The Flaunt

The Flaunt are the Sylphs of the Eternal City, and they will tell you — pleasantly, while checking the time — that they are not a tribe. Tribes have vales and villages. They have addresses, quoted by height, and the address is the point: more Sylphs live inside the capital's walls than any other people, a fact the census does not emphasize because the census is about who matters, not who is there.

The old songs say the Sylphs came from soaring peaks, long ago and somewhere lost. The Flaunt have heard the songs and drawn their own conclusion: the spires of the capital climb higher than any grass, and if the race was made for altitude, then the city — glass, light, updraft, and nine hundred feet of it — is not an exile from the ancestral country but the nearest thing to going home. The Aurae consider this argument heartbreaking. The Flaunt consider it settled.

The Thermal

The city's glass throws heat off the spires by mid-morning, and the updraft over the central spiral will carry a Sylph nine hundred feet without a wingbeat. The Flaunt ride it the way their plains cousins walk a road, and the city's whole courier trade is theirs: silent wings, the best flight among the common races, and a lift the architecture provides for free. A Flaunt's rank among Flaunt is substantially a matter of how they ride — where they peel off, how late they flare, whether they check the wind or already know it.

They prefer the artificial environment without apology. Grass makes them sneeze. The Meadowlands are where the food is from; the Skirl is where the wool is from; the city is where everything else is from, and everything else is what they like — glow-lit arcades, Leprechaun clockwork from the Winterworks, dew-glass fashion that changes by the season, and the human-inspired novelties the Ring sets and the Spiral perfects. Court fashion is designed in the Ring, but it is worn, corrected, and made survivable by Flaunt tailors, and everyone in the trade knows which of those is the art.

Ways

Flaunt live dense: terraced rooms off the Spiral's middle tiers, rented by height, shared by workmates as often as kin. Work is the city — couriers, clerks, tailors, pressers, vintners, and above all the Service Families, the dynasties of household staff who have run the Ring's estates for generations and are the most loyal subjects the Queen has.

Names. The village found-name is quietly retired at the city gate — Fescue does not survive the Spiral — and replaced with something current. The retired name is not forgotten; it is used by exactly one person, whoever loved them first in the city, and being asked for it is the Flaunt proposal.

Arrival. A Sylph who metamorphoses in the capital is claimed within the hour by a courier line, a service house, or a workshop — the city's one inexhaustible resource being openings — and is flying the Thermal by the end of the week. Where a village walks its newcomer to the water and the fields, the city walks them to the ledge and shows them the lift. It is done kindly, at speed, and it takes.

The Descent. Once a year, at the Gild, the Flaunt go down — to the villages their families came from, laden with city presents, for three days of being fed too much and asked when they are coming home. Attendance is near-universal and no one can say why, which is the closest the Flaunt come to admitting anything.

Relations

The court holds the Flaunt up as the model of what a lesser race can be: prompt, polished, humanlike, and grateful. The Chancery counts them carefully and trusts them with everything, because a people with no seat, no lord, and no land is a people with no leverage — an analysis that is flawless except for one line: the couriers, the kitchens, the wardrobes, and the doors of the entire capital are Flaunt, and nothing moves in the Eternal City that a Sylph does not carry.

Which is why the quietest thing in the city is this: the Flaunt work beside the Underfoot — the ninety thousand uncounted who feed, clean, and light the capital — closer than any other Faerie, shift by shift, gate by gate. The Service Families have raised loyalty to a craft and see nothing. Their children ride the same lifts, count the same missing names, and are not so sure — and a courier who is not so sure, with silent wings and every door in the capital, is a thing the Chancery has no file for yet.

Playing One

• The city is your instrument. Doors, schedules, liveries, gossip, and the Thermal — in the capital you have the access of staff, which is better than the access of nobility.
• You are current. Fashion, slang, prices, and who is in and out at court: you read status the way a Aurae reads weather, and you can dress the party to pass.
• Out of the walls, you are a tourist. The meadow is loud, wet, unscheduled, and full of your relatives asking when you are coming home.
• A starting complication: your family has served the same Ring house for six generations; you carry its messages; and you have just understood, from the pattern of them, what the house is about to do to the people you ride the lifts with.

The Majority

The Flaunt are so overrepresented in the Eternal City that Sylphs form a slim outright majority of its entire population — more than every other race and subrace combined — while the High Sidhe who outrank them all are under one per cent of it.

Some Flaunt describe the capital as a Sylph city in all but name. They describe it that way to each other.