| Beasts, The Savages
|
| The fairy stories have it that loves first kiss redeems everything. The Beast becomes a man. The Frog becomes a handsome prince. Its a lie. The changelings who think of themselves as Beasts know it all too well. To kiss the Beast is to surrender yourself to sensuality and instinct. To love the Beast is to become like the Beast, lost to memory, self-control and ultimately consciousness. The animal is amoral. The animal is incapable of true thought.
|
| Darklings, The Bewitched
|
| Changelings know that their deeds have consequences, but few feel those consequences so keenly as the changelings who are called Darklings. Many were stolen away as the consequence of attracting the attention of the Fae. The Darklings obsessive clinging to the solace of the night is the consequence of having been imbued with shadows. Their love of quiet is the consequence of having lived in a world where all was whispering, all was rustling and snapping twigs and creeping fear.
|
| Elementals, The Unbound
|
| Other changelings find the Elementals the hardest to understand. They’re alien. The other changelings have taken the faerie side of their nature from creatures who, at least on some level, represent human dreams: beauties, horrors, tricksters and even animals represent something of ourselves. But the Elemental psyche is influenced by the desires of objects and forces.
|
|
| Fairest, The Sovereigns
|
| The Fairest consider their own flight through the Hedge the hardest to have effected. The world they were part of — or as much of it as they remember — was beautiful, a world of sweet pain and pleasant cruelty, a bittersweet paradise. Surrounded by beauty as they were, thralls to creatures a thousand times lovelier than anything on Earth, they had to focus all their thoughts on remembering what it was to be plain, to walk among the ordinary.
|
| Ogres, The Terrible
|
| The changelings who, for the want of a better term, are called Ogres understand this story, for it informs who they are. They know that abuse sometimes creates abusers, that the victims of brutality can sometimes become brutal themselves. By definition, the Ogres are those changelings who have been shaped by unthinking violence, and brutishness defines them.
|
| Wizened, The Shrewd
|
| Whether gray-skinned abductors, child-seizing imps, vandal faeries or tin-mine knockers, many of the Fae marry practical talent and industry with undirected, pointless malice. Sometimes they are the sprites and goblins that bring people practical help and material wealth — if placated. But if offended, even only once, even accidentally, these same givers of aid bestow upon their hapless human victims a lifetime of misery.
The Lost who were kidnapped by such faeries have endured this strange malice. Trained by unreliable Faerie taskmasters, they have become nimble-fingered. They have become willing, tireless workers. But the spitefulness of their captors infects them. It twists them. It makes them somehow smaller. It diminishes them. This is why, no matter how they look, other changelings recognize them as the Wizened.
|
|