Wisp

The Wisps are radiant fey out of the land where the sun never clears the horizon. They are bioluminescent — every one of them carries a unique pattern of light across wings and skin, as distinctive as a face and considerably harder to disguise — and their magic is celestial, drawn from moon, aurora, and star rather than from any element of the ground.

As Faeries go they are patient and slow to judgment, preferring to sit with a question for a decade before answering it. This is generally taken at court as proof that they are gentle and unthreatening.

Appearance

Pale to translucent, lit from within, with markings that shift slowly over a lifetime and never repeat between individuals. A Wisp cannot easily hide. The glamour required to mask one's own light is the hardest thing most Wisps ever learn, and many never manage it.

Attuned Magic

Celestial. A nascent Wisp makes light, reads it, and knows their exact position beneath open sky. A powerful one bends light around objects, calls down a beam sufficient to burn, reads the immediate past of a place from the light still leaving it, and — the discipline Lumenhal is actually famous for — predicts the sky with unnerving precision.

Society

Lumenhal is an observatory-city of stacked lenses and still pools, and Wisp society is organized around the reading of the sky, which they hold to be the closest thing the world has to scripture.

Its astronomers, under Astronomer-Primary Vesperine, have been quietly compiling something uncomfortable: the celestial record does not support the doctrine of metamorphic advancement. They have not published. They have been not-publishing for roughly four hundred years, and whether to keep not-publishing is the central political question of Wisp society.

Relations

Distant from everyone, which suits them. The Kitsune of the Ninefold are the only race they correspond with regularly, and the correspondence is careful, because both parties have independently concluded that the Kingdom's theology is wrong and neither is yet willing to say so first.