The Part-Faeries

Many  humans have at  least one Faerie in their  ancestry. Most of them would be shocked to learn this, and it wouldn’t make much difference  in their lives. To be a Part-Faerie, you must have  one  or more of the Faerie Powers. This generally happens only if one of your  parents was a Faerie, or if you  have Faerie  ancestry on both sides of your family tree. Your Faerie Powers depend on how much Faerie ancestry you have. If you have a single Faerie Great-Grandparent, you might have some vague ability to comfort animals and  figure out when somebody is lying to you, but those are only wisps of Power With Animals and Discernment.

 

The most common Part-Faerie Powers are  Longevity, Power With Animals, Night Vision and  Hearing. A person with two or more of these Powers is likely to be  relatively short, have pointy  facial features and show great manual dexterity. Discernment is present  in about one in four Part-Faeries with Powers. It is almost always associated with short stature.
 
The rarest of Part-Faerie Powers are those that are  given with a Kiss, especially the strong Healing  Power. It is also rare for a Part-Faerie to be able to participate in the songs that merge Faerie Powers in the  Circle.
 
A Part-Faerie must “grow” her Powers, by honoring them. In practical terms, this means living a Faerie  lifestyle. For example, to grow Power With Animals, she must not eat meat and to  grow Discernment  she cannot lie. A Faerie who repeatedly violates her Powers would eventually  lose them. This helped keep the criminal Part-Faeries of Old Ireland in check. Lying  and  stealing  gradually caused their Powers  to dwindle. (Still, a major responsibility of any Part-Faerie Leader is to keep his followers from using  their  Powers to exploit humans.)
 
There are  two Powers that are never found  in Part-Faeries: Flight and Concealment. A  person with wings who can fly  is a Faerie  by definition, and Concealment is the Power most closely associated with Flight (because  it keeps humans from seeing  Faeries as  they  fly).
 
Why are there Part-Faeries in the first place? Why would  a Faerie mate with a human? In Old Ireland the  human world and the  Faerie  realm overlapped. Humans and Faeries were often together and sometimes an attraction developed. Occasionally a Faerie (usually  female) was given in an arranged marriage to strengthen Faerie-human ties.
 
The Faeries who immigrated to Georgia in 1850 found themselves in a strange and sometimes hostile land. They  had to learn the ways of a an environment very different from Ireland. Furthermore, they had only Solomon Murphy to handle  dealings with humans. The Faeries began by taking in escaped slaves and lonely mountain men. During the Civil War they welcomed Confederate  deserters. After 1865, there were many  impoverished, rootless men and women traveling to destinations they could  not describe, and some of  them settled on  the Georgia Circle Lands. The last human to fall in love with a Georgia Circle Faerie was a young woman  from Chattanooga who fled a forced marriage to man she knew was abusive. She settled on the Circle Lands in 1895, and afterwards the Elders decreed there would  be no more marriages between Faeries and humans or  Part-Faeries.
 
This began the  period of  debate  and decision that  led to the  decree in 1900 that the Part-Faeries must leave the Circle Lands.  The following year, about  two hundred Faeries left for California, to found a new  Circle where families made up of Faeries and Part-Faeries could live together. The Monterey  Circle was too small to survive on its own,  just as the Georgia Circle had been, and they took in many humans over the years, beginning with  impoverished Indians and the alienated wanderers of the California coast. The last humans to join the Monterey Circle were three young men who resisted the draft during the Vietnam War. They were looking for a place where they could hide from arrest. They married Part-Faerie women. The West Coast Circle now avoids taking in new humans, but the Elders have said they might do so again in a crisis. It is routine for Faeries there to marry Part-Faeries.