The Land of the Fallen Fairies

You are not ready for Kamari's chapters.

At all.

Not even I was.

Anuli: 11-12 (but fae looks like fae's five to everyone else because ~houseplants don't grow as well~)

Kamari - 25-ish. (Somewhere in the early twenties.)

Ankh: 25-ish. (Maturity wise, Ankh and Kamari are at a comparable point, but years-lived-wise, ANkh's older than Kamari. Differing growth rates wow wow.)

Sitara: 16 (fae's close to maturity for a loblolly pine)

Nali: 58-ish

Aisfa: 64-ish

(Trees have a type III survivorship curve, which basically means that most young trees die off, and once trees get to maturity, they tend to live for as long as they possibly can. Which means, dryad culture reflects this. Perfectly normal to have most younglings die off. A tad bit sad, but... really? Their personalities don't fully develop until they're closer to maturity. So, it doesn't matter much and it's almost expected. AND most dryads forget the earliest years of their life so ~no traumatic consequences~ yay!

The closer a dryad gets to maturity, the more everyone believes them to stay alive, so Sitara, for example, would be expected to stay alive, although fae's in the most vulnerable stage of faer life right now.

As for Anuli.... eh? Not really. Anuli's already really small for someone faer age.

Anyways, dryads overall REALLY value getting older. Hence why aging Nali and Aisfa to be much older was so much more interesting than more 'young adults' to me. Dryads tend to get chubbier, their roots longer, leaves growing on their elbows and on the inside of their knees, showing knots and scars and signs that they've gone through life. Aisfa especially... abuses being the oldest a bit.)

And yes, I can't make a single post without a whole worldbuilding infodump I'm sorryyyy.

Honestly it's probably my favorite Anuli and Kamari art. They both look like how I imagine them in my head

... proceeds to never draw them like this again because alas... my 'skills'... inconsistent.

Also proceeds to never write this scene despite it being SO CUTE AND WHOLESOME IN MY HEAD AAARGHHHHHhh

Okay I think part of the issue is that I know Anuli will want to burn this memory into faer brain and therefore fae will want to describe the clouds perfectly. Which means I have to try to describe the clouds perfectly.

ANd they're clouds. CLOUDS

too pretty.

eh. I'll get there.

Dryads are tree fairies. Pixies are fungal fairies... and they have VERY different ways of viewing and experiencing the world. 

(For any who read this and see an inconsistency and/or plot hole... no you didn't. These are not absolute rules but rather... a bunch of opinions and subjective knowledge. There is no absolute truth nor one narrative here)

Dryads have physical forms, animalistic bodies that live and breathe within the physical plane. Their trees represent their 'subconscious mind' (although interpretations differ depending on who you ask. Ankh, for example, views one's connection to their tree as the single greatest determiner of one's morality and sanity, as they hold one's base emotion, consciousness and empathy.) Dryads as a whole used to name their tree with a complementary name, view their tree as a complementary entity and overall dryad society used to incorporate their trees into their identity, but alas, changing times and a tendency to forget.  

Pixies don't have separate fairy bodies. In fact, forget everything you know about dryads because none of that applies here.  

Also, their experience differs quite a bit from animals and dryads, so... yeah, it'll be a long one.  

Pixies are mental beings living 

When looking at mycorrhizal fungi, there's thousands of differing species within a single spoonful of soil, and scientists aren't sure if there's a distinct separation between one individual and another. So the pixie realm is more of a... Semi hive mind? The pixies do consider themselves a collection of  different organisms/their own society with their own customs rather than 'one pixie'. This is because some pixies have WIDLY different beliefs than others, (how do I explain this...). 

With mycorrhizal fungi, they both carry messages between trees that are further away from each other, and trade nutrients with trees. Mycorrhizal fungi gather nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen and trade it for plant sugars. In pixie society, they highly covet these trades, because it's the only way they can lose/get new information out of their own choice. Otherwise, all the pixies do is rearrange and analyze the information already within their system.

(Think a university/ancient archives full of a bunch of academics that argue and debate about the books all day, overanalyzing the books and rearranging their shelves for easier organization. They're academics in every sense of the word... There are some pixies that don't covet information as much but they're a small minority, valuing information is the largest connecting factor.)  

 Soooo the hardest part to explain - with humans, each person has their own brain with their own experiences, along with their perspective of those experiences... And if you stop seeing people as their own entities, but rather vessels of the information in their brains... You got pixies. They don't really care about their identities or themselves as organisms/living beings. They are living breathing 'shelves of books', making notes in the margins and fusing and splitting as they see fit. You could view the information as memories more so. Except the pixies don't put any personal value on memories, memories are information and the thoughts attached to that experience.  

For example... An old trend of the pixies was analyzing the effects of 'this new human pest'. The pixies that became interested in this tended to have preexisting interests in nutrient composition near the surface of the soil, so they started to congregate amongst themselves. They don't really talk to share information. If they talk, if they use words, then they can misunderstand each other, misunderstand the information they cherish so much. So, pixies that experienced personal effects from human caused soil degradation fused to share their memories together, and spilt where they found the contradictions in memories could damage the information, creating a new pixies from the old ones. And because pixies fuse and split so often, they don't feel the need to have even an imaginary form. They're entirely abstract most of the time (incomprehensible to tree fairies, with their physical bodies. If a tree fairy were to contact and descend into the depths of the pixie archives, their brain couldn't process it, and they'd go crazy and/or die.)  

But some pixies stay as they are for a while, especially if they're fond of the tree and tree fairy they trade with and often talk to them with a more concrete form. Pixies don't form physical bodies... But they do create 'imaginary selves', 'mental forms' that look more like the dryads. These forms can either look like a fleshy body (completely imaginary though) or they look like a physical place. It depends on the pixie's preference. Some pixies hate the idea of pinning down their abstract nature into imaginary concepts. And before the whole 'pixie crisis' that happened before the story even starts, some pixies even fully left the pixie archives and nested within a tree fairy's brain. This was weird to most pixies, an outrage to others. Because if a pixie dies or leaves the system, the information they represented and held, all the memories and thoughts on those memories were lost forever.  

 Part of the point of the pixie archives is to be more incomprehensible... With some parts of it with more concrete and conceptual, other parts completely abstract. None of the POV characters are pixies so this realm isn't meant to be fully understood. 

The Elders would reason it's because the fates chose Kamari to prove faerself free of the fallen fairy traits that plague most of faer kind. If Kamari protects the others from fairies like faerself, dangerous fairies, then fae's offset the danger of faer existence. To Kamari... it implies fae's inherently a dangerous fairy and fae spends a lot of time trying to come to terms with that and eventually assumes its something everyone else thinks of faer (the play) but it's not true. Fae's only using the High Protector to prove that.  

As for the actual reason why the Elders chose Kamari to by the High Protector... they wanted absolute desperation. Kamari has nowhere else to go to, no one else like faer, and even the most discriminated against fairies still see Kamari as beneath them, and they wouldn't dirty one of their own claws with fallen fairy blood. So better to take the worst of the worst, practically tree-less, and make faer into the executioner. The title won't give faer enough power to change the way others see faer, it won't give faer the power to do anything other than the Elder's orders... and that's the point. It's something more than what fae had before. Some Elders tell themselves it's a kindness to Kamari... 'we're give you all this and can't you give us this small thing in return?' small thing includes having to wretch younglings away from their guardians