>>5877601“It is difficult for them to be here,” Clanirae says, a touch sadly. “To manifest in our reality. It is like a poison to them… Like a flesh-and-blood being trying to endure the Elemental Planes, maybe. It is why they devised the rite… To make us more comfortable, to help us feel at home. But to become more like the flesh and spirit of this reality is also to lose something of ourselves… To be less like them. Less like the Gods, and more like…”
“Like Man,” you realize. “More like Man, or… Dwarves, and halflings, and orcs, and…”
“And everything else,” Clanirae agrees. “Like plants, and animals, and even like the spirits native to this realm…”
“There were spirits here?” you ask. “Before the Gods?”
Clanirae nods, and whispers quietly: “Dark ones. The demons. The Dark Gods. The dragons, and their kin. Things that crawl, and slither, and kill. Things which know no love or kinship except for themselves, no beauty save for vainglory, no art but cruelty and carnage, no civilization but that of oppression and domination.”
You shiver involuntarily.
“The Gods came here, long ago, and set it right,” Clanirae continues. “The rite wasn’t just to help our kind—the Fair Folk—feel at home in this new world. It was to make this world BETTER… To bring it closer to virtue. To bring it salvation. To teach it goodness, and kindness, and beauty, and love.”
As if to punctuate the point, she holds out a hand, and swirling light drifts from the flickering, wobbling star-portals to gather above her outstretched hand. There, a worm-like, snake-like thing writhes, until with a syllables of song she stops its struggling. With another, rising song of innocent hope—wordless, but far from meaningless, she sets it to trembling, until finally it splits open and explodes into a panoply of colours—unleashing a menagerie of brightly-coloured birds, and butterflies, and leaving a single flower of light upon her palm as they scatter and dissipate.
“That ritual which you have learned,” she concludes, “was created to save the world.”
