If…..

[Connor]

I started to doubt myself but it was confirmed in a 2014 fanfest interview with Koji-Fox that the fairies are artificial constructs, in that they didn’t exist until Scholars conceptualised them.

A: To follow up on a question from the stream earlier- the taxonomy that fairies fall into. Is there an origin to how they become fairies of Scholars. Were they fairies and then bound to scholars? or did the scholars create them?

MCKF: Yes, the second one. Fairies again, while they fall under the taxonomy of elementals, they are actually beings that were created. They did not exist before. The Scholar would take the energies and elements from around them and would basically create these beings that were made of the elements.

A: Those are bound to the soul crystal then and passed from one person to the next where carbuncle is more one per person. Very cool.

I wasn’t aware of the distinction from Carbuncles, I assumed everyone just summoned the same one lol.

The fairy is still a ‘living being’ in that it (apparently) has its own consciousness, thoughts, memories etc. But there isn’t any place where real ‘fairies’ exist in nature (in terms of ones like Lily). They also seem to have been conceptualised based on Nymian folklore/mythology as opposed to modelled after pre-existing creatures. Especially considering how Seraph is more ‘angelic’ than ‘fae’. Basically, they’re artificial constructs with the ability to store memories/experiences, which is where their ‘individuality’ comes from.

In regards to ‘binding the fairies’, I think this may have simply been a more straightforward way of referring to how the Scholars took elemental aether from their environments and bound the energy to the soul crystals as a means to create the fairies. Rather than the fairies being ‘bound’ by a literal pact, it just means the energies were linked/connected to the soulstone itself (hence why the same fairy pops out of the soul stone each time). That said, there does seem an unspoken connection between the Scholar and their Fairy, which sort of is a ‘pact’