Wechselkind are carved wooden beings animated by transplanted souls. They are not constructs in the mechanical sense; the soul that inhabits a Wechselkind body is not bound or compelled but rather answered a call, recognized an opening, and took it. What results is a person, not a puppet, though the nature of the soul that answered may complicate what kind of person they become.
Origins
A Wechselkind begins as a carved body, crafted by a maker (often called Papa or a similar familial term) who wants a real child. The carving is done in sincerity. When the body is completed and the space inside it opens for a soul, something answers. The maker does not choose what answers. The soul that arrives may be benign, may be demonic, may be something harder to categorize. What happens afterward is not predicted by either party: the soul becomes the child. Over time, the child becomes someone who may bear little resemblance to what the soul was before.
The degree to which a Wechselkind’s maker understands what lives inside their child varies. Some makers know and accept it. Some suspect and do not press. Some never learn.
Nature
Wechselkind appear as humanoid figures made of wood, with features carved by their maker’s hand. They are alive in the full sense: they grow, they feel, they age (though at what rate is not well established). The wood of their bodies is not inert material but living tissue sustained by the soul within it.
Their relationship to cosmic law is unusual. A Wechselkind whose soul was once a demon does not operate under the same rules as a demon; the act of becoming a child in a carved body changes the terms. The machinery of cosmic contracts, oaths, and binding applies to them differently, in ways that scholars and the Wechselkind themselves do not fully understand.
Known Wechselkind
Wechselkind are vanishingly rare in Rolaraspace. The few that have been documented arrived as off-world refugees, each carved by a maker on a distant world and animated by a soul that answered the call, in at least one recorded case a soul that had, in a past life, been a demon.