Blie, Blue Wing

Of the Blue Wing among the Blie—whom many term the Fey and few have beheld with waking eyes—let this be faithfully told. They are small folk of mammal’s blood and lucent pinions, children, say the elders, of moonlight laid upon still water when Moab’s breath first stirred the tide. By the Ida they are remembered as moon-guides who haunt dream and shore; the Alfra call them Selu’thien, the Wings of Still Water; Mogs fling the name Night-Flies in scorn and then vanish where marsh meets star; and in Mopru maledictions they are the Whispering Vermin, feared more than they are admitted. Among themselves they hold a truer style—Eryath’lun, the Children of the Moon-Tide—and it suits their nature, for their hearts beat to the rhythm of water and sky and all paths that lie between.

In stature they stand scarcely eighteen to four-and-twenty inches, slender as reeds, the limbs fine-strung for flight and quickness rather than for contest. The wings are paneled like tinted glass, sapphire to indigo by day and deepening to midnight at dusk, and when the moon rides high they take on a sheen as of wet silk. Faces are keen and luminous, with eyes that answer starlight, and their hair falls in river shades. They move with a silence that pretends to be mere breeze, vanishing where the night sets its silver upon pool and current; and many a watchman, swearing he kept a true post, has discovered his lantern dreaming in his own hand while a Blue Wing slipped past like a thought half remembered.

Their gifts are married to the night. Under moon’s governance their stealth becomes sorcery: they bend reflection and ripple to confound pursuit, weave the thin veils of sleep about fretful minds, and set forth small illusions—twinings of light and shadow—that make a thicket seem a corridor or a ford appear where none is safe. They love water and the creatures that keep it, and fish, otter, and shy birds answer to their courtesy. Yet daylight is a hard tutor to them. Bright sun bruises the glamour, tires the wing, and makes their arts dull and fretful; in open noon they are fragile as swallows before a storm. Thus, do they keep to river-mists and lakeside groves and those dew-hung courts where moon and bough confer, sanctuaries ordered to the cycle of the heavens and tended with a devotion that is half craft, half prayer.

Their manner is monarchical and communal in one breath. A queen is acknowledged, though her throne is woven of willow and oath rather than stone; around her, clusters of kin hold hidden households—flowered hollows and hushed lofts among the branches—linked by paths no heavy foot may find. They prize listening above speech and gentleness above wrath, and they answer trespass first with confused lights and misplaced footsteps so that harm forgets why it has come. Yet they are not harmless. Powdered sleeps and needle-darts set with sopor, sudden gleams that blind a heartbeat’s span, and the quiet mustering of night-things make a rude invader wish for clearer roads. It is said many among them are apt in Tovan Ki where moonlight is master, and that they can turn a dark water into a mirror of counsel or slip along the edge of a dream to lay a warning in the mind. So let their measure be entered: delicate in frame, puissant by cunning, faithful to water and star; if one walks in reverence, the Blue Wing is a rumor that comforts, but if one comes with a breaker’s heart, rumor hardens into interdiction.