Dark Spirits

[Fae Oonagh]

Dark Spirits
No fairy within my realm can truely be considered evil, they are all as nature intended, and yet, there are many, that mortals do consider to be dark and malicious, mostly because they will happily kill (or eat!) any mortal that crosses their path, or mess around with their minds, property, lives, but they never hurt another faerie.. Below are those such subjects of my realm.


Will-o'-The-Wisps
These fairies are well known in the mortal realm, although they are often believed to be just mere phosphorent light. They can often be seen flittering about marsh lands, and to follow their glowing light is to follow them to your doom, to drown somewhere in the mire. These are small creatures, tiny, and sexless, and are an element of fire. They appear as a small ball of light, most commonly a blue or white light, but occassionally red. It is hard for mortal eyes to distinguise a body from amongst their brightly glowing light, and yet, it is possible, if you look hard enough and keep an open mind. These marsh spirits, like many faeries that live within hidden places in the mortal plain, are easier to see if you only believe.

Ogres
These are amonst the most well known denizens of Faeries, often spoken of in fairy tales as violent beasts with a hunger for human flesh, and yet these creatures, like all other faeries, are just obeying their natural instincts. It is true that these faeries are carnivourous, but human meat for them is just an exotic flavour. When in the domain of Faerie, where humans are not permitted entrance, they happily feast upon the flesh of any creature set before them, showing no real preferance.

Goblins
These faeries are mischevious. They are small, ugly, squat little creatures, often with long pointed noses and small dark eyes. They have quick tempers, short attention spans and are very restless. They often like to play tricks on mortals who annoy them by being unable (or unwilling) to see them. Their favourite trick being to steal a mortal child and replace it with a faerie one.
One Goblin, the boredland (between scotland and england) goblin is known as the redcap, because he redyes his red cap in human blood.


CYCLOPS
Another set of creatures encountered by Greeks, this time by Odyesseus. Cyclops are one eyed giants. Odyessus encounted Polyphems, the Cyclops son of the sea god, Poesidon. He and tweleve of his men go into Polyphemes' cave, and started to help themselves to his sheep and goats and cheeses and things. Polyphemus came home and locked them inside his cave, and eats two of his men, planning to eat two each day, leaving Odyesseus until last. Odyesseus gets him drunk, sharpens a pointed stick and blinds poor Polyphemus. In the morning, POlyphems goes to let out his sheep and goats, feeling them as they go to make sure that they are not Odyesseus and his men. But Odyesseus and his men hide underneath the sheep. Once they have escape to safety, Odyesseus taunts Polyphemus, who throws a rock after him, and tells him his real name. Polyphemus prays to his father, who then keeps Odyesseus away from home for even longer.
Granted Cyclops are not very nice, and they do like the taste of human flesh, especially brains, Odyesseus really did ask for his men to get eaten and his traumatic journey home extened, because he just walked into POlyphemus' home and helped himself to his food. Not a single faerie feels sorry for that particular Greek.


Fideal
This is the sadest faerie of my realm. The loneliest. These faeries live along in rivers and streams and lakes and ponds, living in the reeds, singing. Their songs call for male lovers, but one kiss, and their lover drowns. These faeries are doomed to live alone in cold, wet and dark pools of water. They are distant cousins to the Sirens.


HARPIES
The Greeks believed that when a person died suddenly, a harpy would come down and snatch their soul. These are vulture like faeries, with the face of an old woman. they are demi goddesses, to mortals, of the storm winds. According to Hesiod, there were only two, daughters of the Titan Thaumas, and they were called Aello (storm) and Ocypete (Swift Flying) But there are more than two. Homer knew of one called Podarge (fleetfoot) who mated, in the form of a mare, with the west wind, and had Xanthus and Balius, the two immortal horses that belonged to Achilles. There was also Celaeno.
In Apollonius' argonautica, Jason and his men encounter the Harpies, torturing the blind Thracian king Phineus, by stealing away his food, just as he reached for it. Two of Jason's men, Zetes and Calias, winged sons of the North Wind, the fastest men in the world, chased off after the Harpies, with their swords drawn. Iris, the messenger of the gods and sister to the Harpies, intervened, told the men to leave her sisters alone, and promised that they would never bother Phineus again. The two men returned to their comrades.

basically, the harpies had been bored. They, like all faeries, need constant entertainment and excitment, and although their choice of fun was a little cruel, it did keep them entertained. They also appeared in Virgil's Aeneid, doing exactly the same thing. But then, we could put that down to virgil's lack of imagination, and that he stole someone else's story, rather than the Harpies going back to their old game.


Sirens
These are creatures immortalized in Homer's The Odyessey. Well known for their beautiful and hypnotic singing voices, these faeries use their voices to hypnotise passing sailors and cause their ships to be dashed upon the rocks as they attempt to go towards them. By lashing himself to the mast and stuffing up his crewmen's ears, Odyessus was able to listen to their sweet song and was unable to jump from the ship, swim towards them and then be shattered upon the rocks as so many men had been previously. Odyessus is the only man that these faeries will admit to having heard their song and lived to speak of it, and that was only because they couldn't deny it, for the poem that made them famous also sang of their greatest shame.

NUCKELAVEE
A monsterous water faerie. It is a horse, with legs that are part flipper. It has a huge mouth and one firey eye, and rising from its back joined at its waist are arms that nearly reach the ground, and a massive head that rolls from side to side as its neck is to weak to hold it up. It has no skin, and you can see the black blood running through yellow veins and white sinews and its red muscles. A very scarey and ugly creature, but they hate fresh running water, so to escape all you must do is cross it.

FAERIES OF THE BIRCH TREES
The faeries of the birch trees are solitary. They are better less avoided, for if they touch a mortal's head they leave a white mark and induce madness, if they touch a heart it causes death. These faeries hate mortals for the destruction that they are doing to forests and open spaces over the world, or at least, that is the reason they gave. Most faeries just believe that they hate everything.