Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

7th of January 2007 A.D.

Essence Restored to full from Two Days of Fey Revelry

What do the deathless fey who know not time or want, who need not thread to spin into bright garb nor food to sate their hunger or drink to quench their thirst care for mortal limitations? So might a poet describe bright Avalon where Titania's court bathes in the light of her own presence. But as you watch the the games unfold, competitions in deadly earnest devolve into prank wars and swords finer than mortal forging being handed off as trinkets high nobles peering over the shoulders of artisans and offering advice, for they too had once walked that path for a day, a month, a century another word comes to mind: Ren-Fair, After all you had been to a few when you were little and it definitely feels more like that than the palace in Sanctuary with its bureaucrats and taxmen. Handcrafted paper flower crowns mix with whorls of ancient Celtic gold in the market, silk crowns are bartered for favors a thousand years old. Here a dwarf with a beard of living ivy pens a book of dreams, there a tooth fairy collects bottle caps like an array of rare coins.

Just in the time you've been here, which the Archive assures you is flowing concomitantly with the Earth standard, you have had to turn down an offer for a music recital from a nymph with the power to claim people's favorite songs and make them feel nothing at all over them only to them trade that enduring love, in skydiving for pixie kin who have to bind their wings to partake in it and explained the concept of an MMO to a knight in emerald armor of the kind that had once stood at the crossroads to challenge knights with lance and shield.

And yet for all the thought twisting entertainment there is a heaviness in the air as though each dance is the last before the dancers must ride to war, as though each game of chance is for the ultimate stakes. They do not know what the queen is up to, the satyrs, the centaurs, the talking lions with the faces of men on and on though forms and shapes uncounted, each more fantastical in garb and extraordinary in manner, but they can feel the darkness in you and they know that such as that is not oft invited to sup with the queen so they come, they ask, they question as far as courtesy and courage will allow. Knights beg a dance, ladies in daring not-quite-Victorian garb titter behind colorful ornate fans. You've even had a fellow with a red coat, a top hat and a bright golden scarf come up to you, his face familiar yet hard to place.

"What was..." you motion after the behatted fey, bemused as you catch the Archive in the corner with a drinking horn of frothing apple juice.

"Oh that's a Pete, Prince of Humbugs. He and his subjects are still new so you don't see them in the mortal word much yet," she explains.

"Wait that sounds familiar... P. T. Barnum became a faerie, a whole kind of faerie?"

"Not him, more the idea of him in the mortal imagination, the changed how mortals interact with art and entertainment, he turned mere carnivals to big top circuses." She drops her voice a bit. "He might be looking for a promotion considering what's coming, all of them are really. They want to know what's shaken up the queen enough that Kincaid is sitting over there trying to put a dent in her wine casks."

She spoke lightly but you have to ask: "He's gonna be alright, right?"

"Fey wine's only as strong as you want it to be, he's mostly doing it since it's impolite to approach someone busy at their cups," she explains, pauses. "Oh... they managed to co drag back Lady Laoise, not without great battle though, if the Enemy did not know before it does now, not like Fleeting Dawn at all."

For your part you'd only caught glimpse of the narwhal's back among the choppy waters yesterday of the lake yesterday, but the trap had been so smooth that it had scarcely agitated the rumor mill more than the waters. "What about the last one, Ellawyn?"

"That I think is for the others to handle in New York, either that or she's gone to ground is the desire to preserve assets had overcome its spite towards all that is," the girl explains, glancing up at the great stain glass windows of the hall, the panes slowly moving in a clockwork dance, the colors shifting into one another in a pattern of time keeping she had confided was, from experience 'too obtuse to be worth the headache of understanding'. "She'll want you to de-worm them tonight. Do you want me to mention the gift before or afterwards? After would have the advantage that your sorcery will have proven itself, but before would make it look like you thought ahead to the danger of the Enemy doing... something to the Lady. It's a gamble but one that could gain you greater regard and higher favor by."

"In public," you wince.

She seems sympathetic, but can only offer a shrug. "It's Summer, there's a reason they got the ringmaster and showman, panache is their shield and elan their sword."

When do you reveal the gift to Lily?

[] Before the exorcisms

[] After the exorcism

OOC: Hope I was able to do the strangeness of deep Faerie justice.