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wondered in that moment if changelings were made to never quite fit in so that they would better cleave to their true masters when called upon.
Gave me new purpose when I was lost and alone. It’s better than being alone. I just… I was just curious as to what it is like to have real memories.”
“Are not the memories afterwards real?” “They are, or rather as real as memories I could make are.
Of all the dresses, I found it hard to believe this was created to be this way, that it had no former life as a tapestry.
the sight of a silver tree. On its branches was an enormous eagle with a parcel at its feet.
Bäumchen, rüttel dich und schüttel dich, wirf Gold und Silber über mich.
little tree,
shake and shake,
throw gold and silver
upon me
fairy tale.
aschenputtel
She probably just thinks it funny to reference a magical tree that grants dresses.” “A tree that grows on her mother’s grave.”
It was nothing like the high-waisted gown my mother wore in one charcoal sketch my brother and I had of her, evoking none of the classical simplicity or elegance of that past. Instead it was that stiffness of portraiture in the Vandyke style, reminding me of old attic dresses and moth-riddled doublets.
“Technically,” said Miss Davenport. “She’s only invited the fae.” “But aren’t you–” “Changeling.” “I thought–” “Many people do.”
It was a strangeness that it was tempting to call freedom, yet this unanchored movement unsettled me. It filled me with a sense of falling, heart lurching to my throat and a tempest roiling within my chest.
framed in brass and bronze, wood and wonder.
They fragmented the light and made the spaces seem at once vast and yet so small compared to the infinity within the mirrors.
Behind me, the corridor was reproduced perfectly in its glassy depths, but everything looked colder and darker. I saw all the other mirrors, a hundred thousand reflections, all reflecting. It created a hypnotic pattern. Peering like this in a looking glass, it was all too easy to believe such reflections to be the sum of existence, that all was but shadow upon shadow, that the endless worlds were all centred on me, wide-eyed, pale and very afraid.
Mr Warner is a practised hand at such curiosities. His cases abound with articles manufactured for elfin use. He has scissors so minute that some hundreds of them go to the ounce; and there are knives belonging to the same family, which, small as they are, open and shut with a smart click. Mr Warner, we should imagine, works exclusively for the fairies – no doubt he is entitled by letters of patent to wear Oberon’s arms over his door.
The Masquerade was like clockwork.
might actually have been clockwork
the ballroom was lit by glittering chandeliers of sinuous tentacles, like jellyfishes of glass. Each feathery tentacle held within its grip a lit candle. They swayed, though not with the music.
The magnificent ceiling was obscured behind glassy ice. Gleaming icicles hung from the ceiling, clinging to the arched ribs.
that's nerve-inducing
less ornamentation and more the act of uncomprehending mimicry.
I felt that prickle of annoyance that I have known all my life about his height.
same, catherine, same
My brow furrowed, trying to make sense of that knot within me. It ached with a visceral familiarity, as though I had borne it within me all my life without knowledge of it.
“He’s… repeating himself?”
The ceramic mask swung open to reveal a ticking interior of clockwork.
“You’re not one of my automata!”
all very the madame de pompadour episode of doctor who
“Mr Coppelius Warner, watchmaker and jeweller. Always delighted to make the acquaintance of other humans in Arcadia.”
“It is rare to see a thing of beauty within the fae realms. And you are a sight for sore eyes.”
okaaaaaaaaaay
But someone has to keep things ticking around here.”
watchmaker's got jokes
I was touring with the Lady of the Green at the time. Though I do hear he was the one who started this fashion for theology in Arcadia. Soon all the lords and ladies will be acquiring themselves missionaries and situating them in decorative grottos. I should think you’d still look quite fetching in sackcloth.”
the pale queen's pet missionary
I was too used to how familiar Mr Benjamin was with the Bible. At his uncomprehending silence, I mumbled a hurried explanation: “I had thought you were making a reference to him preaching in the wilderness of Judea? Generation of vipers fleeing the wrath of God? It’s all about urging people towards the waters of repentance.”
garden hermits. I had thought them all the rage of late, paying some poor man to wear sackcloth, wander around your folly and spout mystical utterances.”
excellent hermitage built for theirs in Dorset. All very delightful and pastoral, as you can imagine. Setting up a little home for the hermit and a scatter of rustic possessions. Inviting guests to go ask questions of–” “I am not an ornamental hermit,”
“I am just a watchmaker. Theology is not my strong suit. Hell and sin and all that.”
theology may not be your strong suit, but arcadia is, & you've just shown laon a truth he knew but didn't want to acknowledge
“The Pale Queen has a deep love of intricate, interlocking machinery. If you want a masquerade to look right, you can’t leave it up to chance. And gentlemen do have a growing reputation for shunning dance.”
“The fae are well acquainted with the art of the simulacrum, but the ones they create are… well, shall we just say they aren’t very predictable. They aren’t very good at working with the metals. Dolls of flesh just aren’t the same. Too many variables. Excellent people, but just terrible machines. Too much thinking, or at least too much thinking that they’re thinking.”
is mr. ben a simulacrum? someone built for the pet missionary to preach to so he felt somewhat content?
And for all that I’ll be here for eternity,
how long HAVE you been here?
It was like an enormous automata clock.
How would another judge his large blue eyes and long brown lashes, the proud curve of his mouth?
yeah, you haven't ever looked
boi-howdy, are you a rotten liar
Would she think him as beautiful as I did?
“Beauty is of little consequence, brother. It hardly matters,”
Leaves of silver and gold crackled underfoot, crushed into the lush oriental carpets.
Suddenly, a knife was thrust in and jaggedly sawed downward. Even from here I could see that the torn paper revealed but naked brickwork and not some other place.
And yet there streamed from the gash in the wallpaper a flurry of dragonflies that each bore in the long dip of their tails an iridescent darkness. An antlered crone stepped through and she dragged in with her a triad of laughing spectres, figures traced from curling smoke. Pink, writhing earthworms festooned her branching antlers. The spectres threw off their hoods to reveal solid human-seeming faces and untied from their shoulders the obscuring mist.
The Tudor lady with the gable hood revealed herself to be half serpent,
The faces then came off, each of them to be masks atop ribboned rods. For many, there was simply no face underneath, only a strange hollowness. The stone woman was an exception to this as hers was of the same marble as her body. Her featureless eyes were empty of expression. Weatherworn and crumbling, she was missing the nose and half the chin. A glowing scrawl cut through the leaves that littered the gallery. It was impossible to make out what it said, but the text arced until it formed a circle. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and a red-capped man stood in the centre. He waved at another of
...more
I realised how foolishly shallow and limiting the Paracelsian theory was in understanding fae. “Except Paracelsus. I don’t believe he was ever invited to any parties.”
“If he was, he’d have met half of these fae,” I said. “Then he’d revise his theory about the elements.”
Something – or someone – had fallen down the chimney. A figure unfolded from the still-burning fire. They were of imposing height. They scowled as they took in the gallery, regarding Laon and me with coal-black eyes. White scars crisscrossed their face. What flesh wasn’t white was the bright, shiny red of freshly burnt skin. That flesh rippled and seeped blood as they lumbered from the fire. Black soot and white ash billowed and clung to their singed clothes.
Dark figures no more than a smudge the size of a fingernail appeared within a mirror. The figures grew larger, walking along the long gallery behind the glass. As they drew nearer, I could see that it was a couple with tawny brown skin. Antelope horns stretched from their temples and brown feathers wreathed their faces like the mane of a lion. They wore matching russet tailcoats.
JOKES
“Are they manticores?” said Laon. “Some sort of chimera?”
The portraits emptied and more poured in from the looking glasses. They appeared at first as reflection, a reflection that was not replicated across any other mirror.
