Alven [Shadow Fey]

Alven are winged shadow fey, 10 to 14 inches tall, easily confused with pixies or other fairies. Butterfly wings frame leaf-green skin and vivid orange hair, which has earned them names like carrot-tops and fire flits. They dress in light silks spun by spiders, dyed orange and green.

Each can become a butterfly or a bumblebee, most choosing the butterfly, for up to twelve hours in total per day, switching as often as it likes; they are often met frolicking in butterfly shape. Their speech is the shadow fey tongue sung in a soft, high lilt that listeners must strain to follow.

Alven avoid melee and lean on magic. An enemy who gets close faces pin-sized blades that deal 1 point per hit. They cast plant-sphere spells as 5th-level clerics. Their signature defense is a darting, weaving wing dance: anyone who watches it makes two saves vs. spell, the first against being enthralled (as the spell) and the second against being struck deaf and blind at once (as blindness and deafness).

Weapons of cold-wrought iron, or those of +3 or better, are needed to hurt them, and stone weapons, obsidian included, never do, magic or not. Lightning and electricity have no effect. Sunlight is their bane: each round in direct sun costs 1 point of damage as wings and then skin blister and crack, slowing to 1 point per turn under cloud.

Among growing plants an alven moves as if under find the path, the flora itself steering it; the power fails where nothing grows. Infravision reaches 120 feet, and a keen nose detects invisible creatures within 120 feet.

Alven dig warrens beneath lovely gardens and wildflower meadows and defend them fiercely, striking at anyone who harms the plants or picks blooms without leave. Praising an alven's garden or giving it seeds is the surest route to friendship; giving it cut flowers is a grave insult.

They are the gardeners of the shadow fey, specializing in night-blooming plants but loving all green things. Some visit mortal lands to study human gardens, and a mortal with a truly green thumb may be carried off to the hidden shadow realm and turned into a changeling.