Worldbuilding Day 18: Fairy Town

Feb20

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.
Every day in February (or most days), I will answer one question about any one of my settings.
The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!
The eighteenth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Fairy Town

What made Fairy Town different?

Nobody knows!

Okay, that’s cheating, and also a lie.

Long before Fairy Town was Fairy Town (and, really, it is only Fairy Town to those in the know), it was a holy place; deep in the crossroads park that was, once, the center of a small town, there is a shrine.

There is, if you ask the right people, some disagreement as to who the shrine is to; there has always been disagreement over it, and if you dig into the dirt anywhere in that park, you will find bones, many of them humanoid.

What nobody argues about is that the shrine is a place of power.

It is not the only one in this variant of the world; indeed, when mankind first came here, there were many, like springs.

But, for as powerful as they are, there are many ways a place of power can be desecrated, blocked off, broken. And many of them were.

Others had cities grow up around them, as Fairy Town did. And in the cities growing up, some places locked the power into place with ancient and sometimes horrible magics, and some people bound the fae from entering with blood rituals and complex prayers, or, at least, things they thought were prayers.

(In a couple places, this was tried and did not succeed. In those cities, only those completely fae-blind and the nastiest of fae live, and those are not nice places at all).

In Fairy Town, the rituals did not take hold, and the place of power acted, as they all did, as a magnet for those who were fae, for those who had Faith, for those who were Strange and Wyrd. And without the rituals and call-them-prayers to hold the fae out… they just kept coming, and they settled.

And there they have been ever since.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/672076.html. You can comment here or there.

0 thoughts on “Worldbuilding Day 18: Fairy Town”

  1. Why build a city around one of the shrines? Or rather, why would *humans* build a city around one of the shrines? Fae folk, certainly …

    Reply

      • Iiiiiinteresting … clearly there are folks in Fairy Town who distinguish between human and fae. On what grounds? So having been drawn to and settled around a shrine, why lock it away? Does that lock it away from everyone, just limit it (to certain people or methods or …)?

        Reply

                  • Yes. No. That is, I realize the church and the park in the middle of town (where the series started, and also where the Bishop goes to … you didn’t quite tell us) are different places. I had assumed (because fae) that Mirandabelle’s reaction to the iron fence around the church was because it was iron, rather than because it was around a church or any magic the church had. I may be wrong! And while Mrs. Bao clearly goes into the church (and is or claims to be fae), and a couple of other fae are mentioned in passing as being there, if Mirandabelle does you haven’t to my knowledge written that yet. 🙂

                    Reply

                    • Okay, I’m confused, because I’m not sure what this has to do with “why lock it away.” This is a separate question? Than Mirandabelle is burned because she kisses the fence.

                    • Oh! I asked both about distinguishing humans and fae, and about locking away the shrines, and I wasn’t sure which one you replied to. So we’ve been talking past each other. Ooops!

                    • Ooh! Can we pretend this is ’cause I’m not all the way healthy yet? Okay. So, fae and humans … not so entirely distinct in this ‘verse as, say, in Dragons Next Door.

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