piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The fourth question comes from lilfluff and is for the Faerie Apocalypse

After the apocalypse what has happened the former ‘blindness’ that kept regular humans from noticing the fae. Did it go away for good? Just temporarily weakened? Never really went away and people only noticed because of how blatant the Returned were being?

For a reference to the Blindness of the Gods see here.

First, what is/was The Blindness of the Gods?

The colloquial expression is used to describe the fact that true humans – and those Faded with very very thin fae blood – cannot see Ellehemaei for what they are. Mask up or down, these people see only a human; their mind rewrites everything else to fit within a normal world.

It was lain in place when the Gods left this world, back in the late BC’s. It was meant as a protection for humans – if they could not see the strangeness, the gods reasoned, they could not be intimidated, bullied, or awed into following those fae that remained as gods, as leaders, or as masters. It also served to protect the fae; even a god can be taken down by angry enough, clever enough, humans, especially in a group. Their descendants, especially the young ones, could be taken down with comparatively no effort.

Because it only had sporadic effacacy on mixed-blood humans, and because someone could be entirely human except this ability to see unMasked fae for what they were, the fae tended, as a whole, to remain Masked when in mixed company, even before the war.

The sundering that brought the departed gods back to Earth also broke this blindness. And this time, there were no older, authoritarian gods to put it back. After the Return, the Blindness of the Gods was entirely gone, and fae who wished to hide (most of those who wanted to survive!) had to rely on their own Masks.

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