Leprechaun

The Leprechauns hold the alpine north, the only Faerie homeland that is openly hostile to the people living in it. Thin air, killing cold, and glacier-cut valleys mean that everything a Leprechaun has, a Leprechaun built. They are the Kingdom's engineers, and their fortress-manufactory in the flank of a peak is the industrial heart of the world.

Their natural wings are small and struggle badly in thin air, so most Leprechauns augment: propellers, springs, compressed-gas boosters, and small rockets, strapped on and tuned individually. A Leprechaun in flight is loud, fast, and slightly on fire.

Appearance

Short, wiry, and weathered, with ruddy skin and frost-fern patterns on their wings that no two individuals share. Working Leprechauns are visibly modified — goggles, harnesses, brass at the joints — and consider an unaugmented body a sign of either youth or wealth.

Attuned Magic

Cold. Not fire's opposite so much as its discipline: a nascent Leprechaun chills metal to make it brittle or holds a workshop at a steady temperature. A powerful one freezes a waterfall mid-fall, sheathes a valley in ice, or drops the heat out of a forge fast enough to temper what is in it. Most Leprechaun magic is applied to manufacture rather than to combat, which does not make it any less dangerous.

Society

The Winterworks is a company town and makes no pretense otherwise. Rank follows craft, apprenticeships run for decades, and the Foreman-Ascendant is closer to a guild-master than a lord. Thirteen percent of Leprechauns live in the one city, the highest urban concentration in the Kingdom, because the cold permits nothing else.

Relations

The nobility adores Leprechaun artifice and looks down on Leprechauns for making it, a contradiction the Leprechauns have monetized ruthlessly. The Winterworks also holds the Kingdom's only real trade relationship with the Outer Wilds: ore comes up from the Kobolds, scrap comes in from the Gremlins, and no one at court wishes to inquire too closely about where a thing came from so long as it ticks.