I didn’t begin by asking what the fae are.

I began by asking when they entered the human imagination—and why, once there, they never truly left.

Humans are easy, in a way. Every culture has a creation story: breath over water, hands shaping clay, gods walking among reeds and firelight. Even when those stories contradict one another, they answer the same essential question:

Why are we here?

The fae ask something different.

They do not explain existence.
They explain experience.

The first time someone spoke of the fae, I doubt it sounded like poetry. I suspect it sounded like uncertainty.

A light where no fire burned.
A presence felt but not seen.
A voice carried on the wind that did not belong to a mouth.

Was it exhaustion after a long crossing?
A night of drink and stories by the fire?
Grief, hunger, fear, or awe?

Almost certainly some combination of all of these.

But humans have always been remarkably good at sensing when something does not fit neatly into reason. And instead of dismissing it, they named it.

That naming mattered.

Long before Ireland had borders—before it had written language—stories were told of those who were already here. Not gods, who were too distant. Not animals, who were too familiar. Something else. Something alongside.

The fae did not arrive with agriculture or kingship. They arrived earlier—when humans still believed the land itself possessed intention.

And once they arrived, they stayed.

That persistence is what fascinates me.

Ideas that do not serve a purpose tend to fade. Yet the fae endure—through oral tradition, medieval manuscripts, Victorian paintings, children’s books, and even modern animation. They shrink and soften at times, become whimsical or decorative, but they never disappear.

Even when reduced to glowing wings and playful mischief, the shape remains.

Why?

Because the fae were never meant to be believed in the way gods are believed in.

They were meant to be remembered.

The fae live in the space between what we can explain and what we feel certain is true anyway. They are the story we tell ourselves when intuition outruns logic. When the land feels older than we are. When memory doesn’t quite belong to this lifetime.

In Irish tradition especially, the fae are not sweet. They are not small. They are not ornaments. They are reminders. They guard thresholds. They punish arrogance. They resent forgetting.

Which leads to the question that mattered most as I began writing Bone and Blood:

What if the fae did not come after humans—but alongside our first attempts to remember?

What if they were born the moment humans began telling stories not merely to survive, but to understand loss?

The fae are often described as ageless, yet rarely immortal. They fade. They retreat. They slip sideways out of time. That does not read to me as fantasy—it reads as metaphor.

Cultures forget.
Languages die.
Names disappear.

And something essential grows quiet when that happens.

In the opening of Bone and Blood, the faery matriarch watches small boats crossing the sea. That image did not come from folklore. It came from history. From migration. From the moment memory steps onto water and hopes it will survive the crossing.

She is not surprised by the leaving. She knows what is coming.

Humans will forget the old names.
The old ways will thin.
The stories will fracture.

But she follows anyway.

Because memory does not live in places.
It lives in people.

Are the fae eternal? Not exactly.
Are they female? Not entirely.
Do they die? Not the way humans do.

They persist the way stories persist—changed by each telling, weakened by neglect, strengthened by attention.

When I look at early depictions of fairies—particularly from the 17th and 18th centuries—I see something far removed from modern whimsy. I see wildness. Sorrow. Unease. I see a culture wrestling with colonization, famine, displacement, and the slow erasure of language and land.

The fae did not comfort people by being cute.

They reminded them of what had already been taken.

Perhaps that is why they still matter.

Because even now—even in a world mapped by satellites and screens—we still sense when something has been forgotten too quickly. We feel the pull of ancestry without always knowing why. We dream in symbols older than our own lives.

The fae are not proof of magic.

They are proof that humans have always known there is more carried in blood and memory than history can record.

And maybe that is why they continue to walk beside us—smaller now, quieter, easier to dismiss—but still watching.

Still remembering.

Still waiting to see whether we will.