High Fae
A spoiler-free guide to A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR).
Only showing what’s been revealed up to your current progress. Future events, identities, and relationships are hidden.
Overview
High Fae form the ruling aristocracy of faerie society, with estates, servants, courts, and ranks such as courtier and emissary.
High Fae can detect tiny sounds and bodily cues beyond human limits, hearing soft movement and even smelling fear.
Despite their immortality and strong healing, High Fae can be injured and killed. Ash disrupts their recovery, while iron is harmless; specialized attacks can also slow their healing enough to make wounds fatal.
Transformation into a High Fae body brings heightened strength, speed, senses, and resilience, but the change can initially cause severe sensory overload as sound, scent, and light become painfully intense.
High Fae are a distinct faerie people rather than a label for every human-shaped faerie. Illyrians, despite resembling some High Fae, belong to a separate people and are neither High Fae nor lesser faeries.
Transformation runs only one way in practice: a human remade into High Fae can rarely return to mortal life, where fear and anti-faerie prejudice leave such a person isolated and all but confined.
Appearance
High Fae are marked by delicately arched ears, refined limbs, and a subtle immortal glow that sets their bodies apart from human ones.
Glamour can conceal the faint immortal glow, pointed ears, sharpened beauty, and unnatural grace that distinguish a High Fae body from a human one.
Personality and Behavior
Among powerful faeries, power is maintained by force, because immortals with great power and endless time are not easily checked by kindness or friendship.
High Fae can lie and have deliberately encouraged the false mortal belief that faeries are incapable of doing so.
Court interaction among the High Fae is treated as a power game in which words serve as weapons and feuds can end in people literally tearing each other apart.
Some High Fae societies impose severe restrictions on women’s freedom, resembling the most controlling parts of the human world.
Relationships
High Fae rarely produce children, and their children mature much more slowly than humans. Most marry ordinarily, but some find a mate regarded as their equal in every way; this bond carries greater weight than marriage.
Among the High Fae, lineage carries social prestige, and prejudice over blood purity can diminish even powerful individuals of mixed ancestry, including those with Illyrian blood.
High Fae possess entrenched advantages over lesser faeries. These inequalities extend into household custom, where lesser faerie servants may be expected to work silently and remain unseen, though some in Prythian seek to dismantle such privileges.
A human transformed into High Fae cannot safely resume an ordinary life in the mortal lands, where fear and anti-faerie prejudice can lead to isolation and effective confinement.
A High Fae female’s pelvis is not shaped to deliver a winged child, making labor involving such a child highly likely to be fatal.
Important Events
Mortal history remembers the High Fae as former overlords defeated in an ancient uprising, while Tamlin maintains that some faeries fought and died beside humans for freedom. Human safety afterward came to rest on a five-century-old promise and the Treaty, although neither the Treaty nor the Wall physically prevents faeries from crossing into mortal territory.