Old Folk and New Folk

Old Folk and New Folk names a racial and historical division in the mythology of Outremonde. The Old Folk are the ancient beings who claim that the world once belonged to them; the New Folk are the peoples now inhabiting and transforming it, especially mortals and the societies associated with them. In the late confrontation between Vainqueur Knightsbane and Mag Mell, the distinction becomes a program for conquest: the Fomors intend to kill the New Folk, reclaim Outremonde, and eventually carry their war to Earth. Yet the wider story complicates the division by showing that the supposedly empty or conquered frontier is already inhabited, that present populations are shaped by earlier catastrophes, and that political recognition can turn a monster’s territorial claim into a state.

Definition and Historical Claim

The Old Folk and New Folk opposition rests on a claim of prior possession. Mag Mell describes the Fomors as enduring beings and treats the New Folk as intruders who have polluted lands that properly belong to the older races. The desired restoration is not merely cultural or religious. It is territorial: Outremonde is imagined as a quiet domain in which the Old Folk once ruled, and the Fomors’ coming war is intended to make that former order sovereign again.

The category is therefore inseparable from memory. Mag Mell invokes an ancient past in which the Old Folk ruled Outremonde, while Vainqueur Knightsbane rejects the implication that the Fomors possess a unique right to rule. He insists that he has always ruled and argues that the weakness belongs to the Fomors, who allowed mortals to defeat them. Their disagreement reveals two rival versions of antiquity: Mag Mell treats age as legitimacy, whereas Vainqueur treats continuing power as proof of rightful dominion.

The book also supplies a material history beneath the mythic language. The southern region surrounding Vainqueur’s castle is a harsh landscape of badlands, arroyos, sparse vegetation, and a vast red desert, with a small manling village at the foot of the volcano and primitive encampments near the desert’s edge. Vainqueur remembers having flown over the area two centuries earlier, when it appeared much greener. The transformation is later attributed to the Sablaris, a dark elf empire that ruled much of the southern continent, Ishfania, and Barin before cultists of Sablar the destroyer seized power and caused a magical cataclysm that converted their empire into a red desert. “Old” and “new” thus conceal layers of displacement: the land has been altered by earlier imperial violence before the Fomors claim it as an untouched inheritance.

The Fomor Doctrine

Mag Mell presents the New Folk as a contaminating presence rather than as political communities with their own histories. He declares that all New Folk who pollute the Fomors’ lands will die, attributing the threat to his champion, Mighty King Balaur. The planned Wild Hunt is described as a horde numbering in the millions, first directed against mortals and then against Earth, which the Fomors regard as the nest from which the newer peoples came or to which they have spread.

The doctrine joins biological metaphor to religious and military violence. Mag Mell calls mortals vermin and their magic a disease, then describes extermination as a cure. The Fomors will hunt mortals into their houses, kill the last of them, and make Outremonde pure again. This language converts conquest into sanitation: the victims are denied political standing, while violence is made to appear necessary for the restoration of health and order.

The promised reward makes the ideology materially explicit. Vainqueur is offered fairy gold and mortal flesh for joining the campaign. Mag Mell further claims that the Fomors can raise gold from the air and shape slaves from dirt, presenting limitless production and disposable labor as proof that their civilization can sustain total war. The offer exposes the practical foundation beneath the rhetoric of purity: the proposed restoration depends on treasure, bodies, magical manufacture, and control of land.

Opposition to Vainqueur Knightsbane

Vainqueur does not reject the Fomor program because he embraces equality among the races. His refusal is rooted in appetite, sovereignty, and distrust. He asks why he should exterminate his favorite food when killing all the lesser peoples would leave him without coins and princesses. His objection is logistical as much as ethical: the New Folk are resources, prey, sources of wealth, and participants in the economic world that sustains his hoard.

He also refuses subordination. When Mag Mell offers him a place beside the Fomor king, Vainqueur warns the fairy to leave before he devours him and declares that Vainqueur Knightsbane is nobody’s pet. The phrase makes the conflict a contest between competing supremacies. The Fomors want to recruit the great dragon as a weapon in their restorationist war; Vainqueur will not exchange his independent rule for a subordinate role in another ancient order.

This resistance is sharply different from a liberal defense of the New Folk. Vainqueur continues to regard mortals and other peoples as lesser beings, and his rule is marked by coercion. He accepts gnoll tribes into his service after they flee the cruel undead Furibon, but he also eats twenty troublesome gnolls before they begin obeying. His conduct shows that the Old Folk and New Folk binary cannot be mapped neatly onto good and evil: opposition to extermination may arise from self-interest and possessive empire rather than compassion.

Frontier Politics and Reclassification

The concept acquires another meaning through the political transformation of Ishfania. After Brandon Maure’s death and the destruction of his army, Ishfania ceases to exist as a nation, but its demon-infested desert still contains enough resources to attract rival powers. The possibility of another Century War makes the region’s status an urgent question rather than a matter of ancient memory.

The proposed Gardemagne–Ishfania Mutual Protection Pact responds by recognizing Vainqueur’s claim as Emperor of Ishfania and treating his territory as an official adventurer state. In exchange, Vainqueur promises that Gardemagne and his country will never take arms against each other and will fight together against outside threats. The agreement converts a monster’s conquest into a recognized political order while preserving his access to the Adventurer Guild and his Emperor class.

This treaty demonstrates how the boundary between old and new authority is administratively negotiated. Vainqueur is not simply an ancient creature returning to a primordial homeland; he is a new ruler whose legitimacy is produced through recognition, territory, resources, treaties, and institutions. The same frontier that the Fomors describe through ancestral entitlement is managed by states through maps, legal status, military protection, and economic access.

Narrative Significance and Ending

Old Folk and New Folk gives the book a language for examining competing claims to civilization. The Fomors invoke age, purity, and recovery; Gardemagne invokes treaties and state recognition; Vainqueur invokes possession and appetite; the displaced populations of the southern frontier reveal the costs of earlier empires and catastrophes. None of these positions is detached from material power. Each defines who may inhabit the land, who may command labor, and whose history counts as legitimate.

The final exchange leaves the conflict unresolved. Mag Mell warns that, on the solstice, the New Folk will eventually come for Vainqueur and his kind as well. The warning reverses the Fomors’ confident hierarchy: those labeled intruders may become the force that challenges the older monsters. Mag Mell then curses in an archaic language, merges with the earth, and vanishes, while Vainqueur returns to shopping. The contrast is deliberately comic but structurally important. A prophecy of genocidal war enters the narrative beside the dragon’s mundane pursuit of acquisitions, making the looming struggle feel both immense and absurd.

The concept’s lasting force lies in that contradiction. “Old” does not guarantee justice, and “new” does not guarantee innocence. The terms are weapons used by rival powers to naturalize ownership and violence, while the story’s frontier politics continually redraw the line between invader, ruler, survivor, servant, and citizen.