Trolls
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Overview
Trolls (Commonspeak), also Leabharkin (Feyspeak \ˈlaʊərkin\ for book people), are a Fey species native to Arcadia. They are one of the two constituent species of The Upper Court of Yesterday. Their Fey God is The Cartographer Queen. Trolls embody Strange Meaning through place, record, and the conviction that understanding where something is, or was, is the first step toward preserving it.
Among the Fey, Trolls are regarded as steadfast, methodical, and unyielding in their commitment to memory made concrete.
History
Shattered Age
Trolls came into existence in the late Shattered Age, circa NIR 950, with the founding of The Court of Here. This Court pursued Strange Meaning through location, asserting that meaning is grounded in where something exists, not merely that it exists at all.
Trolls were shaped as living anchors of place, capable of recording and recalling geography, boundaries, and spatial relationships with absolute fidelity.
Dark Age
After The War of Erasure, around NIR 1400, The Court of Here was renamed The Upper Court. The philosophical shift was subtle, broadening focus from strict location to elevated placement and continuity. Trolls were largely unaffected, as their existing doctrine already encompassed preservation through record.
Later in the Dark Age, circa NIR 1750, The Upper Court was fused with The Court of Yesterday through the Concordance, forming The Upper Court of Yesterday. This fusion bound the Trolls to the Brownies.
The partnership was uneasy. Trolls favored exactitude, documentation, and verified record, while Brownies privileged oral tradition and lived memory. Over time, the two species forged cooperation not through affection, but through a shared sense of obligation to the past.
Dawn Age
In the current era, Trolls remain central to the Upper Court of Yesterday, serving as its institutional memory and structural backbone.
Cosmology
The Upper Court of Yesterday holds that Strange Meaning arises from continuity. To preserve something is to validate it.
Trolls embody this belief by treating memory as infrastructure. A thing that is mapped, recorded, and cataloged cannot truly be lost. Their bodies serve as archives, ensuring that knowledge remains embodied rather than abstract.
Their cooperation with Brownies represents the Court’s dual thesis: memory must be both recorded and remembered to endure.
Society
Within The Upper Court of Yesterday, Trolls serve as scholars, librarians, archivists, and cartographers.
They are responsible for:
- Maintaining libraries of maps, records, and histories.
- Verifying oral accounts preserved by the Brownies.
- Cataloging changes in Arcadia’s mutable geography.
Troll society values discipline, patience, and precision. While disagreements with Brownies are common, Trolls regard compromise as a duty rather than a concession. Together, the two species labor to ensure that nothing from the past is erased through neglect.
Ecology
Trolls resemble extremely tall, heavily built Fairfolk, with thicker limbs and heavier frames that appear almost human in proportion by Fey standards. Their skin is densely tattooed and scarred with symbolic markings.
Each tattoo or scar represents a specific record: a map, a boundary, a historical event, or a text. Trolls possess the remarkable ability to hide or reveal any marking they have ever received, allowing them to present or conceal knowledge at will.
Through this practice, Trolls become living libraries. A single elder Troll may carry centuries of cartography, treaties, and historical records etched into flesh.
Trolls favor environments suited to preservation: libraries, archives, stone halls, and places where knowledge can be guarded against decay. They move slowly, deliberately, and with the confidence of those who know exactly where they stand.