Overview

The Chain (Commonspeak), also Slabhra (Feyspeak [1] for chain), are a Fey species native to Arcadia. An individual member is called a Link (Commonspeak), or Nasc (Feyspeak \ˈnæsk\ for link), though the species name is always used in the plural, regardless of number. Even two individuals are referred to as Chain, never Links.

The Chain are the sole species of the Court of Genuflection, ruled by The Lady of the Web. They are most commonly encountered within the Court’s domains, where they serve as living instruments of reverence, hierarchy, and collective unity.

To outsiders, the Court of Genuflection appears serene, immaculate, and deeply unsettling, a society without visible disagreement or deviation.

History

Shattered Age

The Chain came into existence quite early in the Shattered Age, when Lolth founded the Court of Alignment, circa NIR 370.

Dark Age

In the early Dark Age, circa NIR 1350, at the end of the War of Erasure, the Court of Alignment became known as the Court of Genuflection. They retained their interest in cultural unity, but in the aftermath of the War, they no longer claimed that it came from careful alignment of internal and external qualities: it came from a brutally more simple source.

Meaning, they claimed, could not be argued, disproven, or eroded if it was surrendered entirely. Reverence itself became the foundation of existence, and unity its proof.

The Chain were shaped to embody this doctrine, not as believers who choose devotion, but as beings for whom devotion is structure, instinct, and identity.