silent Forest in the epicentre of the Realm.
And in the centre, in the spot of the first emanation, is a tree neither pixie nor selkie will see for themselves without a journey longer than their lifespan.
The first emanation.
The first botanical life in all the Realms.
The Green Man.
Ecosystem
The first indication one is not in the Middling Plane is the cyclical nature of the breeze. A perfect median temperature in every season, the Fae breeze sings with the music of wildflowers and puff-a-day dandelion tufts, which whisper and coo and giggle to be heard. Water mists from the Green Man's centre outward every morning, leaving the days dew-sprinkled and pleasant without storm or rain by midday. No plant starves for water, when the Queen sits upon her Throne in the Fae Court. No wind is too strong to remove a petal or leaf without cause.
It is a tranquil place, before the daffodils and carnations awake. One of the first created.
Ecosystem Cycles
In the sky, the sun bathes day in balmy light, where night is governed by a confounding amount of ionically charged plasma streams dubbed solar winds. They shine like neon once the plasma streams hit the magnetosphere, with the vault of the sky as their playground. Thus, in Faerie there are no constellations, no satellite moon. Nothing but an explosion of colour which bathes the night. Seasons function more through decision of the Queen and Court than through a sense of grounded time.
Natural Resources
A logging company & botanist's paradise.
Don't tell them I wrote that, I want to continue to exist.
Tourism
Let me tell you a story of changelings, fae lovers and deal makers...
"Veto! Father veto, way not old enough!" "Dad!" "Nope! Nuuh-uh! Not happening! Not today, I don't have the spoons." Caleb & Karisma
Alternative Name(s)
Faerie, The Seelie & Unseelie Court
Type
Magical Realm
Included Locations
Owner/Ruler
Additional Rulers/Owners
Ruling/Owning Rank
Owning Organization
Related Ethnicities
Inhabiting Species
Ambassadors
- Hellene: Great Grey Owl
- Aesir & Vanir: Crow
- The Dao: Rooster
- Kehmeti: Falcon
- Yataban: Odirere Parrot
- Theosian: Cherub
Appears In
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