Character Splat: Darkness Sprites

Darkness Sprite

The darkness sprite is most typically observed as a soap-bubble distortion of shape within a shadow or darkness. Its surface is the source of ripple-like sensations. One may witness light that has the appearance of gleaming eyes yet cannot be located when looked for—a motif without manifestation. If driven to emerge into the light, it attains a tentative air and moves with some embarrassment; its shape is tenuous and permeated with oscillations, and tendrils like antennae taste the world and feel about as if for danger.

That said, the other common appearance for the darkness sprite is nothing like what was described above. These sprites have an appallingly humanoid appearance, some not even deigning to appear pale, gaunt, or smallen; they are like young men or women, sometimes children, distinguished only by a peculiar deepness and blankness in their eyes and their presence at such times as one would expect not human company but fairy visitation.

The abnormal darkness sprite has a fairy appearance but with some of the overt distinguishing characteristics of the spherical darkness or deep-eyed children above; these creatures are doubtless tainted by or bordering upon other fairy types, and thus distinguish themselves by a character of darknessing or darknessishness rather than the full character of the darkness sprite.

One must be cautioned against presuming the malignity of these sprites. They are, while not notably beneficent spirits, no more inclined to mischief or malevolence than the average of their kind and perhaps, in truth, burdened by their distinctive experience with a greater awareness of responsibility and the costs of suffering than other fairies might be. One must consider the darkness of their appearance not a sign of moral failing but of magical negativity: they are prone to consume or direct light rather than scatter it about, they receive energy rather than give it, but they are as efficacious in absorbing, mitigating, or neutralizing curses and banes as their brighter cousins are at bestowing blessings.

Thus we may say, befriend such darkness sprites as ye may encounter, but do not invite them into rituals which have an intent to raise power, as this will in no wise do ye good.

— A Catalogue of Faerie, by Tracey Oengein

Darkness sprites are keepers of the great silences and mysteries of the world. It's their job to clean up the loose magic in the world, the petty and unproductive disorder, and leave instead the echoing vastness of Nature, Being, and Truth.

It is their duty to stop—to eat, more precisely—random surges of power, follies of magic, and disruptions of the mundane. But they do not devour, and sometimes even augment, the spiritual openness that is magic at its best. They protect people from random manticores but leave behind not simple mundanity but a quiet transformative potential.

And, too, theirs is the duty to swallow—when they can—the mundane things that ought not be. To let the darkness rise around unbearable things, and consume them in that darkness before the light returns. They are that which leaves the world clean.

Into them spins what is unnecessary, and it is gone.

These are the standard invocations of a darkness sprite—the powers they rely on to do their work:

• I am a void into which power falls
• I am a devouring spirit
• I take this into me; I accept it.

Example: "I am a void into which power falls. I can decaffeinate her coffee from here."

Darkness sprites have a +1 bonus on Mist rolls. They are never burned by the power tokens that represent loose magical energy, and on a Praxis roll of 23+ they can remove 1-5 such tokens from a scene.

Famous darkness sprites include the West Wind's hound; Professor Evans of the High Academy; and the Central Darkness that lives beneath Providence, RI.

You should play a darkness sprite if . . .
You want to think about what happens to things that aren't part of the world any longer. If you want to fight curses and misfortunes. If you want to be a creature of the shadowy borderland, but don't want to be dispassionate like a monitor fairy watch-fey would be. If you think that your group needs a cool head and someone to draw off the consequences of excess. If you like the idea of being a power of cold, dark, sobriety, loneliness, quiet, stillness, openness, and release. If you'd rather bring an end to pain than a beginning to happiness.