#pfoa

When I began outlining Fey Touched it didn't, originally, have fey at all. I wanted three different types of vampires. Traditional vampires, psychic vampires, and some twisted, nosferatu, type vampire.

But the longer I world built, the less I liked that. The "psychic" vampires were turned into the Fey, although they still retain psychic abilities, such as telekinesis, telepathy, and similar powers.

The traditional-style vampires stayed, with some tweaks. Sunlight doesn't hurt them, so much as they've very light sensitive, but they keep the more traditional speed, and strength, and enhances senses associated with vampires.

That still left me with a blank space where my monstrosities needed to sit. The evil ones. I still didn't know what I really wanted to do with these creatures, until I watched a 2019 film called "Dark Waters", with Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway.

This is a little bit of a tangent, so bear with me. The film is based on true events, which are some of my favourite films to watch. It dramatizes the story of a lawyer called Robert Bilott, when he took on a case against the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont after it was discovered that they had contaminated a town with unregulated chemicals.

The story is a little terrifying in that is is based on true events, and despite Bilott's win against the company, the chemical that's contaminated the town is still used today in the manufacture of Teflon, the non-stick coating for cooking utensils, such as frying pans etc.

The interesting/horrifying thing about this particular chemical, is that it's known as a "Forever" chemical. It doesn't break down in the environment, and while DuPont argued that the amount shed from Teflon was negligible, scientific tests proved that it was linked to dozens of diseases, and some very nasty cancers.

The film is VERY worth a watch, but the part that caught my attention was "Forever Chemicals", and my little writer brain began spinning.

If humans are ingesting, and being infected my these forever chemicals, that are floating around out bodies, and our blood, from the moment we take them in to the moment of our deaths, deaths somtimes caused by these very same chemicals...

What would those chemicals do to vampires who drank our blood?

We have very strict food regulations on animals for human consumption, and what they are allowed to eat. What would happen to vampires, if human blood became toxic to them?

And very slowly, very quietly, and slightly insidiously, my Kavians were created.

Kavians emerged within the world of Fey Touched somewhere around the early 1700's. The industrial revolution, according to my brief google research, happened around the early 1700's, so I figured that's when humans began inhaling huge amounts of toxic fumes, and then progressed onto ingesting lab made chemicals later.

At the time, Fey and Vampires both lived within the mortal realm.

At first, it was isolated incidents of Vampires going mad, and attacking anyone around them, but then Fey began to go missing, and turned up dead, drained of their blood.

In appearance, Kavians are similar to vampires, but they look sick. Like they've been lost at sea for months, sick. Their skin is waxy-looking, and shrunken, leaving them looking bony. Their eyes are bloodshot, but their movements are fluid and smooth. The tips of their fingers become deformed, boney and clawlike, but because they are gorging on human and fey blood, their abilities are overfuelled.

They're faster, stronger, and their senses are sharper than the average vampire. If you've seen the Fast and Furious films, it's like punching Nitrous Oxide into a racing car's engine, but they're also insane.

There's no logic behind their eyes, and no way to get them to focus. They run on pure, predator, instinct, and lose the capacity for forming speech. They're mindless beasts, of the worst kind, and chaos ensued as more and more vampires began to change.

The council of vampires, what was left of it, didn't have any answers.

All the while, Fey numbers were being decimated. Once a vampire became a Kavian, they would hunt and kill anything, almost mindlessly, earning themselves the nickname "Rabids", but the moment they scented the blood of a Fey, they made a beeline for them, and tore them to pieces. Almost drenching themselves in the silvery blood, like cats rolling in catnip.

Not every vampire who drank human blood was affected immediately. For some, it took weeks or months before their minds snapped, for some it was the first drink of human blood. It was only a small population of vampires who eventually figured out that they were still sane because they'd chosen to drink exclusively animal blood, and took this revelation to what tattered shreds remained of the vampire council.

The vampires, by this point, were desperate. The Fey had fled the mortal realm, for a bubble realm they had created out of sheer desperation, and the vampires were facing the growing number of kavians alone, so they issues a decree that the drinking of human blood was forbidden.

Almost as soon as the law went into effect, they stopped losing huge swathes of their numbers to turning, but they also discovered that human blood had, unnoticed by them, become addictive.

As the weeks turned into months, the vampire population lost a few more vampires who couldn't resist the addictive qualities of human blood, but their biggest fight was now the huge numbers of Kavians wandering the world and killing humans indiscriminently.

The vampires took refuge inside official buildings and structures that had been warded by the Fey, before they left for their own realm of Arbaon, and once the remaining vampires felt they had recouped and slightly recovered, they began training Kavians Hunters, whose sole purpose was to hunt and kill the kavians now infecting the world.

In part, to defend themselves and protect themselves from discovery by humans, but also in the hopes that, one day, the Fey would return to the mortal realm.

Negotiations with the Fey for reintegration into the Mortal Realm have only been ongoing for around twenty-five years at the time of Fey Touched, and it is Fey Court Law that all Fey who chose to leave Arbaon and travel to the mortal realm accept the risk that they may not return.

Hence my novel's tagline;