Know that we of the aes sídhe are the most ancient of races, and once the most powerful.
This is a tale of our glory, and of our fall at the hands of a mortal woman.
The Beginning
It is said that in the beginning we came to this world of ours from the world of mortal men. Came, or were brought: this now is unknowable. Certainty is that however it began, in this realm of greater magic we became more than mortal.
We live longer than mortals. Purest of the blood may be said to live forever, counting their years in centuries. Threescore and ten or a hundred, are as nothing to these.
We are fairer in any form we choose. Tall, slender, graceful folk, as varied in our colouring as mortals, save tending ever to snow-pale skin through which the light shines green, blue, or silver, according to the purity of our blood.
With this beauty comes strength: the slightest of our women is as strong as a mortal man, and we may walk unscathed through fire or frost that would kill the strongest of these. Likewise illness and infirmity are unknown to us, unless visited on us by magic or through mutilation. Thus we have often been taken for angels among men, or the children of angels.
We all partake of magic. By the time we are of age to sire and bear children, all of us possess the ability to perform at least the minor workings of fire, water, earth, and air. Greater powers emerge later. These powers vary within us, some greater and some lesser, as does the wit and force of will to command the greater spells of transformation, and those magics which may tear the barriers between worlds.
Only we can rend the barriers between worlds, and only the most powerful of the Great Houses may do so where no previous weakness in those barriers exists.
A few command the power of were-beasts, created by magic in the dawn of our history. Wolves and bears are most common, and foxes less so. These are in themselves no more than ordinary beasts, their transitions governed by the waxing and waning of the moon.
Rarest are the daughters of Epona and sons of the Wyrm, which manifest in two and three forms each. The eponine sisters in youth transform as the finest and fleetest of horses, and in maturity as mightiest of war unicorns. Sons of the Wyrm begin as venomous wyrm-lords. If they survive their first century of reckless youth, they will thereafter manifest winged, as hot-blooded and fire-breathing wyverns. Given two or three centuries more in which to develop both vision and cunning, they become dragons. These are the rarest of rare, for it is only the purest blooded who may aspire to such power, and that only if they live to learn wisdom as well.
We bow to nothing but power: that which allows us to take what we will from those lesser creatures which serve us, and the weaker among ourselves.
The Oberon and Queen
Rulership among us depends above all on the power to break the walls between worlds, and sustain the passage between them of any prize we may claim. For this reason dragons are seldom kings: their force is spent in strength and the power of flight.
None may rule as the Oberon our High King, or as his Queen, without the ability to rend that fabric which lies between our world and the mortal one, and lead the host of the Wild Hunt upon it. This must be done at least twice each year.
The Mortal World
The sweetest world for our taking is that of mortal men. It is nearest to us in that net of worlds which surrounds us, and for those with the power, its gates lie open to us most often. At each of the four festivals of the sun, which fall each solstice and equinox. At the moon festivals between: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh. At that day each month, when the moon waxes full.
No other world produces so much to enchant us. At their best, their children have beauty to rival ours, which may be refined if they are taken in infancy to be ours. Even in that infancy, they have strength and a rude vitality which pleases us. Our own children come less often, and being often more languid, find stimulation in them as servants. Matured, if brought skillfully to the tasks of service, they can be matchless slaves for our pleasures in both love and war, and for millennia we have taken them as we may.
Mortal children are not our only harvest. Short-lived though they are, mortals are rich in the creative power of music, poetry, and dance, and it is not unknown that when the gifted wander, they may fall prey to us. Our beauty enchants them, and in return for its inspiration, they will follow wherever we lead.
The mortal world is also home to a race of dwarves, small folk who mine the secret places in mountains too remote for men to reach them. They are skilled in all aspects of dealing with metals, from searching them out, to knowing their quality, distilling the pure metals from ore, and working them in such forms as both we and mortals love. These we seldom take as children, for our purpose in doing so is to obtain their skills, and we must have proof before claiming them, that they possess these abilities in full measure.
Pucks
Our foremost instruments in working such mischief upon both men and dwarves are the pucks, or hobs, sometimes called hobgoblins. These small, horned, brown beings, age-wrinkled even in youth and never more than half a sídhe-lord's stature, are easily passed through the barrier between worlds. They possess a little magic of their own, which assists us: certain it is, that while none have the strength to rend the walls between worlds, they are less bound than we ourselves, to the weight of objects they may bear through them.
Most of us can do little more than open small rifts in the walls between our worlds, and hold these open long enough to step through. Most who can do more, may bring no more across the barrier than a handful of seeds. But a puck can be sent, and the barrier held open for them upon their return, and they may enter bearing as much as their weight in treasure with them. This is easiest done if they bear the same weight both ways. Thus arose our practice when they go to claim children for us, of allowing them to bear with them their own aged as changelings.
Argentius
Argentius was one of the first and greatest wizard-kings of the aes sídhe, a scion of the House of the Raven from which so many of our Oberons have risen. He did indeed serve as Oberon a for few brief centuries in his youth, but in his maturity became the first to resign the kingship, preferring instead the pursuit of arcane knowledge.
He it was that created the first torcs, and the jewels and other implements which may be used to enhance the birthright powers among us.
He it was who was first to bind a demon in a brazen mirror, that it might serve him in far-seeing and speech, and other matters.
He it was who studied most closely the limits and effects of sídhe and mortal interbreeding, who first understood how sídhe men might sire children by mortal women without hindrance, while a sídhe woman bearing a mortal's child must abjure our world and live constrained to mortality until the babe be born, or else she and the child will both perish.
He it was who through his alchemy first understood that power in the blood of mortals which renders it poisonous to us, as akin to the poison of cold iron.
Above all, during his time as Oberon, he studied the nature of the walls between worlds. He set lesser mages to map those rifts known to persist in one place, and called forth witches and their faithful in all our subject worlds, to mark these with stone circles, and other forms of gates. He set others to describe the means of detecting such weaknesses, and working upon them, singly and in concert, to weaken them so that new passages might be riven.
Through him was codified the knowledge of all who had come before him, of the means by which both sídhe and mortals might pass between worlds.
Then in latter days he turned from this study in search of other ways to obtain our ends.
He held that the cost of such efforts in magic was greater than desirable among us, and that in future he would seek to farm his slaves instead of hunting them. For a time he would still send forth lesser mages to seek choice mortal children, and artists and musicians of note and artisans in metal from among the dwarven-kind. Then he would cease these efforts, and devote himself instead to the nurturing of enclaves in the wilderness of his lands, from which to supply his needs for such servants.
For almost five hundred years, it seemed he had succeeded in this endeavour. It may still be fair to say that in the breeding of his dwarven metalworkers, the Fir Bolg, he did succeed. Within a century, he had populated a community of skilled workmen and their families in his best territory for mining, to be envied throughout the land. Many were the smiths and artisans in gold, silver, and bronze that he then sold as slaves among his fellows, who prized them equally for their skills, and their inability to conceive of any life which was not captive.
In the matter of mortal slave-breeding though, he failed. Other lords with experience in the bringing together of mortals of age to sire and bear, had warned him of this being a dangerous practice. They had warned him that unless the circumstances of such unions were carefully nurtured, they could result either in both youth and maid destroying each other, or in their uniting on such terms as to destroy all around them, in pursuit of liberties they and their children were not destined to enjoy. This Argentius maintained he could control, and it seemed that for a generation or two that he had succeeded.
What became clear with time was that he could not maintain the quality of his mortals. Children selected for the purity of their beauty, that shining fairness most prized in changelings, did not breed true even amongst the finest of them. They darkened, and coarsened, and sometimes were born as lacking in their wits as their looks. Equally, while skills in music and the arts might breed truer and be capable of greater cultivation, these too were often less than might be hoped. Only in strength and in their character as fighters did they endure, and for this many were trained as warriors, swelling the armies of lords who lacked the power to bind the lesser sidhe to service. These might be nurtured and even bred further as bondslaves if they served well, but that was all.
At length Argentius was called before the Oberon and brought to acknowledge that this trial of breeding mortals among us must be ended. Short-lived though they were, they bred more quickly than we had understood, and their numbers were growing. In the wilderness of Argentius' kingdom, growing far more quickly than any had expected, and there were troubling rumours that a class of witches had begun to rise among them, who had power even to affect the judgement of sidhe. This might also be seen among the number who had by now born half-blood children to their masters among the lower orders. The word was given that this too must end, and these lines be bred no further into the body of the Sidhe.
All mortals then living at liberty in the wild were to be gathered and brought to understand that they were slaves.
The Years of Slaughter
In this time the worst fears of every sídhe who had ever spoken against the release of men upon our world were realized. For every mortal who submitted to the rule of his or her new Lord, there would first be one to resist and then two, and in time, all who might. The wildest and most cunning fled deep into the forests, turning nomad and abandoning the keeping of herd animals for the hunting of wild ones, seeking to live hidden from the world. Enough succeeded, that it would take most of a century to slay the last of them.
By the time Argentius himself undertook their final cleansing from the land, attempts to do other than slay them had been abandoned. Only a few of the youngest children were spared, those few fine and fair enough that in earlier times they might have been stolen from their parents' world.
The Fall of Argentius
It was learned after, that in these years a beautiful young girl was found among those spared from the slaughter. Snow-pale, with hair like fine gold and eyes blue as sapphire, she had been named Ravenna, which pleased the Master of the House of the Raven. She Argentius took into his house along with her young brother Finn, a boy as fair. He made them first his servants, maid and cup-bearer. In time, trained in the arts of war and the hunt, the boy would become master of his guard, and the girl first his concubine and later his Queen.
This was the beginning of disaster.
By this let the limits of prophesy be understood: the greatest oracle in the world will never see everything. Until you are capable of conceiving a possibility, the signs of its coming will remain dark to you.
There were those among us in this time who dreamed of blood and death, of blighted lands and plague and the slaying of a king, but could call forth no image in dream or vision which seemed to suggest from whence it would come. No more than by times the image of a girl serving her master in harmless things, or of a woman wrapped in a cloak of black feathers, with the face of a hag.
These in that time believed their dreams referred to the fall of Argentius and the blood of his human slaves. Some understood him to be the master served by the girl child, but could not conceive his as the power that might bring such destruction. In the end, nothing was understood.
For two hundred years, this was so.
It was known in this time, to the Oberon's court and the highest among other Houses, that Argentius did continue in his fascination with the mortal race. To the ending of the years of slaughter, he spared as many children as he might, and in the name of maintaining his own body of mortal slaves, he was known to have continued in allowing them to mature and to breed more freely in his service, than others. It was whispered that his refusal to seek new blood again from the mortal world—for he continued in this choice—had less to do with the virtue he maintained, than his now lacking the magical strength to do so. This, indeed, was suspected of being his entire motive for the trial he had made of breeding from among the servants he had, rather than sending forth pucks to seek him new ones.
Some might claim his restraint was no more than eccentric kindness to the mortal women he had taken as his Queens throughout this time, but more saw in it only further evidence of his failing powers. Surely if he retained his strength, should not women of his own kind have satisfied him better? And what, after all, should have driven his interest in mapping the rifts between worlds, and studying means by which to pass between this and other worlds with as little aid of magic as possible, except the fading of his power to do so otherwise?
To such murmurings of doubt Argentius responded with disdain, and withdrew to those estates at the heart of his kingdom. His only interests he professed to be in his arcane studies, and indeed, frankly, in the enjoyment of his mortals. Those he favoured as his Queens, he held might suffer from the frailties of mortality, but were still as worthy in his view to serve both his purposes and those of his kingdom for the duration of their brief lives. Any, he warned, who chose to challenge him as a king based on his preferences, would quickly learn that in every way which mattered, he had retained his strength.
This he was to prove more than once in the next two hundred years, as each of his nearest neighbours did seek to challenge him. Some troubled to find pretexts on which to claim territory within his borders, and others merely marched upon them. Few ever returned, and after the first assaults, it came to be understood that to strike across Argentius' lands would invariably be to forfeit one's own territory in return, and the lives of any not sensible enough to flee. If the fleeing remnants were not overcome by blighting clouds of poison which blackened the earth and slew all in their path, they might find themselves facing armies of black glass, or seemingly more subtle perils in the form of the maid Ravenna, or the mortal army now led by her brother. More than once she was sent by her master at the end of things, to bear word before the High King that he had once more met the challenge of lesser kings, and had claimed their lands as forfeit. And so the kingdom of Argentius grew, and across his lands a silence fell, as ever greater numbers of his subjects fled.
The Rise of Ravenna
In time, it was also rumoured that the maid Ravenna had been claimed by her master first as concubine and then Queen, when his latest mortal mistress aged and died. Still it was not understood that her powers were greater than mortal should ever be. None understood at first that the fair messenger who had stood before them, aging but slightly over a century from a maiden's first blush of womanhood to the ripeness of maturity, was always the same woman. None knew that she had already aged thus at least a dozen times.
It would only be learned later how, as the fairest woman in her master's kingdom, she had worked upon him to share his secrets with her, and of these none more precious than those of how life and vigor might be sustained.
The story eventually told by the last sídhe who had served Argentius as major-domo, was that it had begun with the power to heal.
As a girl, Ravenna had begged of her master that she might be taught how to heal first her own slight mortal wounds and ills, then those of others. Against his will, she had succeeded in binding her life force to that of her brother, so that she might ever know his state and be able to lend him her strength and powers to heal, when these were needed. Then as it proved they were needed, once his training began as an armsman and guard, because the strength she might invest in such efforts was limited, magics were worked upon her to allow that she might draw life from life around her, to restore her own strength.
At first she was taught only the ordinary drawing of such force from the lower orders of living things, such as flowers, green growing plants, and trees. Soon, though, as her powers grew and the pleas for her aid became more numerous from among Argentius' other mortal servants, she was taught how to work more subtly with them. How to draw life from one to aid another. How to drain life forces but lightly from several, to sustain one in need—herself, or any other. How to gather such forces from others, and bind them within her to sustain greater magics later.
In this guise, as she grew, she was prized and cherished by those around her as a white witch and healer, and she found no shortage of girls and women willing to serve her, offering from their lives to sustain her powers.
In this, we may easily believe her deception began. For who should question, as months and years passed, what powers she should draw unto herself? Who might question when a little more was taken from each offering given to heal, than strictly needed to restore the healer?
Then, in the glory of her first youth, it became Argentius' pleasure to claim her as his mistress, and this ended.
The character of any maid's magic changes when she is made a woman. For a mortal, unless she is ready to claim it, the price may be its entire loss. So it was, for the maid Ravenna's first youth, and for a time she grieved it beyond measure.
Then she seemed to have bowed without complaint to this stripping of her powers, to this ruin that denied her to her people, but there is reason to think it fired within her now, a desire to be revenged.
Tirelessly now, as she aged, she pleaded her love and the value of her services to her master, that he might grant the draining of some lesser woman's life, or the draining of years from other slaves, that hers might be extended. Time and again she then shared such renewals with her brother, and together, with great cunning they made this continuity their price and promise among their people, for their eventual freedom. As they argued among the other mortals bound to Argentius' service, the key to defeating their master and earning that freedom that would empower them all, must be to match him in age and knowledge. Theirs became the goal of ever winning closer to him in trust, so that they might be charged ever more closely with the daily governance of his kingdom, and some day might seize it from him.
In time, as her master's works upon her served to awaken her magics again, it seemed that they were reconciled. With the bearing of first one child and then two for him, her powers were renewed, and she grew ever fairer, and in time he made her his Queen. She was gifted with the prize of a raven cloak, which allowed her to travel as his messenger in the form of a flock of their watchful birds, and with a brazen mirror, and then again a coterie of maids to share their youth with her, whenever she should command it. Though then, nothing was known of that beyond the lands she now ruled with her master.
Knowing now that in these years she also learned the art of transforming herself, of taking on the seeming of any man or woman she might choose so long as they were not dissimilar in size, we cannot say with certainty where she may have travelled in this time, or in what guises. Neither can we say when Argentius died, or when he ceased to rule in his own lands.
We also cannot say that his end came by Ravenna's hand—only that some ninety years had passed, when word was brought before the High King that the king of House Raven was dead. This word was not brought by Ravenna as in times before, but now by her brother, Finn. He was sent to declare that according to Argentius' will and ancient custom, his mortal Queen would now claim her master's throne. He then laid proofs before the High King and his council of lords, that she possessed power sufficient to hold it, in all the forms of spells of healing and destruction which he held Argentius had taught her, and in her knowledge of arcane secrets which even now may not be spoken before the uninitiated.
This rule, the High King was in no wise willing to grant her, nor were any of those lesser kings bound to his Court. Amid the protests then raised, from his own Queen's murmur that however learned she might be in mage-lore, no spell could be so mighty as to make any woman a Queen, who had begun as a mortal slave, to the shouts that not even from Argentius should it be tolerated, that his mortal leman be taught such secrets or empowered as a Queen over any born sídhe, he stood, and ruled that neither law nor ancient custom should grant her such rights. Respected as Argentius might still be among those who remembered his achievements, this she would not be granted.
To this her champion replied that it was not her will to rule over sídhe, unless they freely chose to be so ruled. Since the years of slaughter their lord had made his kingdom a haven for his mortal subjects, and her interest now was in continuing to hold that sanctuary against any who would deny it. Others might stay or leave, as they chose, and if they chose, might leave bearing whatever wealth they could carry, with them. He then proved the last of her powers, which in certainty she had not acquired through Argentius: she owned that mortal ability to wield the powers of iron, before which no sídhe might stand.
Here ends Part 1
Part 2 covers the period from Ravenna's rise in the Sidhe world as the Iron Queen, through her flight to the mortal world a little over a decade previous.