Serenity_Kadath

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."

-Margaret Atwood


Now it is well known to most that the world was not always ruled over by human beings. In the grand scheme of things, the scientists will tell you, our domination of the planet is but a brief dot at one end of the timeline. However it is not merely that we are the most recently evolved dominant species. Humanity holds a deep seated belief, a fear, that there was another intelligent race that was living here before us. And that through strength of arm or trickery, we somehow overthrew this elder race and took their place. And that one day they’ll want our world back. Of course one day they nearly did.

Before men had learned to shape metals and farm the land there lived the Aos Si, the Fair Folk, the Fae. Tall and proud, they weaved magical glamour about themselves to make themselves supernaturally beautiful and strong. There was only one thing that could injure them, that could lay them low. Iron. When men learned to shape iron they drove the Fae underground and claimed the surface for their own. For millennia afterward the men lived in relative peace, and the Fair Folk devolved into myth. But one of their Queens was not content with living beneath the hills. She rallied her people and led them above ground once more. The war was massive and destructive. Man had long ago moved on to lighter and more durable metals, the real power of iron having been forgotten. Spells and missile flew and the very surface of the Earth was changed forever. The Fae caused plants to explode with life, choking human cities and creating massive, untamable forests. The men in turn scorched the landscape with their weaponry, making wastelands where the very ground was poison. For years the war raged before a tenable peace was reached, both sides afraid that they would be the cause of the destruction of the planet.

Decades passed but still the results of the war scarred the landscape. The populations of both sides had been reduced to a fraction of what it once was. The massive forests that had been created by Fae shapers were now an impassable barrier between the survivors. Well, impassable to most. Serenity Kadath was born after the war was over, when the survivors were just beginning to pull together the scraps of their societies. Something of the Fae’s magic had taken hold in the young human. She found that she could talk to animals, and even to plants. While the woods were amongst the chiefest dangers to others, she could pass through them unharmed. Thorn and thistle would move out of the way from her step. As she grew, so did her strange magics. She could heal with a touch. Animals flocked to her, and her best friend was a wolf she had named Vulchitsa. She became a guide, a pathfinder for her people, allowing them to once more travel beyond the safety of their villages.

Of course the girl also had some oddities to her. She was invaluable to her village, so they tended to overlook it, but she had a touch too much of the wild in her. Her eyes were the same shade as the wolf’s and villagers swore that she had the fangs of a canine at times as well. Diet wise she was a strict carnivore, preferring her meat rare as could be. And there was once when she was guiding an important diplomat from another village through the woods. She returned empty handed, claiming that they had been attacked by Fae while in the forest, but the villagers couldn’t help but notice that she looked a little plumper.