#fae-touched

In a lot of Chronicles of Darkness games, there are “minor templates” for players to take for their characters. These are basically lesser types of supernatural beings— undeniably marked by magic, but not transformed by it like the main templates are. So instead of being a werewolf, you might be a Wolf-Blooded, i.e., not the monster your stronger cousins are, but still recognizably having a connection to that world.

Again, a bunch of games have these. Mage has Sleepwalkers (and Proximi), Vampire has ghouls, Geist has the Absent, Demon has stigmatics, etc.

In Changeling: The Lost, there are the Fae-Touched. We’ll get to them in a bit. First, more on Lost.

In Lost, like many stories about faeries, oaths and vows are very important. They are, in the form of magical Contracts, the source of many fae powers. Changeling have a neat ability to make any spoken promise binding, invoking the force of the Wyrd to force even minor vows to be taken seriously. And many changelings are taken by the True Fae by getting ensnared in some kind of oath.

See, if you didn’t know, Changeling: The Lost is about humans taken to the home of the True Fae, and then transformed into changelings as the True Fae torment them. The game is very much about the way trauma changes a person, and how even recovering from trauma still doesn’t bring you back to the way you were— you’re healed, but you’re not the same.

And much like trauma changes a person, it isolates them too. Lost represents this in the fiction with fetches— the faerie-forged simulacra left behind in the stolen person’s wake, acting the roles of parent, sibling, friend, and so on while the original person is actually suffering with no escape.

But the Fae-Touched won’t stand for that.

Because while Changeling: The Lost recognizes that many promises aren’t serious, that when people swear, “I’ll always be there for you,” they don’t always live up to that, it also recognizes that some promises are different.

The Fae-Touched are the mortals who remember the words they swore, and will not ignore them. They can tell, in their dreams, through the nagging impulses they get in their waking moments, that the person they promised to help needs them now more than ever. They are lead by the Wyrd into the land of faerie to live up to that promise, and they follow it gladly.

A Fae-Touched is the father who knows the smiling fetch who claims to be his daughter isn’t the real thing, and that somewhere the girl he swore to protect is in mortal danger— and so he delves into a world of dreams and nightmares to bring her back.

A Fae-Touched is the woman who fights off briar wolves in a mad, twisting forest so she can find her wife, because when she said “I will never abandon you,” she meant it.

A Fae-Touched is the young man staring down a Lord of the True Fae and refusing to yield. He and his brother went through hell together years ago when their parents died, and they promised one another then that they’d always stand by each other, and some monster in a crown can’t change that.

Not every changeling is helped by a Fae-Touched, and not all of the Fae-Touched succeed. Sometimes you have to claw your own way back home. But God, what a beautiful concept.

I know that Changeling: The Lost is very dark, and the reason I love the Fae-Touched isn’t really because they’re the light to that darkness— I think that simplifies it too much.

I like the Fae-Touched not because they take away the darkness, but because they remind me we don’t always have to face the darkness alone.

Sometimes, when you think there’s no point going on, when you think it will just be the pain and the fear again and again and again… it’s not true. Because sometimes, maybe even more often than we think, there’s someone out there who knows you need help. And they ready themselves, they set out into the darkness, saying only,

Yes, technically, nothing permanent would happen.

...but they'd gotten very high in the air...

...and the ground didn't cease to exist just because a laughing changeling decided she wanted to play!

Or perchance, When the last little star has left the sky, Shall we still be together With our arms around each other

And shall you be my new romance? On the clear understanding That this kind of thing can happen

Shall we dance?

"Kona! Kona! Look what I learned to paint!! The pixies are going to love this!"

"What di- WHAT IS THAT?!"

"Summer! What is that?!"

"I learned to paint it from a show in that dome place! Isn't he adorable????"