Sylph

The Sylphs hold the meadowlands at the center of the world, and the meadowlands are the most forgiving country there is. Warm, well-watered, thick with clover and seed and pollen, the Heartland asks nothing of the people who live in it, and the Sylphs have accordingly become the most numerous, the most peaceable, and the most favored of the twelve races.

They are also the only race with no home of their own. The capital sits in their territory, and over the centuries the Sylphs surrendered any separate identity to it. This is the source of their standing and of a quiet melancholy that runs all the way through their culture: every other race can point at a place and say that is ours, while a Sylph can only point at the Queen's city and say we live nearest.

Appearance

Slight even by Faerie standards, with pale colouring that runs to grass-green and wheat-gold, and the longest, narrowest wings of any race — so thin they are nearly invisible at rest and produce almost no sound in flight. A Sylph in the air is the closest thing in the world to silent.

Attuned Magic

Air. A nascent Sylph stirs breezes and small gusts. With practice the scope grows: sustained winds, weather over a whole meadow, and at the height of the art, localized storms and tornadoes. Sylph flight is the best among the common Faeries, since they can put the air to work rather than fighting it, and Sylph couriers routinely outrun races that are stronger in every other respect.

Society

Agrarian, communal, and organized around the harvest of nectar, seed, and pollen that feeds the capital. Sylph villages are governed by consensus and old habit rather than by any lord, and the Kingdom's provincial administration is layered on top of that arrangement without ever quite replacing it.

Sylph folk music is the largest body of song in the world and is overwhelmingly about home. Almost none of it names the place.

Relations

Close and constant with the High Sidhe, who employ Sylphs by the thousand and regard them with the fondness owed to a favorite servant. Warm with the Cait Sith of the Hedges, who move Sylph produce to market. Strained with the non-Faerie labor that works the Heartland fields alongside them and is listed in the Kingdom's ledgers as equipment — a thing many Sylphs have started to notice, and a few have started to say aloud.