The Book of the Archfey

The Book of the Archfey is a book of stories about the Archfey of the Feywild. They contain descriptions, illustrations, stories and anecdotes about them, divided into sections by season.

The book focuses only on the Archfey of the Seasonal Courts, and have descriptions relating them to colors and gemstones, as well as some description of their Elven Boons.

Each of the Archfey are associated with a season, a color, and a gemstone:

• King Oberon
  • Season: Spring
  • Color: Green
  • Gemstone: Emerald
• Queen Titania
  • Season: Summer
  • Color: Orange
  • Gemstone: Topaz
• Queen Arcadia
  • Season: Fall
  • Color: Red
  • Gemstone: Ruby
• Queen Mab
  • Season: Winter
  • Color: Blue
  • Gemstone: Sapphire

King Oberon

Of the Green Lord and the First Shield

It is said among the elves who came across the Elven Bridge that their host was first received by the Green Lord of the Spring Court, he whom they name Oberon.¹ He is no sovereign as we would reckon one, but a power that walks in the shape of a man when it pleases him, crowned in new leaves and eyes the color of moss after rain.

The Hicks of old did not know him by this name at first. They knew only the great emerald shield that the elves carried down from the sky, a thing of such living green that it was said to quicken the grass wherever it was set. Because this shield was the first gift shown, and because it was green as the first shoots after thaw, the wise women and the lettered men of the Hicks declared that the Lord of Spring must therefore be the lord of green things and of emerald stone. Thus was the color and the gem fixed to him, not by his own word, but by our need to name what we had been given.

They say he laughed when the elves told him of this. Not in scorn, but in the manner of one who finds a child’s drawing of a tree more true than the tree itself. He did not correct them. Powers such as he have little interest in being accurately described by mortals.

Yet the shield remains. And so the association remains. Green for the one who sends the first warmth, emerald for the stone that remembers the color of new life. Whether the Green Lord ever claimed these signs for his own, no elf has ever said. We claimed them for him, and the claim has held.

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Footnotes

1. A later compiler’s marginal note disputes this identification: the elf who bore the First Shield was not Oberon himself, but a High Elf lord entrusted with the shield by the Green Lord. In this reading, the earliest Hick accounts confused the bearer of the gift with the Archfey who bestowed it. ↩