Half-Aeth

The prison of charisma and the precarious crown-of-glass worn by a successful minority.

On Blackwater, 'Half-Aeth', 'Demi-Aeth' or 'Aethling' almost always means someone born to Aeth and Somon parents. Other variations have their own abstruse names and references.

PHYSICALITY
Though there are variations tending a little towards one side or another, almost all Half-Aeth are a neat mixture of both groups, with an appearance towards the gracile end of humanity or the heavier expression of the Aeth.
Depending on their descent, Half-Aeth can often perform some remarkable maneuvers of twisting, tumbling, climbing, and leaping that only Somon gymnasts can achieve, though they still need to work somewhat for these skills. However, they lack the unnerving liquid walk and stance of the Aeth. Though they move like dancers, they can be clumsy; they can trip, run into things, and knock bottles off of shelves. These are things which, in theory, any Aeth can do, but which it is hard to imagine them doing.
Many could pass for Somon if they wished to, if it were not for the ears or the slim strands of crisscrossing musculature beneath the skin, visible when naked, or sensible to touch.
Their 'racial' expression, the way they feel to be around, physically, behaviorally, and culturally depends a great deal on where they were raised. In most cases, Half-Aeth are brought up in or among Somon and so they 'feel' like Somon.
To that end, and especially in urban environments, it is considered slightly rude to refer to a Half-Aeth by their race, in a way that it wouldn't be for Aeth or Deoth (because they barely care).
Their senses tend towards the higher end of the Somon spectrum, though without the near-supernatural elements of the Aeth sensorium. They can eat Somon food, though they tend to be picky. They can wear low-quality clothes if they must and use sub-standard tools; these things don't give them the deep sense of inner wrongness the Aeth feel when interacting with something clumsily or poorly made.
TIME
While Aeth lead possibly-infinite lives of indistinct length, persisting for ages and dying from strange causes, like sadness or moon-glory, measles or flu, Half-Aeth retain some rugged mongrel vitality from their Somon half and will usually not expire from the common cold or a peculiar mood.
They are unquestionably part of time and of the material world, aging and dying a little slower than Somon, living for perhaps two centuries, but no more than three. Eventually, they will die of old age, like a normal Somon, and their bodies do not translate into shadow and flow into the night or turn to music and fade to silence, but simply rot where they are left.
DREAMS
Half-Aeth do not exist in dreamlike states or by storybook logic. You can imagine them paying taxes or going to the toilet. (Which Aeth do too, but it’s hard to picture it). They exist in history, rather than weaving through it, neither strange nor unearthly.
In dreams, much like Somon, it is not unusual for them to experience the startling vistas of other worlds or to meet people they seem to recognize. Repeated dreams are common, or dreams that pick up where others left of or that seem to come from the same continuity.
But Half-Aeth don't remember their dreams when they wake any more than Somon. Though nightmares can be troubling, they don't experience huge personality shifts based on what happened in their dreams, and whatever continuities exist, they never stick.
ALONE AND UNKNOWN
Nobody knows them. Not deeply. Everyone knows of them. Word of their presence has often arrived at their destination before they do.
Everyone appreciates the sad irony of their long existence. Trapped between two worlds, yet part of neither. Attractive but lonely. Sad, but in a charismatic way. Everyone gets the dark poetry of it, or thinks they do; the sad plight of the Half-Aeth has been celebrated in verse and song for centuries. Many of the heroes of trash romance ballads are Half-Aeth. Half the romantic leads on the grey city stages are Somon dressed up as Half-Aeth, singing soliloquies of near-immortal love.
Pre-teen girls imagine themselves Half-Aeth boyfriends.
Everyone knows the stories and has seen the dramas. Everyone thinks they understand. And nobody knows.
No-one is like them. They cannot disappear into a crowd. They cannot dance through falling leaves in anonymity amongst the wild Aeth, there they are considered fat, thick, slow, and somewhat brutish.
Nobody shares their experience - even other Half-Aeth have particular patterns of attention. unique circumstances, and complex relationships with their parents.
Half-Aeth do not attract deep connections, it’s more usual for them to have many casual friends in many places and to move between them, welcome everywhere but rarely home. They have no clan, no tribe, no warm mass to back them up or fold them in. For all their privilege, they are alone.

RESENTED
The great curse of the Half-Aeth is that they tie the ethereal, but alien and sometimes troubling beauty and otherness of the Aeth into the Somon world in a way that makes it directly sensible.
While Aeth have many qualities that might cause Somon to like them, they are also, frankly, weird.
And while they might have power and abilities that could make Somon resent them, their tangible differences in cognitive style, differing desires, differing diet, dream worlds, and strange bodies cause them to live somewhat at an angle to the Somon world.
Does it matter that someone might live forever if they think their king is the shadow of a hawk beneath a tree?
Half-Aeth are simply beautiful. Their desires are close to Somon, they eat the same foods and sing the same songs.
While Aeth are "other", Half-Aeth are "better".
It is a lot easier to deal with some alien weirdo than it is to deal with a better version of yourself. And easier still to deal with someone who will live until the stars fall, possibly, than with someone just like you who gets double your lifespan and who gets to keep their looks.
Half-Aeth in Somon society live in a kind of parallel social world, one more dangerous than that of Deoth and Aeth, because it is less obvious.
It's the same world that celebrities or models or the outgoing children of the beautiful rich live in. It’s hard to get out of because the gates are barred with smiles.
Everywhere they go, people are pleased to see them. Everywhere they go, they are invited in, invited out, asked for their presence, opinion, attention, and gaze. They are looked at, commented on, desired, exalted, and, ultimately, loathed. All this for nothing they have actually done, just for being who they are. When they do succeed, their triumphs are amplified and their failures discounted. In some ways, this projects them quickly to the peak of Somon society.
But the peak is a precarious place.
As much as they can be admired and desired, they are also resented; for their beauty, ease, social fluidity, rapid social ascent and long lives, for the lightness with which they touch the world, and because they seem to get away with anything. They are easy to hate. With as many connections as Half-Aeth seem to end up with, there is always the potential for complications; accusations, inferences, conspiracies, and whispering campaigns.
So are the lives of the Half-Aeth shaped.