Fae

Mortal, long-lived, elemental-descended people of Luminglade, in four Houses: Phoenix (fire), Kraken (water), Gorgon (stone and earth), Sylph (air and storm). Brands are burned in at birth.

From the books

In The Outcast Knight

Luna's King bans the Fae from the city the moment they are sighted and calls their brands unholy, yet two Fae, the Water Fae Kara and the Fire Fae Iskander, are found chained beneath the Radiant Bank, their power drained to feed the city. Freeing them disrupts Luna's energy supply. At the Festival of Light, Fae from Luminglade walk the streets under guard, their wrists bound in dull anti-arcane cuffs.

In The Channeler

Many Fae are blue- or violet-skinned. Each carries a core, a faint glowing point beneath the sternum, and the birth brand burned over it is both House mark and conduit, the place where power meets the body. Strong feeling draws the hollowborn to the ward-lines, so the Fae practise discipline and take Hush, a preparation brewed from grey-white fungi that grow where old fear has soaked into the earth.

Luminglade is ruled by the Council of Masks, masked elders drawn from all four Houses. Its territory is guarded by ward-rings of stones and song held by ward-singers. Young Fae face their Mask-year, when they are tested and sent towards adult duty along role-paths such as Channeler and Stalker. Fae trust House knots over paper, since knots remember the hands and breath that made them. Each House has its gods: Aeshan is the living phoenix of fire, and Kraken healers call on Mora when ordinary current cannot save a dying body. A bond across Houses, a storm-pair, is forbidden.

The Council's Spire Tithe surrenders chosen youths to the First Sanctum. They travel by covered wagon under templars whose luminarite staves hum whenever a brand stirs, and enter Luna through service cuts and drains, because the city does not admit Fae through its clean gates.

In The Highlander

In the season of the Festival, Fae travellers are turned away from southern inns that took their coin the year before. A road shrine on the Highland southroad holds a carved leaf offered, perhaps, to the Fae element gods. In Luna's chaos Eira Ironvale sees Fae prisoners marched through a side gate under thrown fruit, and saves a Fae child from a frightened soldier's spear.

In The Godless Priest

Amid upheaval in Luminglade, Fae refugees meet the Crowbrook army in the forest, with house marks cut from their clothes. Some bear Sanctum wounds, current cut from their limbs in measured channels; one young woman carries Fire and Water fused permanently in her skin. Fae experience their gods through elemental creation, lineage and current, and will not hear Aeshan or Inaris called demons. Their healers can hear demonic passengers as pressure in water, and they make "remembered water" that keeps the shape of poisons it has met. Through their spokeswoman Nimra, they trade medicine and road news with Crowbrook but refuse its army passage through the forest. Fae-descended families in Crowbrook still whisper to Inaris over water flasks.