Fairies do not fully exist on the same layer of reality as most Sims. Their true form and actions take place closer to the Limen, meaning that ordinary Sims cannot see them directly. To non-fairies, fairy activity passes unnoticed, misinterpreted, or explained away as coincidence.

Long before memory settled into history, in the deep forests and the half-dreams mortals forget upon waking, there existed the Limen. It was not a separate world, but a thin place layered beside the physical one, a threshold where emotion gathered weight and meaning. The Limen was shaped not by matter, but by feeling, grief pressed into the soil, joy caught like static in the air, fear echoing long after its source was gone.

From this accumulation of raw emotion, certain entities cohered. They were not born in any human sense, but condensed, self-aware knots of appetite and perception. These beings came to be known as Dustbound Fairies.

In earlier ages, when mortals lived closer to instinct and excess, the Dustbound fed easily. Ordinary emotions were plentiful and rich enough to sustain them. But as the world grew more rational, more restrained, emotion thinned. The Dustbound adapted or vanished.

Those who survived learned to hunt differently.

They discovered that emotions altered by intoxication, fear sharpened by chemicals, joy amplified beyond its natural limits, despair distorted into hallucination, carried far greater potency. These emotions did not merely nourish them, they flooded their inner hunger, surging it to fullness and holding it there, suspended, intoxicating, dangerous.

To endure the long spaces between such feedings, the Dustbound learned to use Fairy Dust, a shimmering residue produced through their own nature. It does not create their hunger, nor replace feeding, but regulates it, slowing decay, restoring control, allowing them to persist without unraveling.

And so the Dustbound drifted closer to mortal lives. They linger near revelry, near excess, near those willing to lose themselves. Mortals see them as eccentric, magnetic, slightly unreal. Few ever realize they are being watched, tasted, measured.

The Dustbound do not perceive themselves as cruel. Persuasion, charm, temptation, these are not indulgences but survival. Emotion must flow, and sometimes it must be encouraged.

Their true forms, wings half-formed from light and motion, features subtly wrong, exist closer to the Limen than to flesh. Only those whose perception is unguarded, toddlers and infants, or those whose minds are opened by powerful psychedelics, can truly see them. To others, the Dustbound pass unseen, folded neatly into the background of the waking world.