Poison of Gull (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
writtendestiny) wrote2018-06-01 08:40 pm
writtendestiny) wrote2018-06-01 08:40 pm
Entry tags:
Canon Information
As Poison's canon has no comprehensive wiki, her story can be found below.
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Poison was born to Hew and Faraway, in the village of Gull, deep in the heart of a region called the Black Marshes. The name of the village was whimsical in itself since none of the residents had ever so much as seen a gull, let alone been to the sea. The village was built up on stilts above a murky lake, platforms and wooden bridges linking the separate homes and winding between enormous corkscrew trees and grassy sandbars bulking out of the weed-choked water.
Sometimes the water would rise almost to the level of the houses, and sometimes it would sink so low that you would be able to see the dark shapes of creatures swimming in the muddied depths.
In the Black Marshes, life was precious, and the only solid ground was that which you built yourself.
When Poison was twelve, her mother died of swamp lung, just after giving birth to her second child – Poison's sister, Azalea. Her father remarried, wedding a cold beauty from the next village named Snapdragon, and from the beginning there was friction between stepmother and stepdaughter, and they hated one another with a fierce, bitter intensity only kept under control by their mutual desire to see Hew happy.
But how, you might wonder, did she come to be called Poison? No parent would give their new born such a name, and the answer is simple – she is called Poison because she chose that name for herself. Until the age of fourteen, Poison's name was Foxglove, but on her fourteenth birthday everyone in the village gathered around a platform to hear the name that she’d chosen to be called from then on, as was tradition for the people of the marshes. An outcast amongst the villagers even at that age, no one was surprised when she proclaimed that her new name would be 'Poison', a choice provoked by an argument that she had had with Snapdragon the morning of the choosing.
From then on and to the end of her days that would be her name, and she'd only grow further away from her family and everyone else around her. By the time her sixteenth birthday arrived, it had been forgotten by both of her parents, and she spent it entirely alone.
Being young and constantly at odds with everyone around her turned Poison into a sullen and quiet girl who would more often than not speak only to gain a reaction, be it for good or ill. She would not trust easily, after being burned one too many times by those she thought closest to her, and she yearned for more than a simple life in the marshes. It was difficult to live that way, and she sometimes grew envious of the other girls, the 'normal' girls who were content with their lives. When every other child was stillborn, one in five died before the age of thirteen from swamp lung and girls and boys were snatched up every month by the swamp monsters or the phaeries, it was impossible for Poison not to want to do something about it, and the constant lack of action from the other villages only lent itself to her ever-mounting frustrations.
Her only solace in the dull village was an old man known as Fleet, who was said to be the only one of them who had ever left the village. He brought back trinkets and stories for the curious and strange young girl every time he returned, and she would spend a great deal of time with him despite the general disapproval of the village.
On Soulswatch Eve of her sixteenth year, Poison had her first real brush with the Phaerie Realm – specifically, with a creature called the Scarecrow. On Soulswatch Eve of her sixteenth year, the phaeries stole Poison's baby sister, and replaced her with a Changeling.
After saving the creature from Snapdragon's attempts to drown it – knowing that killing the Changeling would destroy any chance of getting her sister back – Poison immediately took the terrible thing to Fleet in the hopes that he would be able to tell her what to do. She'd done the right thing in saving it, but Changelings were difficult to care for and many couples would break in doing so, hoping that their own child would be returned.
Poison's grief quickly gave way to anger, and she made the decision to travel to the Realm of the Phaeries and demand that they return her sister to her.
She sought out the wraith-catcher, a man who would come to the village on Soulswatch Eve to catch the marshwraiths that came out on that single night, for a price, and bought passage on his cart to the city of Shieldtown. This particular wraith-catcher was named Bram, and he quickly became protective of the young girl brought under his care. He was good company, answered her unending questions and never made her feel threatened in the way a young girl of Poison's size might feel threatened by a grown man of his.
After over a week in his company they finally arrived at the outskirts of Shieldtown, and it was here that Poison finally realised the true scale of things. In the Black Marshes, everything was so hemmed in that she never saw the full extent of the sky, nor realised that the place she lived was, in fact, contained in a bowl in the ground, as if someone had dropped that particular area of land several dozen feet further down than the land around it.
Once in Shieldtown, on Fleet's instructions, she sought out a man named Lamprey. Accompanied by Bram she made her way through the city and, as night fell, was introduced to another marsh-dweller returning to Gull, who agreed to take a message back to her parents. The girl was travel worn and tired, with dark, haunted eyes, and had Poison only thought to ask for her name, her journey may have stopped at that moment.
For it was her sister, Azalea, aged by the time she had spent in the Phaerie Realm that Poison met that night, though she would not discover this until much later.
Lamprey only came out at night, and when Poison finally met him, it became clear why that was. The man was Phaerie-cursed, drowned by a Kelpie in a Phaerie river and now slowly rotting away, yet still living. Though terribly afraid, Poison answered the riddle he set her, and in return, he had to answer her question. He told her how to reach a passing-place, a spot where the Realms touched, and a place where she’d be able to move between one and the other.
The passing-place was home to Maeb, an old and powerful woman known as the Bone Witch. Blind and deaf, she kept two massive dogs to be her eyes and ears and her sense of smell was keen. Poison had to enter the house when the moon was full, and leave the house the next night after midnight had passed, but it wasn't a simple matter of hiding and waiting. There were things that lived in the spaces between the worlds, and she wouldn't want to meet them. While the sun was up she wouldn't have to worry about the witch, but she still had to look out for the dogs.
It was with a heavy heart that she left Bram, having grown fond of the cantankerous old man, but she ventured into the house as the sun set, getting inside by using the coal chute. Using the last small amount of daylight before the witch woke to explore the house, she was caught out by the strange passage of time between Realms, and it was sooner than she thought that night fell, and the Bone Witch rose. Terrified once more, Poison followed a small cat that had joined her on her exploration of the house. It led her through the corridors and up to a small room, where she met a girl of around her own age dressed in a nightgown and holding a candle.
The girl sprayed her with a strong perfume to hide her from the Bone Witch’s sense of smell, and hid her under the bed until Maeb was driven off, finally, by the cat scratching her nose as she felt for Poison underneath the girl’s bed. She introduced herself as Peppercorn, but told Poison that she mustn't stay – Maeb was after her now, and she’d come back with her dogs to find her. She made her way back to the cellar, intending to hide there for the rest of the night and the next day, with only a momentary flash of fear as one of the witch’s dogs appeared to have found her.
Then, the Bone Witch caught her.
In despair, Poison thought then that her journey was over before it had even begun. Peppercorn, though she saw her in the cage, was too afraid to rescue her despite Poison's urging. Her rescue did come, though, in the form of the ornery wraith-catcher, who had been coaxed into the house by Peppercorn's cat, Andersen. He broke her free of the cage and together, the two of them came up with a plan.
They poisoned the Bone Witch's dogs and skinned them, using their fur to try and fool the Bone Witch into thinking they were her pets, but her sense of smell was far too keen and she knew from the smell of blood that something was amiss. She gave chase, and a quick dodge by Poison sent the witch tumbling into her own cauldron, where she promptly boiled alive.
On Bram's urging they brought Peppercorn (who had fainted twice upon seeing Poison covered in blood) and they moved into the Realm of the Phaerie, not knowing what would await them once they stepped through the bone gate of Maeb's house. From there, they followed Andersen, who seemed to know exactly where he was going. At the edge of a lake they came across a peculiar individual named Myrrk, who claimed to have been fishing for a hundred years while never catching anything to eat. Upon learning where they wished to go he sent a signal using firewort, calling for a being he called the Coachman, who would take them straight to the Phaerie Lord's palace.
Told to go and see the Hierophant, Poison reached the palace of the Phaerie Lord in quick time thanks to the Coachman, and were met by a man who introduced himself as Scriddle. Without much ado he took them straight to the throne of Lord Aelthar, under the terms of Amrae's Law, which granted an audience with the Phaerie Lord during which they could not be harmed. Despite the carefully constructed speech that Poison had held in her head until that moment, all she could do when the time came was bluntly request the return of her sister, and the laughter that the request provoked turned the young woman’s fear to a white-hot fury. She screamed at the Phaerie Lord, hotly insulting him and defying his 'reasons' for the Phaerie Realm's treatment of humankind. Impressed with her spirit, Lord Aelthar whisked the two of them away to speak in private, and made a proposition - if she would complete a task for him, he would return her sister to her.
The task was to steal a dagger belonging to Lady Asinastra, the Lady of the Realm of Spiders, and Poison readily agreed to undertake it.
Accompanied by Bram, Peppercorn and Andersen, Poison entered the Realm of the Spiders, but it was alone that she ventured into the palace. Climbing a length of thick webbing she dropped into one of the crumbling castle, an enormous spider hot on her heels. Inside, after she’d gathered herself and checked herself for injuries, she began her search. Finally, after hours of searching, she entered a room with the heavily pregnant corpse of a woman slumped over in a chair, and the dagger sticking out of the top of a horned helmet. Willing herself not to be shaken by the dead woman, she retrieved the dagger, only to turn and find that the corpse had moved.
Lady Asinastra had her, but she claimed audience under Amrae's Law, and while the Lady of Cobwebs shrieked her aggravation, Poison used a small orb that Aelthar had given to her to immediately transport her and her companions back to his palace. Not, however, before claiming herself the Phaerie Lord's thief.
Phaeries couldn't be trusted any more than unicorns, however, and soon after waking back in the Phaerie Lord’s realm, the dagger was taken from her by Scriddle, removing the only leverage that she had in her attempts to get her sister back. Realising that they might now be in danger, Poison began to think that it might be better if they weren't sitting around and waiting when Scriddle came back. With Andersen's help they escaped the room they were locked in - Scriddle had left the key in the other side of the door - and the cat led them unerringly through the corridors of the palace until they reached a space in between the walls, eventually coming to a grille in the walls where the cat forced them to stop before anyone had even entered the room that it looked out over.
Predictably, who entered the room was first the Phaerie Lord, and then his secretary, Scriddle. Bemoaning the presence of humans in his lands, the Phaerie Lord unwittingly revealed the current tensions in the Realm to the watching humans, and that the mysterious Hierophant was up to something. Scriddle was revealed to be half-human, something which had stopped him rising any higher in Lord Aelthar's employ than the position of secretary. Finally, Aelthar demanded that the group of humans be killed, not knowing that they could hear every word.
The realisation that Aelthar had never intended to give her sister back almost sent Poison into despair once again, but she resolved in that moment that if he wouldn't give Azaelea back, then Poison would take her.
Stowing away in the Phaerie Lord's retinue as he made his way to visit the Hierophant, they made their way to the castle. It was by magic that they arrived, much to Bram's distaste, and in the library of the Hierophant's home they met a man who Poison had never thought to see again - her old friend, Fleet.
Fleet was an Antiquarian, a biographer of the Realms whose job was to not only collect stories, but witness them and, where necessary, help them along. Unbound by race or loyalty they soaked up the tales, histories and myths of every Realm and brought them back to the Hierophant's castle. It was the Hierophant, he told them, who decided what was possible, and Poison in her unending curiosity desired to know more. Fleet had been watching her all her life, taking in her experiences and those of the people around her to be written in the books of the library.
It was a difficult thing for Poison to grasp - that everything was just a story, even her own life.
The Hierophant didn't only write stories, he had the power to change them, and that was what made him one of the most feared people in any of the Realms. Anything he wrote, the Realms were bound by - Amrae's Law, for instance - and that made him a force to be reckoned with. His name was Melcheron, and it was his words that would finally drive Poison to the end of her patience, and almost to the end of her life.
Learning the truth broke her utterly, and Poison couldn't cope with the undeniable fact that her entire life had been the product of another's fiction. The most natural reaction in the world seemed to be to go limp and stop struggling, with the possibility that he was lying not even entering her head. Somehow, she'd known the truth even before he had told her. None of it was real, and if she only thought that she was choosing for herself, then why bother?
It wasn't long, though, before the effects of Poison giving up on life began to seep into the world around her. Her friends and the castle's residents sickened, with even the walls themselves seeming paler and thinner. Everything was fading away, and Poison didn't care. The story was unraveling around her as she chose not to eat or drink and simply lay in bed, apologising to her friends for what she was doing to them by her inaction.
It was Bram who finally got through to her, forcing her to see that she did have a choice, and that she was making it - she was choosing to die, and to take everyone with her, and no one could stop her, but nothing gave her the right to kill them all whether or not they were fiction. Bram had realised, though Poison couldn't see it, that the whole world was going along with her because they were in her story, and if she died, everything would disappear.
Her recovery was quick, and with it came the collective lifting of the malaise that had settled over the castle. It was on the day that Fleet declared her fully fit that the Hierophant was murdered, stabbed in the back with the very dagger that Poison had stolen from Lady Asinastra.
Their hopes of finding the name of the killer in Melcheron's tale were dashed by their discovery that the book had been removed from the library, but her suspicions of Aelthar were only strengthened by the presence of the Scarecrow - the creature that had stolen her sister. It was a formidable adversary, but in a moment of quick thinking on the edge of the unnatural sleep forced by the Phaerie being, she threw a lamp at it, setting it on fire and destroying it for good. Revenge was indeed sweet.
Poison fled the Hierophant's castle and found an ally in Grugaroth, Lord of the Trolls. Under his protection she returned and accused Lord Aelthar and Lady Pariasa, the Hierophant's wife, of Melcheron's murder. However, her accusations were turned away when it was revealed that Aelthar had never seen the dagger that he had sent her for, and Scriddle denied that Poison had come back with it at all.
Aelthar claimed a simple grudge, grounded in his taking Poison's sister many years ago, but Poison pressed on with her case, stating that Pariasa and Aelthar's rooms should be searched for Melcheron's book. Finding the book would reveal the murderer, but a search by the Antiquarians didn't find it. Meanwhile, Aelthar suggested that each of the lords and ladies put forth their own candidates for the vacated position of the Hierophant, immediately suggesting his secretary, Scriddle.
In that moment the pieces fell into place for Poison, and she knew what was happening. Scriddle intended to wipe out the Realm of Man, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Not long after the murder of the Hierophant, Lord Aelthar summoned Poison to meet with him privately. Again, she accused him of plotting Melcheron's murder, and though he didn't deny that he'd taken advantage of the opportunity, he did deny the murder itself. However, Aelthar suspected Scriddle, and he confided as much to Poison, telling her that he had given her the task of retrieving the dagger believing that she could never accomplish it. She did, though the Phaerie Lord never put his hands on the weapon, and it had only been a convenient part of Scriddle and Pariasa's plans that the knife they used to murder the Hierophant would belong to the Lady Asinastra.
Again, Lord Aelthar offered Poison a deal. He showed her an image of her sister, revealing to her that humans were taken only for the purposes of breeding, so that he might find the perfect replacement for the Hierophant. He promised Poison that her sister had not yet been 'used', and if she retracted her statement of his guilt in front of the lords and ladies, then returned home and never bothered him again, he would return her to Poison immediately.
How could she resist such an offer? After conferring briefly with her friends, she returned to Aelthar to give him her answer, only to find that he had been poisoned in the short time she'd been away. Lady Asinastra had got her revenge. The Phaerie Lord was dead.
Moments later, Scriddle and Pariasa entered the rooms. Though she tried to hide, she was discovered, and almost killed by the furious half-human as he admitted to her that they had never had her sister to give back to her. It was only then that Poison realised that the girl she had seen in Shieldtown had been Azaelea, and that the entire journey could have been avoided had she only asked for her name.
Pariasa knew as well as Scriddle did what Melcheron had been writing, what had been in his book and it was the Lady's pleas to spare her life that finally pushed the last piece into place, and she knew what her story was and exactly why she was there. Poison's story had never been that of a girl who left the marshes, traveled to the Realm of the Phaerie and brought her sister back.
Poison was the new Hierophant, and killing her before the end of her tale would bring an end to everything.
Even knowing this, Scriddle still stabbed her. Immediately, everything began to come apart, even more quickly than it had when Poison had been starving herself. He stabbed her a second time, and would have finished her with a third had Pariasa not come to her rescue, burying a dagger of her own into the neck of her lover. She wanted to live, and as the Trolls burst into the room, Poison blacked out.
Poison was alive, Pariasa's magic having undone most of the damage caused by Scriddle's dagger and the lore of the Antiquarians helping the rest of the way. She quickly regained her strength, enjoying the company of her friends despite her weakness, and for the first time she began to feel as if she truly belonged. Bram departed, much to her sorrow, but Peppercorn and Andersen stayed, and Fleet instructed her well. Melcheron had never counted on his own murder, and the new Hierophant was utterly untrained.
All the while, Poison had been privately reserving the right to refuse the position, but as days and weeks wore on she found that as much as she had been expected to become the new Hierophant, she was also expecting it. It fitted her like a cloak, and nothing else would so.
Her first story, of course, was her own. Who better to write her story than herself? She wrote, uninterrupted, for two days and nights thought it felt like only moments to her, and when she finally closed the book and the title bloomed across the cover, she smiled.
"Poison.
It would suffice."
Poison was born to Hew and Faraway, in the village of Gull, deep in the heart of a region called the Black Marshes. The name of the village was whimsical in itself since none of the residents had ever so much as seen a gull, let alone been to the sea. The village was built up on stilts above a murky lake, platforms and wooden bridges linking the separate homes and winding between enormous corkscrew trees and grassy sandbars bulking out of the weed-choked water.
Sometimes the water would rise almost to the level of the houses, and sometimes it would sink so low that you would be able to see the dark shapes of creatures swimming in the muddied depths.
In the Black Marshes, life was precious, and the only solid ground was that which you built yourself.
When Poison was twelve, her mother died of swamp lung, just after giving birth to her second child – Poison's sister, Azalea. Her father remarried, wedding a cold beauty from the next village named Snapdragon, and from the beginning there was friction between stepmother and stepdaughter, and they hated one another with a fierce, bitter intensity only kept under control by their mutual desire to see Hew happy.
But how, you might wonder, did she come to be called Poison? No parent would give their new born such a name, and the answer is simple – she is called Poison because she chose that name for herself. Until the age of fourteen, Poison's name was Foxglove, but on her fourteenth birthday everyone in the village gathered around a platform to hear the name that she’d chosen to be called from then on, as was tradition for the people of the marshes. An outcast amongst the villagers even at that age, no one was surprised when she proclaimed that her new name would be 'Poison', a choice provoked by an argument that she had had with Snapdragon the morning of the choosing.
From then on and to the end of her days that would be her name, and she'd only grow further away from her family and everyone else around her. By the time her sixteenth birthday arrived, it had been forgotten by both of her parents, and she spent it entirely alone.
Being young and constantly at odds with everyone around her turned Poison into a sullen and quiet girl who would more often than not speak only to gain a reaction, be it for good or ill. She would not trust easily, after being burned one too many times by those she thought closest to her, and she yearned for more than a simple life in the marshes. It was difficult to live that way, and she sometimes grew envious of the other girls, the 'normal' girls who were content with their lives. When every other child was stillborn, one in five died before the age of thirteen from swamp lung and girls and boys were snatched up every month by the swamp monsters or the phaeries, it was impossible for Poison not to want to do something about it, and the constant lack of action from the other villages only lent itself to her ever-mounting frustrations.
Her only solace in the dull village was an old man known as Fleet, who was said to be the only one of them who had ever left the village. He brought back trinkets and stories for the curious and strange young girl every time he returned, and she would spend a great deal of time with him despite the general disapproval of the village.
On Soulswatch Eve of her sixteenth year, Poison had her first real brush with the Phaerie Realm – specifically, with a creature called the Scarecrow. On Soulswatch Eve of her sixteenth year, the phaeries stole Poison's baby sister, and replaced her with a Changeling.
After saving the creature from Snapdragon's attempts to drown it – knowing that killing the Changeling would destroy any chance of getting her sister back – Poison immediately took the terrible thing to Fleet in the hopes that he would be able to tell her what to do. She'd done the right thing in saving it, but Changelings were difficult to care for and many couples would break in doing so, hoping that their own child would be returned.
Poison's grief quickly gave way to anger, and she made the decision to travel to the Realm of the Phaeries and demand that they return her sister to her.
She sought out the wraith-catcher, a man who would come to the village on Soulswatch Eve to catch the marshwraiths that came out on that single night, for a price, and bought passage on his cart to the city of Shieldtown. This particular wraith-catcher was named Bram, and he quickly became protective of the young girl brought under his care. He was good company, answered her unending questions and never made her feel threatened in the way a young girl of Poison's size might feel threatened by a grown man of his.
After over a week in his company they finally arrived at the outskirts of Shieldtown, and it was here that Poison finally realised the true scale of things. In the Black Marshes, everything was so hemmed in that she never saw the full extent of the sky, nor realised that the place she lived was, in fact, contained in a bowl in the ground, as if someone had dropped that particular area of land several dozen feet further down than the land around it.
Once in Shieldtown, on Fleet's instructions, she sought out a man named Lamprey. Accompanied by Bram she made her way through the city and, as night fell, was introduced to another marsh-dweller returning to Gull, who agreed to take a message back to her parents. The girl was travel worn and tired, with dark, haunted eyes, and had Poison only thought to ask for her name, her journey may have stopped at that moment.
For it was her sister, Azalea, aged by the time she had spent in the Phaerie Realm that Poison met that night, though she would not discover this until much later.
Lamprey only came out at night, and when Poison finally met him, it became clear why that was. The man was Phaerie-cursed, drowned by a Kelpie in a Phaerie river and now slowly rotting away, yet still living. Though terribly afraid, Poison answered the riddle he set her, and in return, he had to answer her question. He told her how to reach a passing-place, a spot where the Realms touched, and a place where she’d be able to move between one and the other.
The passing-place was home to Maeb, an old and powerful woman known as the Bone Witch. Blind and deaf, she kept two massive dogs to be her eyes and ears and her sense of smell was keen. Poison had to enter the house when the moon was full, and leave the house the next night after midnight had passed, but it wasn't a simple matter of hiding and waiting. There were things that lived in the spaces between the worlds, and she wouldn't want to meet them. While the sun was up she wouldn't have to worry about the witch, but she still had to look out for the dogs.
It was with a heavy heart that she left Bram, having grown fond of the cantankerous old man, but she ventured into the house as the sun set, getting inside by using the coal chute. Using the last small amount of daylight before the witch woke to explore the house, she was caught out by the strange passage of time between Realms, and it was sooner than she thought that night fell, and the Bone Witch rose. Terrified once more, Poison followed a small cat that had joined her on her exploration of the house. It led her through the corridors and up to a small room, where she met a girl of around her own age dressed in a nightgown and holding a candle.
The girl sprayed her with a strong perfume to hide her from the Bone Witch’s sense of smell, and hid her under the bed until Maeb was driven off, finally, by the cat scratching her nose as she felt for Poison underneath the girl’s bed. She introduced herself as Peppercorn, but told Poison that she mustn't stay – Maeb was after her now, and she’d come back with her dogs to find her. She made her way back to the cellar, intending to hide there for the rest of the night and the next day, with only a momentary flash of fear as one of the witch’s dogs appeared to have found her.
Then, the Bone Witch caught her.
In despair, Poison thought then that her journey was over before it had even begun. Peppercorn, though she saw her in the cage, was too afraid to rescue her despite Poison's urging. Her rescue did come, though, in the form of the ornery wraith-catcher, who had been coaxed into the house by Peppercorn's cat, Andersen. He broke her free of the cage and together, the two of them came up with a plan.
They poisoned the Bone Witch's dogs and skinned them, using their fur to try and fool the Bone Witch into thinking they were her pets, but her sense of smell was far too keen and she knew from the smell of blood that something was amiss. She gave chase, and a quick dodge by Poison sent the witch tumbling into her own cauldron, where she promptly boiled alive.
On Bram's urging they brought Peppercorn (who had fainted twice upon seeing Poison covered in blood) and they moved into the Realm of the Phaerie, not knowing what would await them once they stepped through the bone gate of Maeb's house. From there, they followed Andersen, who seemed to know exactly where he was going. At the edge of a lake they came across a peculiar individual named Myrrk, who claimed to have been fishing for a hundred years while never catching anything to eat. Upon learning where they wished to go he sent a signal using firewort, calling for a being he called the Coachman, who would take them straight to the Phaerie Lord's palace.
Told to go and see the Hierophant, Poison reached the palace of the Phaerie Lord in quick time thanks to the Coachman, and were met by a man who introduced himself as Scriddle. Without much ado he took them straight to the throne of Lord Aelthar, under the terms of Amrae's Law, which granted an audience with the Phaerie Lord during which they could not be harmed. Despite the carefully constructed speech that Poison had held in her head until that moment, all she could do when the time came was bluntly request the return of her sister, and the laughter that the request provoked turned the young woman’s fear to a white-hot fury. She screamed at the Phaerie Lord, hotly insulting him and defying his 'reasons' for the Phaerie Realm's treatment of humankind. Impressed with her spirit, Lord Aelthar whisked the two of them away to speak in private, and made a proposition - if she would complete a task for him, he would return her sister to her.
The task was to steal a dagger belonging to Lady Asinastra, the Lady of the Realm of Spiders, and Poison readily agreed to undertake it.
Accompanied by Bram, Peppercorn and Andersen, Poison entered the Realm of the Spiders, but it was alone that she ventured into the palace. Climbing a length of thick webbing she dropped into one of the crumbling castle, an enormous spider hot on her heels. Inside, after she’d gathered herself and checked herself for injuries, she began her search. Finally, after hours of searching, she entered a room with the heavily pregnant corpse of a woman slumped over in a chair, and the dagger sticking out of the top of a horned helmet. Willing herself not to be shaken by the dead woman, she retrieved the dagger, only to turn and find that the corpse had moved.
Lady Asinastra had her, but she claimed audience under Amrae's Law, and while the Lady of Cobwebs shrieked her aggravation, Poison used a small orb that Aelthar had given to her to immediately transport her and her companions back to his palace. Not, however, before claiming herself the Phaerie Lord's thief.
Phaeries couldn't be trusted any more than unicorns, however, and soon after waking back in the Phaerie Lord’s realm, the dagger was taken from her by Scriddle, removing the only leverage that she had in her attempts to get her sister back. Realising that they might now be in danger, Poison began to think that it might be better if they weren't sitting around and waiting when Scriddle came back. With Andersen's help they escaped the room they were locked in - Scriddle had left the key in the other side of the door - and the cat led them unerringly through the corridors of the palace until they reached a space in between the walls, eventually coming to a grille in the walls where the cat forced them to stop before anyone had even entered the room that it looked out over.
Predictably, who entered the room was first the Phaerie Lord, and then his secretary, Scriddle. Bemoaning the presence of humans in his lands, the Phaerie Lord unwittingly revealed the current tensions in the Realm to the watching humans, and that the mysterious Hierophant was up to something. Scriddle was revealed to be half-human, something which had stopped him rising any higher in Lord Aelthar's employ than the position of secretary. Finally, Aelthar demanded that the group of humans be killed, not knowing that they could hear every word.
The realisation that Aelthar had never intended to give her sister back almost sent Poison into despair once again, but she resolved in that moment that if he wouldn't give Azaelea back, then Poison would take her.
Stowing away in the Phaerie Lord's retinue as he made his way to visit the Hierophant, they made their way to the castle. It was by magic that they arrived, much to Bram's distaste, and in the library of the Hierophant's home they met a man who Poison had never thought to see again - her old friend, Fleet.
Fleet was an Antiquarian, a biographer of the Realms whose job was to not only collect stories, but witness them and, where necessary, help them along. Unbound by race or loyalty they soaked up the tales, histories and myths of every Realm and brought them back to the Hierophant's castle. It was the Hierophant, he told them, who decided what was possible, and Poison in her unending curiosity desired to know more. Fleet had been watching her all her life, taking in her experiences and those of the people around her to be written in the books of the library.
It was a difficult thing for Poison to grasp - that everything was just a story, even her own life.
The Hierophant didn't only write stories, he had the power to change them, and that was what made him one of the most feared people in any of the Realms. Anything he wrote, the Realms were bound by - Amrae's Law, for instance - and that made him a force to be reckoned with. His name was Melcheron, and it was his words that would finally drive Poison to the end of her patience, and almost to the end of her life.
Learning the truth broke her utterly, and Poison couldn't cope with the undeniable fact that her entire life had been the product of another's fiction. The most natural reaction in the world seemed to be to go limp and stop struggling, with the possibility that he was lying not even entering her head. Somehow, she'd known the truth even before he had told her. None of it was real, and if she only thought that she was choosing for herself, then why bother?
It wasn't long, though, before the effects of Poison giving up on life began to seep into the world around her. Her friends and the castle's residents sickened, with even the walls themselves seeming paler and thinner. Everything was fading away, and Poison didn't care. The story was unraveling around her as she chose not to eat or drink and simply lay in bed, apologising to her friends for what she was doing to them by her inaction.
It was Bram who finally got through to her, forcing her to see that she did have a choice, and that she was making it - she was choosing to die, and to take everyone with her, and no one could stop her, but nothing gave her the right to kill them all whether or not they were fiction. Bram had realised, though Poison couldn't see it, that the whole world was going along with her because they were in her story, and if she died, everything would disappear.
Her recovery was quick, and with it came the collective lifting of the malaise that had settled over the castle. It was on the day that Fleet declared her fully fit that the Hierophant was murdered, stabbed in the back with the very dagger that Poison had stolen from Lady Asinastra.
Their hopes of finding the name of the killer in Melcheron's tale were dashed by their discovery that the book had been removed from the library, but her suspicions of Aelthar were only strengthened by the presence of the Scarecrow - the creature that had stolen her sister. It was a formidable adversary, but in a moment of quick thinking on the edge of the unnatural sleep forced by the Phaerie being, she threw a lamp at it, setting it on fire and destroying it for good. Revenge was indeed sweet.
Poison fled the Hierophant's castle and found an ally in Grugaroth, Lord of the Trolls. Under his protection she returned and accused Lord Aelthar and Lady Pariasa, the Hierophant's wife, of Melcheron's murder. However, her accusations were turned away when it was revealed that Aelthar had never seen the dagger that he had sent her for, and Scriddle denied that Poison had come back with it at all.
Aelthar claimed a simple grudge, grounded in his taking Poison's sister many years ago, but Poison pressed on with her case, stating that Pariasa and Aelthar's rooms should be searched for Melcheron's book. Finding the book would reveal the murderer, but a search by the Antiquarians didn't find it. Meanwhile, Aelthar suggested that each of the lords and ladies put forth their own candidates for the vacated position of the Hierophant, immediately suggesting his secretary, Scriddle.
In that moment the pieces fell into place for Poison, and she knew what was happening. Scriddle intended to wipe out the Realm of Man, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Not long after the murder of the Hierophant, Lord Aelthar summoned Poison to meet with him privately. Again, she accused him of plotting Melcheron's murder, and though he didn't deny that he'd taken advantage of the opportunity, he did deny the murder itself. However, Aelthar suspected Scriddle, and he confided as much to Poison, telling her that he had given her the task of retrieving the dagger believing that she could never accomplish it. She did, though the Phaerie Lord never put his hands on the weapon, and it had only been a convenient part of Scriddle and Pariasa's plans that the knife they used to murder the Hierophant would belong to the Lady Asinastra.
Again, Lord Aelthar offered Poison a deal. He showed her an image of her sister, revealing to her that humans were taken only for the purposes of breeding, so that he might find the perfect replacement for the Hierophant. He promised Poison that her sister had not yet been 'used', and if she retracted her statement of his guilt in front of the lords and ladies, then returned home and never bothered him again, he would return her to Poison immediately.
How could she resist such an offer? After conferring briefly with her friends, she returned to Aelthar to give him her answer, only to find that he had been poisoned in the short time she'd been away. Lady Asinastra had got her revenge. The Phaerie Lord was dead.
Moments later, Scriddle and Pariasa entered the rooms. Though she tried to hide, she was discovered, and almost killed by the furious half-human as he admitted to her that they had never had her sister to give back to her. It was only then that Poison realised that the girl she had seen in Shieldtown had been Azaelea, and that the entire journey could have been avoided had she only asked for her name.
Pariasa knew as well as Scriddle did what Melcheron had been writing, what had been in his book and it was the Lady's pleas to spare her life that finally pushed the last piece into place, and she knew what her story was and exactly why she was there. Poison's story had never been that of a girl who left the marshes, traveled to the Realm of the Phaerie and brought her sister back.
Poison was the new Hierophant, and killing her before the end of her tale would bring an end to everything.
Even knowing this, Scriddle still stabbed her. Immediately, everything began to come apart, even more quickly than it had when Poison had been starving herself. He stabbed her a second time, and would have finished her with a third had Pariasa not come to her rescue, burying a dagger of her own into the neck of her lover. She wanted to live, and as the Trolls burst into the room, Poison blacked out.
Poison was alive, Pariasa's magic having undone most of the damage caused by Scriddle's dagger and the lore of the Antiquarians helping the rest of the way. She quickly regained her strength, enjoying the company of her friends despite her weakness, and for the first time she began to feel as if she truly belonged. Bram departed, much to her sorrow, but Peppercorn and Andersen stayed, and Fleet instructed her well. Melcheron had never counted on his own murder, and the new Hierophant was utterly untrained.
All the while, Poison had been privately reserving the right to refuse the position, but as days and weeks wore on she found that as much as she had been expected to become the new Hierophant, she was also expecting it. It fitted her like a cloak, and nothing else would so.
Her first story, of course, was her own. Who better to write her story than herself? She wrote, uninterrupted, for two days and nights thought it felt like only moments to her, and when she finally closed the book and the title bloomed across the cover, she smiled.
It would suffice."