Non-Faeries

Everything that thinks, speaks, and is neither Faerie nor Goblin — which is to say most of the world. Beetles, moles, jumping spiders, songbirds, snails, mantises, moths, worms, and several thousand kinds of creature the Kingdom has never troubled to name. They outnumber the official population of every province by somewhere between five and fifty times and appear in no census.

The Kingdom has no single word for them that it likes, because a single word would imply a single thing, and the court's whole art is in the sorting. In practice its heralds recognize two categories, and the difference between them is not virtue, or beauty, or even doctrine. It is whether the Queen's writ can be enforced.

Caste	Colloquialism	Who
The Elderborn	The Sovereign Freehold	Treants, faerie dragons, hamadryads, satyr envoys, the great corvids
The Low-Brood	Creepfolk, Crawlers	Talking insects, arachnids, micro-frogs, rodents
The Feral-Kin	Wild-Limbed, Half-Paws	Heavy anthropomorphic beastfolk
The Chrysalids	The In-Between, Larval-Fey	Uncanny moth-featured and chitin-skinned humanoids

The last three are collectively the Basekin: the broad caste of intelligent, speaking creatures denied personhood under Faerie law for no reason but the shape of their bodies.

The Ladder

The court's own diagram, as taught to heralds and reproduced on the wall of the Chancery of Forms in the Eternal City.

        THE DIVINE COURT      the Queen — indistinguishable from human
              │
        HIGH & COMMON FEY     Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes, Cait Sith
              │               (subtle sylvan traits, no more)
              │
        THE ELDERBORN         sovereign titans and ancient beasts,
              │               respected in exact proportion to their power
              │
  ══════════ THE DIVIDING LINE OF PERSONHOOD ══════════
              │
        THE CHRYSALIDS        uncanny, chimeric, alien humanoids
              │
        THE FERAL-KIN         heavy animal traits, upright bipeds
              │
        THE LOW-BROOD         pure animal and insectoid morphology

Three things are worth noticing about it.

The Elderborn sit above the line, and this is a lie of drafting. They are not a rung; they are the reason the ladder has a hole in it. The Court places them high because it cannot place them anywhere, and would rather be seen honoring the ungovernable than admitting to it.

The Goblins do not appear at all. They are humanoid, wingless, and unmistakably fey, which makes them a problem no caste solves — the Chancery draws them off to one side of the chart entirely, as a heresy rather than a station.

And the line itself is drawn on anatomy, which the Kingdom's own doctrine of metamorphosis holds to be temporary. Every caste on this page is, by the Court's theology, a form somebody is passing through. Nobody at court has explained why a temporary form warrants a permanent law.

What the Line Does

Above it: personhood, property, standing to petition, protection from harm, and a seat — however low — in the great karmic climb toward the Queen's shape.

Below it: nothing of the sort. Faerie law classifies the Basekin as natural resources, livestock, draft stock, or hazard, depending on size and temperament. They may not own land. They may not travel freely between provinces. Injuring one is a matter of damages owed to whoever held it, if anyone did. The Kingdom's ledgers list Basekin labor as equipment, in the same column and the same hand as the beetles it works beside, and this is not clerical laziness — it is the entire architecture. See Beasts of Burden, which is the same list from the other end.

What the law does not do is work. Below the line runs a second world of guilds, markets, courier lines, and treaty-bound neighborhoods that the Kingdom has never mapped because mapping it would mean conceding it exists: hidden civilizations, quiet alliances, and underground networks whose members routinely outwit the Faeries who cannot imagine being outwitted by them. The one formal exception is the Motherstone moot in the Deep Hollows, where moles, worms, and beetles hold seats with the same weight as any Gnome clan, and which the Eternal City regards as an embarrassing provincial eccentricity.

Why the Court Bothers

The vocabulary is elaborate because the vocabulary is the argument. "Low-Brood" says a thing is unfinished. "Wild-Limbed" says it stalled. "Chrysalid" says it is mid-change and therefore unsafe. Each term smuggles the doctrine of karmic advancement into what looks like a neutral description, so that a herald can classify a beetle-scribe who reads four scripts as a natural resource without ever once making a claim he would have to defend.

The slurs do the same work with less patience. A courtier who says chitin-bag is saying what Low-Brood means.

"The Queen's peace extends to all her people. It is a great mercy that so few of them are." {.flavor}

At the Table

They all talk. This is the setting's signature horror and its signature lie, and it should be played straight. The mantis is courteous. The aphid herd knows its own name. The Kingdom's position is that none of this is relevant.
The line is the plot. Almost every Everdew campaign eventually puts a player on one side of it looking at somebody on the other. Nothing about that scene needs underlining; the ledger does it.
Elderborn are not encounters. They are terms. A treant does not have a challenge rating so much as a set of conditions, and the interesting question is never whether the party can beat one.
Basekin PCs work fine. The mechanical differences from a lesser Faerie are wings and a homeland. The differences that matter are that nobody will sell to you, no gate will open for you, and no magistrate will hear you.