Pixies are small, fast, and short-lived. They have sheer, delicate wings, significant strength, and excellent short term memory. Pixies primarily exist in Warda as messengers, observers, servants, and delivery persons.
Pixies are traditionally viewed as less than their ‘big folk’ neighbors and masters. Pixies are often considered belongings of their fey masters, or as pets. A well-off middle or upper class house or family may employ a number of Pixies to work for them privately and exclusively. It is also common that Pixies join the Pixie Messenger Union or perhaps work for a certain department of a guild or the Wardens even. There are Pixies woven into every level of Wardian life, and yet by the other fey they are utterly overlooked as individuals. A Pixie is a Pixie is a Pixie. And that’s that.
…but to a more discerning scholar, there’s more information to be found.
Pixies don’t make their own homes or houses – they find or inherit them like hermit crabs. Perhaps a shoe, or a flower pot, or an old bird’s nest in the eave of some big folk’s house.
Pixies exist in the space between space in a big people’s world – they do not have a ‘country’ of their own. They tell bedtime stories about whole pixie hollows in trees and forests beyond the walls, where everything is built and owned by pixies, and nothing is owned by the big folk, and they live as free as flowers and birds all their lives long.
Pixie marriage does not conform to gender roles or gender categories – any two (or more) Pixies can be ‘married’ as a partnership. Families don’t really form, but deep partnerships do, hence pixie marriage. Plural Pixie marriage is not unheard of or shocking, but it is uncommon – most Pixies don’t have that much free time to be married to more than one person.
Pixies are born and do not remember it. Pixies give birth to children, but the gestation period is so brief (less than a few hours) and in a few more hours, those parents may not even remember that it has happened (like thinking back to last year and trying to remember what days you were sick – it’s vague and unimportant). Pixie procreation happens sometimes between two Pixies who come together, like a fusion of souls in a magical encounter, and conception occurs spontaneously from that union. A baby Pixie is called a speck and a mother keeps it for three days, before the speck is grown enough to go off on its own. Thus departed, the parent shakes off the euphoria of birth and goes back to work, the memory gone as though a brief illness.
Some Pixies believe that there is a maker, a creator. This is not universal but many silently believe and understand that someone out there made pixies, and makes them still to this day. A seelie, a god. The “so-and-so” they call it. They look at the world around them and see only a grander design, a purpose somehow. A meaning behind their tiny size and incredible speed – their disabilities in the face of the bigger world around them. Many see the so-and-so as an explanation for their size and purpose, but many do not read any further into it than a cultural subtext.
Welcome to Warda 