Prince of the Courts

Prologue

Sera had been 11 the first time she dreamed of him. It had been among the first of her dreams that felt different. These ones were special. Sometimes they held hints of what the future could be, sometimes they felt so strongly of the present that Sera was certain that they were really happening at that moment, and sometimes they took on a faded quality that made them feel like things that had already happened.

This dream was strong, and its sense of immediacy was overwhelming. This was happening. This was real.

Great, dark trees rose all around her, high into the night sky, exaggerated by dream sense, as things often are. They ringed an expansive clearing where glimmering Faerie lights floated in the air, unsupported, twinkling with a lazy grace. Starlight shone down on the clearing, adding to the ethereal illumination.

The dream flashed, and now the space was filled with beautiful and terrible creatures, creatures she never could have imagined. Slender bodies in every imaginable hue, some winged, some horned, others even more exotic. Flowing hair shimmered in wild colours, and jarred the eye with incongruous glimpses of chitin and claws. Feral eyes flashed above perfect smiles, and delicate limbs sometimes ended in talons or hooves. She couldn't hear the music, but she knew it was there and could feel it thrumming through her chest, pulling at her heart without being able to hear a single note. She could see some of the Fey farther back in the trees, dancing and twisting in the night, helplessly ensnared by the music and throwing away every thought except of dancing more in their lust for pleasure.

Wings fluttered impatiently and antlers twisted around as heads turned to see what was happening at the far end of the clearing. Sera slipped closer in her dream, sliding through the crowd of achingly beautiful monsters. She drifted through the last bit of spectators and could at last see what was drawing their attention.

A great throne of twisted oak rose from the earth, clearly not an original part of the clearing. Gnarled limbs extended from the back, twisting upward almost painfully, cursed to never again know the clean lines their limbs once bore proudly. Upon the throne was a Faerie woman of surpassing beauty, her elaborately-styled red tresses so lush even in a dream that Sera ached to reach out and touch them. She was gowned in diaphanous gold, the folds clinging where they should and flowing gracefully everywhere else. A crown was just visible in her hairstyle, and Sera surmised that this must be the Seelie Queen she had heard of during her mother's lectures.

The silent music humming through her chest faded and the Seelie Queen rose from her throne with grace that spoke of a thousand years of addressing her subjects. Her ice-blue eyes pierced the assembled crowd and Sera could feel the weight of that gaze as it swept by her, the power that radiated from a Queen of Faerie. Rosebud lips parted and the Queen spoke,

"Welcome, my faithful and loyal subjects. The Seelie Court makes free with its food and drink this night, that you may revel and take pleasure in it and from each other," she paused as the crowd cheered and raised glasses filled with every colour of drink Sera could imagine, and a few she couldn't.

"Even now, the Nephilim and their Downworld allies celebrate the renewal of their Accords in the City of Glass, without the Fair Folk." The crowd hissed at this, and the Queen raised her hands to stay their anger.

"The Nephilim children do not understand that we, the most powerful and oldest of Races, care nothing for their human laws. If they think to grind us under their heels, they will learn to their woe that we were here long before their kind, and will live on long after they are wiped from this earth."

The gathered Faeries stamped loudly with ill-assorted feet and hooves, cheering wildly and Sera could feel the blood-lust growing in the crowd, that feeling that comes from being on the very precipice of becoming a mob.