The faries say that in the dawn of days, there was only one court. On season, one wind, one tree, spreading out across an endless field of green. And in that field, the faries tended to the tree, not that it required much tending. It was work without purpose, without goal.

Until the day the tree was shattered.

The birth of what we now call the universe tore the tree in half, and fir the first time the faries experienced catastrophe. In the burning shards of all they had ever known, with a reality even more alien to them than the chaos growing from it's shattered pieces, they scrambled to collect what they could, to keep it safe. And in the end, as the last echoes of the big bang reverberated around them, they experienced another new thing.

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Their first disagreement.

Some were horrified by the destruction, and argued they should take what they had saved and grow anew, a new eternal tree, a new eternal field, a return to their quiet, endless toil.

Some had seen the destruction and saw within it hope. Change for the first time. They saw the new world rising from the chaos, and wondered what other new things destruction could bring.

Of course, you see the problem. They were both just as wrong as they were both right.

In time, they became a part of the forming universe. Growth and destruction, life and death, yin and yang. Those who championed growth became called Seelie, the warmth and growth of spring and summer. Their counterparts became Unseelie, the cold and chill of winter, the death and rot that feeds new life in spring. Both vital, both necessary. And is the way of all things that think...still hating each other, over conflicts long past.

It was also around the time the two courts were formed that a stranger came to visit both of them, offering promises. He wasn't anything they'd ever seen before, a flickering laughing thing made of the fires that had birthed the universe. In time, they would call him the first of the genies, and curse the deal they'd made with him....

But that's a story for later.