The North Court

The Court of the North follows, to a point, the Buddhist "truth" that all of life is suffering. Human beings are imperfect, and changelings even less so. The Lost are made in the image of the Fair Folk, and this, too, is imperfect. All imperfection leads to suffering; it's simply the nature of things. This is what the Armor Court claims to see most often: A changeling escapes his Keeper, and flees the Hedge back to his home. Once home, he embraces life too easily. He seeks comfort away from the horrors of his durance. He exhibits great emotion, connects himself with the material world of money, the mental world of love and attachment, the physical world of pleasure. He shies away from the suffering he experienced, and in once again claiming a kind of happiness in this world, as wide or as meager as the changeling can manage it, he once again knows fear. The fear is of losing what he has regained. His life. His money. His loves. His pleasures. The Fair Folk can come out of nowhere -- descending out of a bleak fog or crawling out through a broken mirror -- and take it all away again with but a snap of their spidery fingers.
The Court of the North refuses to become that fearful thing. Therefore, they practice suffering, and in suffering, detachment. One's attachments lead to fear of losing those attachments and so, by and large, they deny themselves such pleasures. Money? No. Love? Not in a romantic sense, at least. Physical pleasures? Denied. If they do not have these things, the Fair Folk cannot take them away. And since the True Fae seem to take some pleasure in plundering one's life and stealing all that the poor fool has, this makes the Lost of the Northern Court undesirable to the Fae. While some Fae may endeavor to bring these courtiers harm just to see if they might break, many Fae are lazy and indolent, and prefer to go after easier targets. Targets with more to pillage.
The Court favors the Black Tortoise (Xuan Wu in China, Genbu in Japan, Hyeon-mu in Korea). In the old stories, the Black Tortoise became heavenly by purging himself of his humanity and by rejecting all the demons from his past. By denying the demons, he stole their power.

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Mantle

The Mantle of the Court of the North is, just as its courtiers and philosophies, stark and simple. At Mantle 1 to 3, a courtier may occasionally give off a whiff of dust and ash (similar to those ashes of the Buddha), or appear to bear scars that were never physically earned. Those of Mantle 4+ might show bodies laced with a network of scar tissue or tortoise-shell pattern of bruises and contusions, and parts of the flesh might appear armored momentarily, like the black glassy shell of Genbu.
At Mantle 1, the changeling can ignore any penalties taken from fatigue or deprivation (the character may still die from them, but he doesn't find his abilities reduced because his mind stays clear and his body sharp even in denying it its necessities). At Mantle 3, the changeling can ignore one die from penalties taken as the result of wounds (so, if she were suffering -2 dice from injuries, she would only really suffer a -1 penalty). At Mantle 5, the changeling may once per scene use his Resolve score as his armor rating for a number of turns equal to his Wyrd (though this doesn't stack with any other type of armor, supernatural or mundane).

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Nicknames

The Armor Court, the Stupa, the Court of Constants

Emotion

Suffering

Colors

Black and White

Related Species

• Changeling