Kith

Kith (also called beast-kin, or poetically Twilight-marked / Veil-marked in sermons) are mortals of the Sunworld whose bodies carry animal or draconic echoes — ears, tails, eyes, scales, horns, and similar traits ranging from subtle to unmistakable. They are not Fae, not natives of the Moonworld, and not a separate cosmic species tree in orthodox The Realms of Faeloria theology: the Moonworld reflects what has occurred; it does not freely mint new Sunworld lineages.

What Kith are

Kith eat, age, bear children, and die as mortals. Their marks are phenotype and story — shaped by lineage, place, oaths, trauma, or resonance — and are often misread by layfolk as half-fey blood.

Origins (debated in-setting)

Temples, universities, and dockside taverns disagree; all explanations below coexist in Faeloria:

Twilight bleed-through / Fae-adjacent resonance — Birth during veil-thin hours or in places where Fae pacts and gifted bargains echo strongly; not half-Fae biology, but Sunworld outcomes of heightened myth (compare failed crossings and Fae bleed-through in cosmology).
Wild Fae regions — Communities long adjacent to the Avarian Forest or Silverfall Cascade tell tales of marks appearing after generations of neighborly (or fraught) coexistence with Wild Fae stories.
Great Cycle shock — Some chronicles link spikes in Kith births to planar catastrophes such as the Faefall era; scholars argue whether cause is trauma, record bias, or real thinning of local reality.
The Penumbra echo (feared / heretical) — Beast-marks as Umbral Veil echo seeking form — useful for horror arcs; poor basis for systemic oppression in-setting unless bigots are explicitly wrong.
Mundane diversity — They have always been here in dockside proverb; cosmopolitan ports accept Kith crews without cosmology homework.

Culture and law

Treatment varies by charter: Crystalport dock wards in story skew pragmatic; isolated valleys may treat Kith as omen. Magic in Faeloria has no Kith-only school; innate affinities matching an echo (heat, charm, speed) are stereotypes, not laws.

Example lineages (folklore, not exhaustive)

Vulpine — Fox ears and tail; trickster ballads; some families unusually long-lived in tale.
Lupine — Pack oaths, frontier scouts, Dalr-adjacent story.
Felid — Night markets, temple guardians, or thieves' guilds — same ears, different myth.
Cervine, lapine, ursine, serpentine, avian, draconic — Regional names multiply with trade routes.

Relations

Humans — Majority neighbors; politics of acceptance varies.
Elves / Dwarves / Halflings — No cosmic hierarchy over Kith; only local prejudice or alliance.