At first there was no response, just the scent of grass smoke drifting over the plains from a distant prairie fire. The Ragabash relaxed for just a moment, and that was enough.
Fleeting images flashed into Fae Carver's mind. A garden, wild and sprawling, filled with pale light and dancing figures. Whirling and gyrating in silent, frenzied patterns, their naked limbs radiant and glowing blurs of motion. Thrumming music and the heady unbidden scent of old wine spike the senses.
A desolate stony plain covered with pits and shadowed valleys, and overhead hangs a black sky, burning cold. Dust rises in the airless void as beasts race silently across the steppe; these creatures are not wolves or reptiles or sharks but something contained within their alien movements suggests kinship to each and all.
A pale woman, her eyes like ancient ice and her smile nothing more than a fey twitch, sits in an open terraced palace of alabaster, nephrite and feldspar. A rabbit made of cunningly crafted jade rests in her hands. The rabbit lifts its head to sniff the empty perfumed air, and she pets it absently, gazing out her window at a distant, storm-wracked globe.
Fey Carver feels a twinge of cool pain, like a long-healed bite wound in winter time, as the thing speaks:
"yOu TeLl mE my NamE, neW mOon. wHAt am I?"
Home 
