Chapter Text
Deep within the tangle of roots that spread out from beneath the great oak until it reached the very borders of the clearing, the Fairy Queen of Sweet Dreams stirred. Something brushed the fringes of her awareness, troubling her sleep.
The touch was delicate at first, but it grew more insistent, prodding at her edges, pulling at the psychic threads that connected her to every tree in the Lands That Are, every bush and shrub, every flower and weed and clinging vine down to the last blade of grass. She felt the fungi as well, intertwined as they were with the roots of her plants, feathery mycelia mingling with the thinnest and most delicate fingers of the sun-loving things that were her proper domain as the Goddess of All That Is Green and Good.
Something plucked an immaterial thread so sharply it buzzed and twanged and almost tore asunder, and the goddess burst into sudden wakefulness, all-seeing eyes snapping open.
What was that?
The Fairy Queen knew a great many things, but this one was beyond her ken. It was cold, hollow, alien, and unutterably wrong.
She reached out and gently plucked a strand of the glittering web of awareness that stretched throughout the Wilderwood and far beyond, all the way to the sea, where the network of plants finally stopped. It was the same thread the unknown wrongness had assaulted. To her relief, it was undamaged and thrummed peacefully at her touch. The Goddess checked the other strands, listening to the pure, crystalline tones, but there was no trace of foreign taint.
The wrongness was gone, at least for now.
The goddess did not think it was gone forever.
She searched her long memory for anything similar to the icy emptiness, but the only echo it struck in her mind was the eternal dark at the end of time, and that was not a force, but an absence, trapped beyond the brink of eternity. The blackness there was now absolute, for the Fairy Queen had forged the last flickering gleam into trappings of starlight for the daughter of fire, Ella Ashmore.
Ella had returned the trappings after wreaking her vengeance upon the trolls who had murdered her family and friends. She had asked the goddess to protect them along with the innocent corpses whose burning blood had summoned her back from the Realm of Death, and the goddess had agreed. The starlight slippers would stay with Ella’s severed feet, and Ella herself would keep the feet the revenge spell had created for her in their absence.
It was an elegant solution to the spell’s weakness, and the part of the Fairy Queen that felt human emotions was proud that the child of ash had devised it.
Lady Ashmore would have been proud, too, had she lived to see her daughter’s wisdom, but had she lived, Ella would never have summoned the goddess from death. For this reason, the goddess was grateful to the Lady for dying, as her sacrifices had been in vain. That which has not drawn breath cannot rule death.
Ella had left Ashmore for the royal castle, where she reigned as queen. Rule had not been part of her original plan for vengeance, but it had sprung directly from that sweet dream. Inasmuch as the Fairy Queen hoped for anything that involved humans, she hoped Ella was happy to wear the crown. She had her own proper domain now, of human lives instead of green, and it was her duty to help them flourish.
The cold, empty wrongness the goddess had sensed lingered in her thoughts like a smothering blanket of snow, but it held a chill no spring could thaw. She must find the cause of it, and the easiest way to do that would be to call upon the other Old Gods for aid in her search.
The Fairy Queen of Sweet Dreams closed her all-seeing eyes and vanished from the world of plants and people and rocks and hills, bound for stranger realms.