The Harvest

The Changed do not generally have much success conceiving and carrying children to term. Aside from the difficulties of fertility, the early Changed never knew quit what they’d be giving birth to, as the effects of the gene-bombs hadn’t settled yet.

When they left for Old Earth, the Changed, now known as Fae, Fair Folk, and a host of other names, depending on the region, discovered that mixing with baseline humans helped both with fertility rates and to somewhat stabilize the genetic code. Somewhat.

Eventually, as human population outpaced even that of the hybrid Fae, the children of the mixed pairings weren’t as easy to claim or integrate into Fae life. They were still born with odd abilities and sometimes odder feature, but older hybrids wanted to go back to the humans, and new babies started slipping past watchers among the changed who didn’t take humans as spouses or chattel, instead staying only long enough to make sure impregnation happened before leaving the human settlements.

Some Fae purposefully left their children among the humans, to spread the bloodlines further. As time went on, more Fae did this, feeling that they could always come back later and take the child back to their lands, pocket kingdoms, and tiny territories on Underhill or Jormunger. Often a poor substitute would be left behind in these cases, giving rise to the inaccurate, but memorable term of “Changeling”.

Other Fae started villages in their territories, warding them so the Changed animals couldn’t get in and the humans couldn’t get out. There they kept hybrid humans as a sort of captive breeding ground. With luck and a little planning, the pregnancies of the women in the village would result in stronger Fae children. When an especially strong child was born, it would be taken, or plucked, to be raised among the Fae instead of among the humans. The smartest of the Fae would make sure to keep their villages well, and not play the tyrant too much, thus making sure that the women wouldn’t go to great lengths to rid themselves of the babies rather than see them lost to the Fae courts.

Others were not so wise, and had to resort to other measures in order to make sure healthy offspring would be born. Later, after the Fae returned to Underhill in numbers, leaving only simulacrum and the weaker members of their race behind, they had to resort to other methods of retrieval for the now rare hybrid children. Not only were the restrictions on time-travel strict, Changelings or fetches were harder to slip into a crib. The number of babies who had to be left in human care rose, but luckily, the old method of taking and keeping baseline humans still worked. The captive village method grew in popularity, and the taking of new Fae children, both on Old Earth and in the villages, came to be collectively known as “The Harvest”.