Pixies are a small winged people native to the flowered wetlands of southern Yshara, on the continent of Ashkenar. They stand no taller than a grown Kazmirai forearm, and their translucent, vein-bright wings scatter light into shifting colours as they move. Pixie bands live dispersed across the reed country, tending wild orchards and pressing the river fruit into the keeping-syrups they carry along the southern trade roads.
Origin
The earliest secure record of Pixies comes from the survey ledgers of the Varietas Vitae Society, whose field scholars charted the southern reed country during the long drought of 41 P.A. Those accounts describe established orchard-bands already keeping detailed seasonal calendars, which places Pixie settlement of the Sedge Reaches well before any outside record of them.
Pixie bands trace their own beginnings to the flowering of the inner sea's margins, a slow greening that opened the wetlands to settlement. The bands hold that their forebears followed the spread of the fruiting reeds inland from the coast, founding new orchards wherever the water ran warm and still. That account agrees with the spread of orchard sites mapped by later scholars, who found the oldest groves clustered along the original coastline and the youngest pressed far up the river roads.
Anatomy and Physiology
An adult Pixie stands between fourteen and eighteen centimetres, with a slight, long-limbed frame built for flight rather than ground travel. The wings are the defining trait, four membranes carried in two paired sets, clear enough to read print through and threaded with fine vessels that flush brighter when the body is warm. Survey scholars record that the wing colour shifts with light and temperature, ranging from pale gold in the cool of morning to a deep teal sheen under the high sun.
Pixie sight is unusually keen at close range, an adaptation to the fine work of tending blossom and pressing fruit, and their hearing carries well across open water. Field observers note a faint luminescence along the wing veins in the hour after dusk, an observable trait that fades as the body cools through the night. Recorded lifespans run long for so small a people, with band elders attested past their hundredth year and still flying the orchard rounds.