The FaeOf all creatures, mythological and present, the fae figure uniquely to the witch's charge. The witch does not seek them out. He does not sport in their company. The witch leads the way away from them. The fae proper were described by the Reverend John Campbell, in 1900, as "a race of beings, the counterparts of mankind in person, occupations, and pleasures, but unsubstantial and unreal, ordinarily invisible, noiseless in their motions, and having their dwellings underground, in hills and green mounds of rock or earth."1 They are not gods, angels, guardians, elementals, nature spirits, the spirits of the deceased or the like. Rather, they are mortal creatures of impulse and reason, like humans -- but the two are even less integrated in them than they are in us. Deft at logic yet decidedly capricious, they are dangerous and no friend. It is for this reason they are separate. They are the road we did not take.
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