RACES: THE FEYN
The Long Burden
There’s a strange isolation that comes from a blended heritage. When you don’t fit neatly into one box or the other, you wind up an outsider to both. This especially true if your parents come from equally proud traditions. No matter how hard you try to stand in two worlds, choosing a side feels inevitable.
I tried to envision the Feyn in a similar predicament. A mixed-race of Human and Fae. An emerging hope for an ancient culture that refuses to embrace its own children because they’re a constant reminder of their unavoidable extinction.
LONESOME ROAD
The Tyrin were dying, whether they admitted it or not. Sure it was a slow death, the way stars die after giving life to worlds without number. But what difference does that make?.
The sacrifices they’d made to survive the Enemy-To-Come, meant tomorrow bore no future generations of Fae. So, they faced the inevitable like cowards. For all their unrivaled power or their centuries of dominance over the other races on Achades. None of it meant a damned thing.
“The Tyrin were dying, whether they admitted it or not.”
If they had any hope of a legacy that might survive the ages, it was through their offspring, the Feyn. Part-human children half cast in their image. But here’s the rub, most of the Feyn were the products of blood bonds made during the days of the Old Home.
Moreover, there was a fear that, should the Feyn grapple with humans on this new world, they would continue to dilute the bloodline until nothing of their noble heritage remained.
EXTINCTION AGENDA
As has always been their way in times of crisis, a dalliance with the forbidden gave the Tyrin an answer. It seems, hidden away in some ancient tome, there was a ritual – a deliberately forgotten bit of arcana that allowed them to occupy their descendants’ bodies for a time. Sleaved in this new flesh, they could once again lay with the children of man, undiluted, just as it was centuries ago in their precious Evergreen.
All it required was the consciousness of the body they inhabited to willingly step aside, however briefly. It had to be brief because the longer the essence of a luminous ancestor remained, the more likely it was that the displaced soul could untether from its mortal anchor and simply drift away.
I like the space this opens up for the Feyn to have ghosty ancestor types who they can turn against one day.