In answer the king rises from his seat and casts a handful of glowing dust into the air. There it hangs, beginning to spin gently around a central point. "Tales illuminate the Void of Being as star-fire illuminates that of Form. In one as in the other all things spin inwards upon themselves, and in so doing light is born that stretches seeking into the blackness." As he speaks a point of brilliant white flares in the center of the small cloud, and the rest of the dust forms a flat disc around it spinning faster and faster. "Thus are shadows born ever upon the edge, thus the rooted ones, the green-blood, are spun forth as a sphere looking ever to the light but never falling inwards."
Some of the dust had clumped together in spheres, turning round and round while the rest had thinned to stray wisps.
"So the Court of Stars is the light at the center?" Garin guesses.
"Yes, it is the desire of all tales to flow into one another into one all consuming point..." Pale lips twist into a grimace. "A god."
"But the system is not crashing inwards," you note trying to grasp the metaphor that is itself the literal truth of the fey. "It won't ever happen."
"No, and in this balance light serves its purpose—illuminating the whole, giving purpose and motion—but it also burns if one reaches too close." He pauses for a moment as though pondering the wisdom of continuing. "The mortals of the land called the Reach have stared too long into the light. If they do not avert their gazes then they will be filled with it as a vessel of glass and only through its will shall they be moved. Mistake me not, Dragon King, I do not speak of simple enchantment that the countless of my court can work on any single mortal, but rather of a realm where the veil between Form and Meaning thins as it had in the Days of Dawn. I have seen much of mortals of late, and I would judge that few of them would truly wish to live in their tales, no matter how pleasing to the ear."
"What sort of tales?" you ask, intrigued. You had not thought the darkling king would know so much of what is happening a thousand leagues and more away, but he did call himself a trader in secrets.
"One of grace and chivalry, righteous knights and beauteous maidens—a fortress and a stage all at once, a play in which mortals would have less room to improvise than they usually do."
A fairy tale land, you realize, a chill going down your spine. A literal godsdamned fairy tale land imposed by godlike power, a web spun of the very dreams of its inhabitants. There are worse fates in this world, powers truly malignant rather than merely strange, but the fey must be tempered, constrained by law and oath, perhaps as much for their own sake as that of mortals. The image wrought of dust and spell-fire still turns before you. They do not wish to fall inwards, but left to their own devices unopposed they might in time... a great deal of time, granted.
