...The Feerie Queen held court in the space where sunlight bent wrong, where seasons happened all at once, where a moment could be a year and a year could be a breath. She was beautiful in the way a storm is beautiful, in the way a hunting beast is beautiful, terrible and complete and utterly indifferent to mortal concepts of kindness. She had summoned a human to her service, not out of love but because his particular stubbornness amused her. He would age differently here, time would treat him strangely, and by the time he ever returned to the mortal world, all he had known would be dust. But that was not her concern. She tended the wild things, the deep growing things, the magic that predated human kingdoms by aeons, and mortals were less than mayflies in her timeline. She smiled at her newest servant with teeth like pearls, and gestured him deeper into the forest where strange music played...