The Fey Courts
PDFVaries by court
Worshippers
The Fey Courts are not worshipped in the conventional sense -- they are navigated. Mortals who enter into formal relationships with a Court do so through pacts and bargains rather than prayer and devotion. Those who follow Court-adjacent traditions tend to be those who live near the boundaries where the Fey Realms thin: certain druids, some bards, and communities in the deep forests and old places who have maintained cautious relationships with specific Courts across generations.
The Fey Courts are four sovereign powers -- Summer, Winter, Spring, and Autumn -- that govern the Fey Realms and everything within them. They are not unified. They compete, negotiate, feud across centuries, and occasionally cooperate when something threatens the Fey Realms as a whole. The seasonal structure is genuine: Summer and Winter are the primary poles, each representing an extreme of temperament and power, while Spring and Autumn serve as the moderating forces between them. This does not mean the four Courts balance neatly. It means they have a structure within which to be unbalanced.
Fey interactions with mortal species are unpredictable by design. The Courts operate on time scales that make mortal politics look like weather, and they find mortal urgency somewhere between baffling and amusing. A bargain with a Fey Court is binding in ways that mortal contracts are not, enforceable by mechanisms that mortal law cannot touch, and interpreted with a literalness that rewards precision and punishes assumption.
The elves of the Elysor Reaches once maintained friendly relations with the Courts -- the oldest Halvaen histories describe regular embassy between the Reaches and at least two of the Courts. That relationship is no longer intact. Neither the Elves nor the Courts discuss what ended it, which is itself a significant piece of information about how seriously both sides take it.