Campaign setting reference — GM canon, not player-facing. The wood Draz hails from, and the covenant of the Eyes of Kreth.
Faeries in the Age of Umbra
Faeries are more sensitive to the soul blight than other ancestries, causing their physical appearance to develop in jagged and monstrous ways. Where other peoples endure the Umbra through grit and Sacred Pyres, the faeries of Thistleglass took a different path entirely.
Thistleglass
Thistleglass is a strange and magical forest in the southern coastal region of the Halcyon Domain, home to faeries, elves, and fauns. Few go in or leave. It is connected by road to Redmorrow (a ruthless smuggler's haven built from grounded shipwrecks) and Salthewn (a coastal village that maintains black-pitch fires on buoys to ward off sea evils).
Thistleglass is tagged as Forest / Mystical — the only settlement with the Mystical designation.
The Faeries' Response to the Umbra
The faeries of Thistleglass were always strange and peculiar, but when the Umbra descended on the world, they did not resist it. They matched it. Every cruel thing ever imagined about the fae — the stolen children, the impossible bargains, the glamours that hide rot, the revelry that traps you for a hundred years — became literal truth. They didn't become mindless revenants. They chose this, or adapted to it with terrifying deliberateness.
They don't huddle behind Sacred Pyres. They don't endure. They simply decided the world is beautiful, and for them, it is.
The Eyes of Kreth
Kreth, the Veiled God
Kreth is one of the dark gods of the pantheon, whose domains are deception and the moon. (Tlellic, the other dark god, governs predation and the long night.) Like all the Veiled Gods, Kreth abandoned the Halcyon Domain during the Apostasy. But Kreth left something behind.
The Divine Remnant
What Kreth left behind are eyeballs — divine organs of perception from the god of deception. Some of the faeries of Thistleglass wear these eyes in place of their own. To receive the Eyes of Kreth, a faerie must gouge out their own mortal sight and fill the empty sockets with something divine and deceitful. It is a covenant written in flesh — a permanent choice to stop seeing the world as it truly is.
The eyes appear as pale, luminous orbs — little moons staring out from jagged, blight-twisted faerie faces. In the eternal gloom of the Age of Umbra, encountering a figure in the Thistleglass dark with two soft, cold lights where eyes should be is deeply unsettling. Not the warm glow of a Sacred Pyre. Something older and wrong.
What the Eyes Do
To see through Kreth's eyes is to see the world as it can be made to appear rather than as it is. The faeries who wear them don't just gain power — they gain Kreth's perspective, his fundamental relationship with truth. Everything becomes malleable, negotiable, a surface to be rewritten.
The illusions they create are real — for them. When an eye-bearer reshapes the world, it is reshaped for them and for anyone caught inside it. The glamour doesn't just fool senses; it rewrites reality for those within it. If a faerie decides the path leads to a warm hearth and a feast, then you walk, and you eat, and you feel full. And maybe you are sitting in a bog slowly drowning. Maybe you're eating handfuls of mud and thorns. But within the illusion, it's real. The pain doesn't come through. The warmth is genuine. You are dying comfortably and gratefully.
There is no "seeing through" the glamour in any conventional sense. You can't disbelieve it. Dispelling it doesn't reveal the truth underneath — it destroys the reality you're currently experiencing and drops you into whatever is actually happening to your body, mid-consequence. Breaking free of a Thistleglass glamour might be worse than staying in one.
The Hierarchy of the Eyes
The Eyes of Kreth are divine remnants — limited in number, not something that can be manufactured. This creates a natural hierarchy within Thistleglass:
- Eye-bearers form an elite caste: a priesthood, a ruling court, or both. They are the ones who shape the glamours, enforce the bargains, and maintain whatever twisted order the forest runs on.
- The rest of the fae — those without the eyes — follow, serve, or fear the eye-bearers. Some may know exactly what is real and stay anyway.
Thematic Parallels
The Eyes of Kreth mirror other divine remnants left behind in the Halcyon Domain:
- Blessed Branches carry splinters of Caranthalis's divinity and can ignite Sacred Pyres
- The Askavir may be Tlellic's mount, pet, familiar, or avatar
- The Eyes of Kreth are a fragment of divine will tied to deception and the moon
Each represents a different god's lingering influence — and a different relationship between mortals and the absent divine.
The Moral Problem
The question the party will eventually face isn't just "how do we fight this." It's whether the faeries are even suffering. Whether breaking the glamour is rescue or cruelty. The faeries have built a paradise out of a god's refusal to accept what's true. Some of them may prefer the lie. Some of them may not even know it is a lie.
Faerie Names
Faeries of Thistleglass carry names that sound lovely until you sit with them — poetic, evocative, carrying a sense of something beautiful turned sharp or melancholy.
Examples:
- Winter's Fallen Leaf
- Thorn Beneath the Smile
- Evening's Last Whisper
- Hollow Where the Song Was
- Moth Against the Lantern
- Promise Left to Rot
- Dew on a Dead Branch
- Shadow Worn as Silk
- Silence After the Scream
- Lullaby for the Lost
- Needle in the Cradle
- Bloom That Drinks the Dark
- Sweetness on the Blade
- Web Across the Threshold
- Kindness Without Eyes
Connections to the Party
- Draz is from the southern coastal region near Thistleglass — this is his home territory, where he knows people and places.
- Sylvie identified Thistleglass early on as a potential source of Blessed Branches (the alternative to Ulmira's Step).
- Redmorrow, the smuggler's haven, connects directly to Thistleglass and may serve as a gateway or buffer between the fae forest and the wider world.
- The party has been heading southwest toward this region after leaving Witch's Peak.