February is World Building Month. Day Eighteen (still catching up): Fairy Town

[aldersprig]

piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February (or most days), I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The eighteenth question comes from kelkyag and is for Fairy Town

What made Fairy Town different?

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Nobody knows!

Okay, that's cheating, and also a lie.

Long before Fairy Town was Fairy Town (and, really, it is only Fairy Town to those in the know), it was a holy place; deep in the crossroads park that was, once, the center of a small town, there is a shrine.

There is, if you ask the right people, some disagreement as to who the shrine is to; there has always been disagreement over it, and if you dig into the dirt anywhere in that park, you will find bones, many of them humanoid.

What nobody argues about is that the shrine is a place of power.

It is not the only one in this variant of the world; indeed, when mankind first came here, there were many, like springs.

But, for as powerful as they are, there are many ways a place of power can be desecrated, blocked off, broken. And many of them were.

Others had cities grow up around them, as Fairy Town did. And in the cities growing up, some places locked the power into place with ancient and sometimes horrible magics, and some people bound the fae from entering with blood rituals and complex prayers, or, at least, things they thought were prayers.

(In a couple places, this was tried and did not succeed. In those cities, only those completely fae-blind and the nastiest of fae live, and those are not nice places at all).

In Fairy Town, the rituals did not take hold, and the place of power acted, as they all did, as a magnet for those who were fae, for those who had Faith, for those who were Strange and Wyrd. And without the rituals and call-them-prayers to hold the fae out... they just kept coming, and they settled.

And there they have been ever since.