Metamorphosis

No Faerie was ever born, and yet every one of them began. Creatures in this world metamorphose from one form into another, and in doing so lose the memories of the old.

This may have been a mistake in the world's creation. It is certainly the origin of everything wrong with the society built on top of it.

Karma

Because a fey creature can change form and cannot remember having done so, metamorphosis functions as something analogous to mortality — and, given how clever the Faeries are, it evolved into something closer to karma. Faeries assume their deeds determine when they will "advance" into a "higher" form.

The stratified society is therefore accepted by the people it costs the most. A lesser Faerie believes that through right thinking, right action, and above all devout service to the Queen and the order she represents, they too will one day rise into a higher form and enjoy the privileges currently denied them. And so do the oppressed many willingly support the system of oppression.

The Problem With the Doctrine

Two bodies of evidence sit against it, and neither has been published.

The astronomers of Lumenhal have four centuries of celestial record that does not support metamorphic advancement at all. They have been not-publishing for about that long.

The Kitsune of the Ninefold hold, on theological grounds, that the world was made whole, abundant, and unranked, and that the doctrine of advancement through service is a thing the Faeries invented and then mistook for revelation.

There is a third argument, and it is the simplest: if form is a station one passes through, then no form is permanent, and no exclusion based on form can be permanent either. The Goblins have been making this point for centuries. Nobody at court has answered it.

Boggarts

The one place metamorphosis can be observed from the outside is the Hollow Marches, where boggarts keep habits they cannot account for: sweeping a hall that has no roof, keeping a gate in a wall with no other side. The memories are gone. The routines survived them.

Nobody has yet done the obvious work of cataloguing what those routines imply.