Darkling

A Tale of Mystery

Once upon a time, a traveler in a dark wood bartered her soul for one night’s comfort in the warm firelight, and thus gave up her face. From then on, every evening when the sun went down, she wandered the forest in search of her missing face. She found many others — the masques of hideous revelers, the bloated rictuses of drowned corpses, the malevolent glares of cave dwellers with gemstone eyes. But nowhere did she find her own. Her heart was adrift. Despairing, she fashioned a new face for herself out of pieces of all the rest, and as she looked through its eyes she came to know the secrets each of them kept. Knowing it wasn’t truly hers, but unwilling to give up such a treasure, she hid the new face in the folds of her cloak and tethered her heart to the unmarked paths the others had known. With that, she followed stolen signs behind night’s veil to sneak back through the Hedge and share her insight with the courts of the Lost.

The Darkling loves the silence and prefers to be outside looking in — or at least, accepts it as her inevitable place. She’s the first to venture where others won’t go, where broken clues to long-lost mysteries call with fetching whispers. If she speaks in riddles, it’s only because each word holds power of its own, so she chooses them with care. And if she watches too closely, it’s only because what she learns might save everyone someday.

Though the Mountebanks fade into the background, they know better than to strike out too far on their own. They need strength in numbers as much as any changeling. Likewise, their motleys wouldn’t last long against the Gentry or their Huntsmen without the Hedge wisdom the Darklings provide, nor would their freeholds run so smoothly without their knack for espionage to grease the wheels. They’re prime picks for missions to recover Icons, spy on rivals, infiltrate True Fae courts, or assassinate fetches. Others may view them with suspicion, but the Wisps keep their own counsel because to do otherwise is to expose their darkest selves to the light.

Arcadia isn’t all lavish gardens and crystal spires. Cursed woodlands grow there, too, their twisting trails home to vicious tree-haunts with eyes that gleam. Dead things rise to walk the land and monstrous hellbeasts guard foul, forbidden magics. A thousand leagues beneath the sea sprawl lightless kingdoms ruled by tyrant fish lords and their deadly merfolk children. The Bewitched spend their time in Faerie here among the horrors, abandoned to survive on their own or ordered to cheat the fiends out of ancient knowledge that turns out to be nonsense. After so long befriending the shadows and deceiving the wretched, they end up kin to both, creatures of false face and soft step. Once they’re free, they worry they’ve become too like the unspeakable things they once evaded. They know too much and fear their fellows mistrust them as traitors, or that they can no longer tell the difference between true occult secrets and mad fantasies. Worse, so often unseen and unheard, they fear they’re just echoes of people who never left Faerie at all.

Once

Dread was your constant companion, whether it stalked you from the darkness or from within yourself. Perhaps your master had no eyes and no need for light, forcing you to serve in an underground palace of perpetual pitch black while his many children teased and tormented you unseen. Perhaps you wore a mask you couldn’t remove at a neverending masquerade ball, where the Red Death was someone different every night and murder was never far behind. Perhaps your Keeper forced you to collect oddities for his display cases, catching fellow human prisoners to stuff like dolls and braving dank caves to steal moldy tomes and tarnished relics from terrible wardens.

But with dread came fascination, and opportunity. Wandering blind, you developed ears keen enough and footsteps light enough to eavesdrop on all the secrets your master’s children whispered behind closed doors, and eventually you knew enough to trick and blackmail your way to freedom. From behind your mask, you observed the Red Death’s patterns and solved the murder mystery, exposing him for all to see and slipping out — just another domino — before the crowd’s shock wore off. You snuck out every night to study the novelties you fetched by moonlight, until you found the one that taught you the key you needed to reopen a door into the Hedge. Through stealth, chicanery, and a curiosity strong enough to pry even into the Gentry’s demented affairs, you tore yourself away from the hollow mysteries of Arcadia to become one yourself in the real world.

Now

You’ve had enough of being afraid. You’ll never be truly rid of the fear you learned in Faerie, but you can wield it like a stiletto, sharp and icy cold. You can trade forms and faces to be anyone but the coward your Keeper made you. You can laugh away your troubles with a bit of sleight of hand, passing them on to other people when they least expect it. You’re the one who knows it all, who goes anywhere you please, and it frees you in a way the other Lost can’t understand. No more eyes following you wherever you go. No more barriers between you and the unknown you’ve come to love. You spy and thieve on your own terms, and demand whatever you want in return — because they know you could just take it if they refuse. You may be often overlooked, but your friends know that for all you seem shy or hesitant, you’re the one who’s always heard the right whisper or read the right book.

Tales

She visits the children first in dreams, playing games with them there and coaxing them out of their shells. Then she starts visiting in the flesh, careful never to let their families or other grownups see her. The parents think she’s an imaginary friend, and she lets the fiction persist. The children don’t care that no one else knows she’s real — they’re happy just to have a companion who understands them. She stays for a while, until she knows they’ll be all right without her, and then she moves on to find new friends. But each child carries a token of their time together to remember her by. If it also manages to protect its owner from the Fae, so much the better.

He has a trunk full of stolen uniforms, fake IDs, and stage makeup. Every town knows him by a different alias and profession. Every town hides skeletons in its closet, and he plays his part for as long as it takes to brush the dust from their bones and expose them to the press. Even his fellow Lost don’t know whether they’ve ever seen his true face or heard his real name. He won’t talk about his time in Faerie; in truth, he can’t. All he knows is that he bargained away his identity and his memories to give someone else a chance to escape the Hedge. Now he doesn’t remember whether the one with whom he made the trade was the sort to live and let live, or the sort to give a man a taste of his own medicine.

She seems like a harmless vagrant when she wanders the streets and subway stations, begging for coin. The rude commuter who shouts obscenities at her goes out later with a gorgeous date who skips out and leaves him with the bill. The kind passerby who fills her jar with dollar bills meets a stranger the next day who brings home his lost dog. She lives at the junkyard, scavenging the detritus of other people’s lives and frequenting the Goblin Market no one else notices there. She’ll share her peculiarly prophetic advice with anyone who seeks her out, but anyone who accepts her wisdom must also accept a task, and those who fail find their worldly possessions becoming detritus in a hurry.

She’s behind you in the mirror, but you’re all alone. She says she knows what you’ve done. You beg her forgiveness, but she’s gone before the words leave your mouth. What if it wasn’t good enough? What if she comes back?

Nicknames: the Bewitched, Mountebanks, Wisps

Blessing: Gain an additional dot of one Finesse Attribute at character creation. If you spend a point of Willpower, your character may touch something insubstantial and become part of it for three consecutive turns, transubstantiating into smoke, shadow, a sunbeam — whatever’s handy. This ability costs a point of Glamour if anyone is looking directly at her at the time.

Curse: In addition to your character’s other breaking points, she risks Clarity damage with a dice pool equal to half her Wyrd (rounded up) whenever a secret or important piece of information she knows turns out to be false.

Regalia: Mirror

Don’t worry if I stray from the path. Nothing out there scares me anymore.