16.6 Fae Lore

General Summary

Day 194

I’m cautious about travelling with fae without sharing our knowledge of fae-elf relations. Tonight around the fire we will talk about our history so that they can decide for themselves if our past can be overcome.   But I spend the rest of the daylight with a young summer fae named Zemini, who looks exactly as a wizard should look. We get entirely lost in a conversation about the book they are writing on fae arcane magic and how it might be created. Fae, they tell me, haven’t created magic in a long time. They wake knowing all the magic they need for their season. They might learn magic from others, humans mostly, but they don’t know how to create. Zemini is writing a book and gathering information from others on how new arcane magic is made.   Like most conversations between two wizards, it quickly drifts into adjacent topics such as nobility (fae have noble families who are chosen by the Grove for a purpose) and family structure (fae families can be either open or closed, where closed families consist of two pair-bonded fae).   And in the evening, we do tell stories. Camellia tells our shared history and there are tears around the fire as these young fae listen. Afterwards when Regir comes to speak to me, he tells me that whatever the Great Dark was, it was not elves. The darkness that the fae fought might have been a concept that the elves had to overcome or win free from, but it was not elves themselves.   “Our lights can make shadows for you,” he tells me.   And he has an excellent suggestion - when fae encounter someone who they hurt in the past, they do a particular thing. You recognize that you are different people now but that the hurt is not erased because of that. They write down the things that were bad, set it in a lantern, and set it free. The writing burns, and they can move forwards.   This is a practice I think is very clever and wise, and so Regir and I decide to do this on behalf of our races as we travel together.