Bone Faeries and Bladewings - Deadly Faeries

Faeries. Do not at me, hear me out. Faeries have been present in the majority of the world's folklore, and their place in Dungeons and Dragons has elements of its lore which reference back to Shakespeare. Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously insisted on the existence of faeries, and was a big believer and insisted on the authenticity of Cottingley Fairies.

It's easy for people outside the fantasy genre to take faeries as a little less seriously. They're airy, fleeting, and fun loving. Tinkerbell has done no favour for their reputation. They are tiny, untrustworthy tricksters at best, and violent tiny death machines at worst. Look no further, than the two fae creatures in this article. One, is small but deadly – the other is all deadly. Hopefully your players will fly away while they can.

Bladewings

Swordwing by Steve Argyle

Tooth and Bone by Nell Fallcard

Though they're the size of your average Pixie – two to three inches tall, and weighing in at the ounce – the Bladewing is a deadly. They live in the bark of the oldest trees of nearly every forest in the world. After they were cast out of the world of the faerie, for their ugliness and ruthelessness, they grew jaded as a people. Their jadedness, translated into literal jaggedness of their form.

Their most extreme difference to other fae-kin is their bladed arm. It differs between the right or left for individual bladewings, but all of them have a sharpened carapace instead of a hand with fingers and digits. Bladewings make every effort to keep this limb sharp. It serves as a tool, and a fearsome weapon. Bladewings have hardened shells, like an insect, which is covered in many barbed surfaces. As they fly, their wings ring like what we would know as a mosquito – an intensely high pitch ringing.

The Bladewings as a people are eternally unhappy with how they were treated in the fae-world. They choose to view their unusual shapes as a badge of honour, and bismerch all things they deem prettier than themselves. Stealing riches, vandalising artwork, or even attacks on individuals are all things the jealous faeries are willing to do, to ease their unbalanced minds.

Bone Faeries

In the nicer myths, or bedtime stories told to children when they lose their small teeth – the tooth faerie is coming for abandoned and unwanted teeth. There have even been sightings of tooth faeries coming for the old and the dentured.

This is a cute picture if you believe that faeries are small and nice. Most of the time, faeries are not nice, and sometimes they are not small. Bone faeries stand just under six feet tall, with dragonfly-like wings spreading up to twenty feet wide.

Tooth faeries collect discarded teeth to grind for building, medicine, or high fashion. Bone faeries bones, discarded or not, out of an obsessive need to hoard them comparable a dragon. Most bone faeries have favourite creatures they like to take from, but they usually prefer to take from humanoid races over beasts or monstrosities. Sometimes they wait for a creature to die, and plunder the corpses like carrion. More often, their violent nature compels them to remove the bones aggressively from still living creatures.

Flitting Away

Not all faeries mean well. I wanted to turn something generally considered endearing, sweet or friendly into something sinister and dangerous. Now I'd love to hear from you. What unconventional take could we make on the known and familiar? What friendly monster could we make dangerous? What malicious creature could we put a spin on to make them nicer? Let us know in the comments below, and thanks for flying with the meanest faeries of many worlds.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.