High Sidhe

The High Sidhe are nigh-indistinguishable from humans, beautiful past mortal possibility, and hold the entirety of the Kingdom's nobility. They are what every lesser Faerie is told they may one day become, and the promise is the mechanism by which the whole society holds together.

Almost every High Sidhe carries an artifact of the "lesser" race they metamorphosed out of — a hint of scales at the wrist, a tuft of fur at the nape, an ear a shade too pointed. Concealing these from one's social peers is a lifelong occupation and the subject of an entire minor industry in the Ring.

Appearance

Tall, symmetrical, and unnervingly perfect, with wings larger and more ornate than any other race's, kept summoned at all times as a display of leisure — a Faerie who never needs to fly anywhere can afford to keep their wings out.

The artifacts are the whole social game. A visible trace of the previous form is not a scandal, exactly — everyone has one, and doctrine says it is proof of the climb — but it is evidence of where you climbed from, and the Ring reads it instantly and prices it accordingly. Cosmeticians, tailors, glamour-tutors, and discreet Leprechaun prosthetists make a very good living from a thing nobody admits needs concealing.

Attuned Magic

Arcane, which is to say all of them and none of them well. Where a lesser Faerie has one element and profound depth in it, a High Sidhe has a shallow command of many, and can do a little of everything a specialist would do better. The court holds this to be evidence of a higher and more complete nature. Every specialist race in the Kingdom privately holds the opposite.

The one thing it is genuinely superior at is breadth in a room: a Sidhe duelist can answer four different specialists badly, which is often enough, and Sidhe glamour is the best in the Kingdom for the simple reason that they practice it daily on themselves.

Life

The Ring, and the calendar. A High Sidhe year is a sequence of seasons, investitures, masques, hunts, and audiences, each of which is an occasion to be seen, and the expense of being seen is the primary activity of every house. Estates are worked by staff the ledgers do not count and gardened in soil hauled in from the provinces.

Names. House name first, personal name second, and the personal name is granted — a newly arrived Sidhe is adopted by a house, which names them, which is how a person with no memories acquires four hundred years of lineage in an afternoon.

Arrival. This is the awkward part of the doctrine and it is handled by silence. Since no Faerie is born, every High Sidhe arrived from somewhere lower, memoryless, within living record — and the houses receive them, name them, and never mention it again. A Sidhe's origin race is the one thing that is never asked and always known.

Debt. The gardens are ruinous. Most houses are mortgaged, several to Grismer or to the Winterworks, and the competition cannot be stopped by anyone individually, because stopping is itself a visible act.

Society

The Ring — a belt of noble estates encircling the Eternal City — is the most exquisite and most artificial landscape in the world, grown at ruinous expense in soil hauled in from the provinces. The houses compete relentlessly in beauty, in humanness, and in proximity to the Queen, whose own status is a matter of live theological dispute: whether she is a High Sidhe herself, or some yet-higher tier reserved for her alone.

Real administration is not theirs. The Chancery of Forms governs — registries, assessments, caste law — staffed by clerks who outlast every fashion at court, and the nobility's actual function is to be the thing the ladder points at.

Tribes

There are three conditions of High Sidhe — "condition" being the word the Sidhe use on the rare occasions they discuss it at all, "tribe" being a word they apply to other races.

The three conditions are never named at court, are legible at a glance, and are the one subject on which the Ring's silence is total — which is to say, the most important one.

Currents

The Old Houses. Four centuries deep, land-rich, cash-poor, and increasingly unable to keep up with the Verge. Their asset is precedence and they spend it constantly.

The Verge. New estates, new money, no history, and a great deal of ambition. The easiest place in the capital to be hired for something unwise, and the source of most of the Kingdom's actual innovation, which nobody will say aloud.

The Sympathizers. A small number of nobles who fund radicals — sometimes out of conviction, more often to embarrass a rival house, and the difference matters less than it should to the people being funded.

The Concealers' Trade. Not a faction but a fact: the tailors, tutors, and prosthetists who hide the artifacts. They know every noble's origin race in the Kingdom, they keep records for fitting purposes, and nobody has yet worked out what that archive is worth.

Relations

Every race in the Kingdom answers to them, and no race is on equal terms with them. The Sylphs serve them most closely, the Leprechauns supply them, the Spriggans sell them things they cannot be seen buying, and the Kitsune bless them in careful language. Nothing about this arrangement is examined in public.

Playing One

A Note on Numbers

The High Sidhe hold the entirety of the nobility and less than one per cent of the Eternal City's population. The city around the Ring is majority Sylph — not plurality, majority, more than all other races and subraces together — and overwhelmingly Flaunt.

The Ring is aware of the figure. The Ring does not discuss the figure.