103

Chapter 103: Interlude 10-i: Titania Metamorphose

Interlude 10.i: Titania Metamorphose

The one thing Glaistig Uaine regretted about letting herself be locked away in this farce of a gaol was the utter lack of good tea.

Not that there was no tea to be had. It was a good like any other, supplied to them by the Dragon who kept this place in motion and funneled yet more of the faerie into its depths. Always, however, was its quality questionable, and its quantity finite. Even when she used one of her captured fae to reproduce it or to conjure it from the air, there was something lost in the process. An aspect of the flavor or the body or the texture that inevitably made the already poor tea even poorer, and no amount of added sweetening or spice — things already equally as rare in this Birdcage — could hide the lacking.

A vexing limitation. Born, to some degree, from the sheer length of time it had been since last she had experienced truly good tea. Born, to a greater degree, from the poorness of the mashed and shredded tea leaves that were parceled out for the inmates of this gaol, a cheaply made and over-processed blend that was little more than hot leaf juice.

Most vexing of all was that there was nothing to be done about it. To indulge herself and leave this place for something so banal as tea — no matter how important — would disrupt the play and her part in it, and with things already so broken, twisting it all even further off course would serve no one well, least of all her.

So she would simply have to suffer the poor tea and make do.

"A pity, in any case," she murmured to herself. She examined the murky brown liquid in her cup, a bland and flavorless thing that had to be drowned in sugar simply to taste like anything at all. "One would think they might know better how to treat a queen properly."

Or perhaps they simply took her docility for surrender, rather than patient waiting. They did not think to cater to her, because they thought her beaten. Meek. Even were she wrathful, they thought themselves safe, removed from her touch, protected. As though there was aught at all keeping her from leaving this prettied gaol, if she decided she would like to.

A lark, if ever there was one. Amusing, but not so amusing that watching those presumptions fall apart appealed enough to move her.

A pane of light suddenly described itself in the air, and Glaistig Uaine watched it with interest, gathering some of the dead she kept, as it unfolded inwards to reveal an unfamiliar backdrop beyond. A portal through time and space, cutting away the distance and showing on the other side an entirely different landscape, one that needn't even be on this Earth.

A young woman stepped through it, clad in purple, gold, and black, and after a moment's pause, the pane of light closed, shut, and vanished behind her.

What struck Glaistig Uaine immediately was the figure beside the young woman, a ghostly figure that could have been the woman's double in some ways, and yet couldn't be more different in others.

The specter was just as tall, with the same long, flowing black hair, the same lean-muscled body, the same face, but that was where the similarities ended. Instead of a costume with a vest, pants, and boots, the specter wore armor with sleek, shining panels that contoured to accentuate her form. Her fingers were adorned with ten rings, one to each, her eyes gleamed gold, and her hair floated in a nonexistent wind as though each lock moved independently, like tendrils reaching out to infinity. Above her head was a crown with ten jagged spires, and from the base beneath each spire were thin, gold chains that threaded through her hair as though to anchor it.

What caught the eye most, however, was the robe the specter wore beneath its armor, a long robe with tattered ends that opened for her legs at the waist and trailed to her ankles. It flowed about, fluttering, and as it did, the vibrant red of its cloth shifted and wavered between bright crimson and dark maroon, whorls of color forming waves that undulated across the fabric.

It was wrong. Glaistig Uaine could not say why she knew so, but some deep, instinctual part of her recognized on a visceral level that the robe should be black, not red.

Something had happened. Something that had thrown their play off even more so than it had been before, and whatever it was must be dangerous indeed if it could transform one of the high faeries so greatly as it had the one before her. Dangerous, and an even greater threat to the proper course of things.

Perhaps allowing herself to be shut away in this gaol for so long had been a mistake, if it meant she had missed something so drastic.

"Queen Administrator," Glaistig Uaine said by way of greeting. "You've changed a great deal. I almost didn't recognize you."

"Faerie Queen," said Queen Administrator's human mask. She gave a nod, respectful, as of one equal greeting another. "I've come to speak with you, regarding the future."

"Indeed." What a wonder was being visited upon her, today. "Shall we dispense with the formalities, then, and address each other more familiarly?"

"That would be fine," said Administrator. She waved a hand, and from behind her appeared strange creatures in the shape of woodland sprites, carrying with them a teapot and a pair of porcelain cups, held aloft on a tray. "I've also brought tea as offering, if you would like some?"

Would wonders never cease?

"Please."

Glaistig Uaine handed her cup of bland, boring tea to one of her ghosts, and in a flash of light, both the cup and the poor excuse for tea vanished as though neither had ever truly been. She gestured at her now empty table, small enough to fit into her cell but large enough to host at least two. Four, if the only thing being served was tea.

Administrator nodded again, and with a gesture, her woodland sprites floated forward and set the tray down upon Glaistig Uaine's table. Faint puffs of steam wafted up from the mouth of the spout, curling and whirling gently as they drifted into the air.

Even from so far away, Glaistig Uaine could smell the aroma of carefully brewed Earl Grey. Sharp and smooth, with the fruity undertone of bergamot and a handful of other spices. Adjacent to the teapot and situated between the pair of cups was a small bowl filled with rocky chunks of pure cane sugar, and on opposite sides were another bowl, this one containing perfectly sliced lemon wedges, and a cold pitcher filled with cream.

My, my, but had Queen Administrator considered all the angles.

"You do yourself credit, Administrator," said Glaistig Uaine. "You have impeccable taste."

Administrator smiled. "I would accept nothing but the best for my tea, and so I'll deliver nothing less to you, Glaistig Uaine."

Naturally. Perhaps she had been here too long indeed if something so simple was enough to surprise her, these days. Respect, she was given in spades, but it was the respect of the servant fearing the master's whip or the lamb fearing the wolf's teeth. So few treated her with respect simply because they believed it was owed to her, and fewer still had the means to put action to their words when doing so.

"Your courtesy does you credit."

Administrator inclined her head. "Then, if I might prevail upon your hospitality?"

"How so?" Glaistig Uaine asked with the slight tilt of her head.

"There is a form that might be more appropriate for this conversation which I might take. Would it offend you terribly if one Queen of the Faeries spoke with another?"

Oh my. How interesting. How very interesting, indeed.

Glaistig Uaine offered an indulgent smile. "If it pleases you, then I shall not take offense to such a presumption."

Administrator's lips tugged, and then she took a slow breath. "Set. Install."

And her body transformed, shortening, filling out, hair turning a brilliant, golden blonde, her clothes becoming robes of blue.

Glaistig Uaine did not watch that. Instead, her eyes were drawn to the phantom of Administrator's faerie, watching as a hole opened in her forehead, a yawning, gaping void with nothing visible on the other side. Rivers of golden blood spilled through and flowed down its face, trailing down the cheeks like tears, and then sinking down below the fabric of its clothes. The irises of its eyes glowed to match, unearthly and beautiful.

Unexpected. Queen Administrator was connected to something else, somewhere beyond Glaistig Uaine's sight. No matter how closely she looked, the void revealed nothing on its other side, not even the slightest trace of a presence, only a vast and deep connection that terminated suddenly and inexplicably.

So many unusual things, so many changes and differences that boggled the mind. This was not what she had expected at all, and it was equally as fascinating as it was worrying.

What could have done this to her sister and equal? What could have twisted a faerie of such standing so dramatically?

A mystery she believed she would likely never solve.

Administrator, now in her new form, stepped forward and approached the vacant chair across from Glaistig Uaine, pausing only a moment.

"Let this communion be our pact," she said in garbled Gaelic, and then she sat.

Glaistig Uaine's eyes narrowed. No, not garbled Gaelic, older Gaelic. Gaelic so old that the words sometimes seemed nonsensical or completely unrelated to the modern form, but recognizable enough that it might sound familiar in parts and to degrees to a man who spoke the modern version fluently.

Curiouser and curiouser.

What significance, the dead tongue? What meaning the words? Simple formality and courtesy, or was there something deeper behind them?

Administrator gestured towards the tea set with one perfectly formed hand. "As you like, Glaistig Uaine."

Glaistig Uaine took one of the cups and poured herself some tea from the pot. The aroma that wafted off of it was heavenly and tempting, nearly to the point of distraction, and she took in a deep breath to savor it before she set about sweetening it to her preference.

"That form you take now," she began, "that face you wear in place of your own — you say that it is another Queen of the Faeries, and yet…"

"A queen from song and story," said Administrator as she set about preparing her own cup of tea. "Nimue, Lady of the Lake, Queen of Avalon. The queen of the faeries who helped construct King Arthur's court, whose subjects built the white castle upon which the city of ideals sat, Camelot. She who delivered Excalibur into Arthur's hands and received it back upon his death."

"But not a true faerie," said Glaistig Uaine mildly.

A muscle in Administrator's face jumped and her eyes narrowed slightly. Ah, and so an insult had been delivered indeed, as expected. How curious, that the mask itself so influenced the one wearing it.

Ah, but that was the whole point of them, wasn't it? Precisely because the faerie were so easily influenced by their masks, they were prone to whim and whimsy.

"Not as you would define the fae, no," Administrator answered somewhat coolly, "but a faerie nonetheless."

Indeed. And from whence had it come, bearing the form of humanity's imagination? Like as not, that was the expression of her faerie's powers, a potent shell in the image of tales and stories, bearing their strengths and weaknesses. It was connected, surely, to whatever sat upon the other side of that void, but nothing further could be gleaned as to its nature, no matter how hard she looked.

"I see." Glaistig Uaine took a sip of her tea. "You should take care, Administrator. In this instance, I shan't take this as a slight, but such presumption can be quite dangerous."

A small smile spread over Administrator's lips. "I'll take the warning in the spirit it was given."

"As well you should." Another sip. Tea so delicious had not graced her tongue in nigh on a decade. Ah, but it would be a shame that it only lasted as long as her companion remained here. It would be quite pleasing to have such tea more frequently. "But we ramble and digress, do we not? You had business here which you intended to perform. A concern you wished addressed, in regards to the future."

"Yes. The future." Administrator paused to take a sip of her own tea, slowly. "I'm not quite sure you're aware of what is to come. The inevitability of it, I mean."

Oh, an interesting topic if ever there was one. So few knew what roles they were to perform, the eventual and unavoidable end of their little play, and it seemed that Administrator might indeed be one of those few.

Perhaps she had come to usurp Glaistig Uaine's part in it all? A queen of the living suborning the queen of the dead, taking her in thrall and disrupting the natural cycle of things.

But no, that seemed too simple, too violent for such a cordial meeting.

"All things must end, Administrator," she said, unconcerned. She brought her phantoms in close, just in case, prepared if a fight broke out. "Eventually, at the end of this play of ours, we will put down our masks and be faerie again, and then we will start anew elsewhere, on a different stage, with different forms and faces. That is the way of things."

She considered the woman sitting across from her.

"Or perhaps what concerns you is how things have gone off script, as it were? True, little has gone according to the proper way of things. The other court is in shambles, ill-timed, bedraggled, with nary an instruction to carry them forward. There are fail safes in place for just such a thing, we need only await their activation."

"And so, we die and the faerie slumber, awaiting a…fortuitous arrival?" Administrator asked. Something lingered in her tone, a kind of knowing humor that was hard to place.

"Perhaps it relies overly on luck, but it is the way of things, when so many are lost and fumbling," said Glaistig Uaine.

Administrator gave a small shake of her head. "That wasn't what I meant. Maybe something like that will happen, eventually. What I was talking about, though, was Scion."

An eyebrow rose.

"Oh?"

"The fae are creatures of whimsy," said Administrator, and it sounded almost like she was quoting another, as she echoed Glaistig Uaine's earlier thoughts, "prone to influence by the masks they wear. The day will come when the worst of whimsy strikes him, and he will lash out with destructive wroth."

Glaistig Uaine smiled.

"It will fall to us, then, to wage a great and terrible war upon him and force him back into slumber, so that he might wait for that sliver of hope that another will arrive to finish the play with him. A fool's hope, perhaps, but the only hope left, to him and to the rest of us faerie."

"On that day," Administrator admitted calmly, "I intend to kill him."

Glaistig Uaine froze. "Oh? Do you mean to usurp his position and take his crown for yourself? Start the play anew on your own terms?"

"No," she said. "I will kill him, and that's all."

"So brazenly you admit intent to commit patricide and regicide at once," Glaistig Uaine said mildly. "And did you come here with the intent of recruiting me, so that I might be part of your treasonous plot? I warn you, I would fight him to drive him back to sleep, but if your intent is murder, then you will find no ally in me."

Administrator gave another shake of her head. "I'd gladly accept your help, freely offered and given, if you agreed to it. But an ally whose goals align only so far isn't one I want at my back when the time comes."

Glaistig Uaine took a slow breath and another sip of her tea.

"And so you've come here…why, exactly, if not to enlist me as your conspirator and accomplice?"

"Why else? To negotiate your neutrality."

"Neutrality?" Glaistig Uaine repeated curiously.

"If I can't trust you to fight beside me all the way," said Administrator, "then I'd like you not to fight at all."

Glaistig Uaine set her cup of tea down, and for a long moment, she simply examined the face of the woman across from her.

This was not at all what she had expected. Perhaps she had simply been so overjoyed at the idea of meeting one of her equals — and the prospect of a cup of good tea to go along with it — that she'd allowed her own thoughts to get ahead of her and make a few assumptions she should not have.

It seemed, however, that the two of them were not indeed on the same page at all. To stress the metaphor perhaps past all meaning, it was likely they were not even reading the same book. Or perhaps "script" would be a better term, to continue with the analogy of a play.

"You expect me to betray him?" she asked with a deceptive calmness. She took little care to keep the edge out of her tone.

Administrator didn't seem concerned or spooked at all.

"You already have, once before," she said like it was obvious. "I wouldn't be asking you to do something you're truly incapable of."

Glaistig Uaine's brow furrowed. "I don't understand your meaning. How do you believe I have betrayed him?"

"Excuse me, I misspoke," Administrator said politely. "Or rather, I was deliberately vague. Glaistig Uaine did abandon Scion, in his final moments — that is to say, she would have, in another life, had my own gone a different way."

It took a moment for Glaistig Uaine to truly grasp her meaning.

Of course. She was referring to the visions of a faerie with far sight, one of the clairvoyants who could glimpse the future, or at least the possibilities of the future. In their fevered dreams, they might see snatches of things that could one day be, and they relayed these through their masks to others as a method of influencing the ebb and flow of their little play.

What disturbed was not such visions, but their content. What series of events could possibly lead her to abandon her greatest ally in his moment of greatest need? She could not imagine it.

"I would not place much stock in such things were I you, Administrator," she settled on. "The visions of the faerie are not infallible, nor absolute. Sometimes, the things they glimpse are little better than rampant hallucinations."

Administrator set her own cup of tea down with a tiny clink. "Would you like to see it?"

"It?" Glaistig Uaine shook her head, in spite of her own curiosity. "I place no more stock in such prophecy than I have cautioned you, Administrator. These dreams would serve me little."

"It's not a dream, nor is it a vision," said Administrator. She gestured, and one of her little woodland sprites floated up to sit upon her palm. "It's memory, taken from the…Administrator who would have been. You would see that moment as she saw it, know things as she knew them, experience it all as she experienced it. Far more tangible than just a dream, isn't it?"

Uncharacteristically, Glaistig Uaine hesitated. This seemed to her as a trap. After all, beneath the niceties, had they both not just agreed — if in a rather roundabout way — that they would be enemies, when the end came? Had it not just been established that she would stand beside Scion, who Queen Administrator had labeled enemy?

Would this not, then, be a perfect moment to subvert her, or else to remove her forcibly from the field?

Ordinarily, Glaistig Uaine wielded her power as confidence. She was one of the grander faerie, and she knew it well. There were few who might challenge her, even those she professed as her equal, for they were equal in prominence and importance, not necessarily in the strength of their abilities. This Queen Administrator was one who may indeed be her equal in both, and she was twisted up from how she should be to begin with. It made her both dangerous and unpredictable.

And yet…

Glaistig Uaine reached out and offered her own hand.

…she yearned for the knowledge offered. The memory of the moment when she would supposedly have betrayed Scion, the instant where another version of herself may have turned her back on everything that she believed in.

The woodland sprite floated up and over and gently landed upon her palm —

— "I will warn you, do not attempt to usurp me."

— "Would you accompany me? We would be the queen of the living and queen of the fallen. No swords in our hands, but warlords nonetheless. Yes?"

— "You will need a tether, an anchor. It can be an idea, a physical thing, a place, a person, a goal. Right now, it will not seem so important, but it will. When all is said and done, you will either be dead, and this thing will be a comfort to you in your last moments, or you will be powerful, and it will be all you have left. Decide what you will hold on to."

— The faerie woman had noticed I was moving, but her attention was partially on the man in armor. She was holding back.

I was preparing to go down with the clairvoyant, making sure we wouldn't break contact even if we had a hard landing, when I heard that voice again, small and afraid.

I couldn't place the recollection.

— A sharp right. Moving around the perimeter of the flight. The faerie was busy fighting, but if she saw an opportunity, there was a good chance she'd kill me.

— It was the faerie girl. She had him as a shadow-puppet. A ghost.

I could hear my friend swear. The others around her were tense. They turned to run, sprinting through the portal.

Thousands of doorways. She turned and looked in my direction. But nothing appeared nearby.

— I found the faerie queen, in the center of the group of rescued. Portals stood in concentric circles, with gaps so they could be navigated through. A stonehenge of glowing doorways.

I walked, stopping in the middle of an open field. I watched.

I saw Scion, just barely recovering. I saw the faerie girl, talking to others.

— I appeared right behind the faerie queen. I seized her, and I seized the portal man she'd killed and claimed for herself.

As one long stream, the memory went, jumping, jumbling, chaotic and yet ordered in a strangely comprehensible way. Everything in the memory, she felt herself — the jostle of landing without the flight pack, the weakness of the flesh as she struggled to stand, the expanding consciousness as the clairvoyant allowed her to see beyond sight and the inevitable contraction of her sense of self as more and more was steadily eroded.

The weight of every action was not lost on her. The importance of every decision, even if she had not the access to the memories and the thoughts that had led up to them, and the magnitude of each choice were as clear and certain to her as if it were all her own recollection.

It terminated suddenly, not from the death of the owner, but because the memory itself was only a fragment of a larger event. It didn't matter. She had already seen all of the pertinent moments.

The woodland sprite fluttered and floated away, back to its master. Glaistig Uaine's hand dropped and fell back to her side.

"At…at the end," she began softly, "what was it that I saw? What did you show me?"

"You know it now just as well as I do," Administrator said quietly. "You tell me."

"I…"

When she closed her eyes, her own face stared back at her, swam as the other Administrator's vision wavered, and then fell behind a curtain of hair. Surrender. Not wrath. Not vengeance. Not a last attempt at sabotage. Surrender.

There was no better word for it. Resignation, hesitation, they both had meanings too different from what she'd seen. They could not apply. What had happened, what the Glaistig Uaine of that memory had done, that could only be called surrender.

"I gave up," she admitted. "I could have stopped you — your other self. I could have saved Scion and prevented your final blow from landing. Why didn't I?"

"I don't know," Administrator said. "Maybe she saw herself in Khepri — that is, that other Administrator. Maybe she viewed her as a kindred spirit. And at the end, when she saw what Khepri had become, what Khepri had lost and given up, she realized that everything she'd built herself upon was a lie, born of compromising far too much with her faerie, her passenger."

Glaistig Uaine's hands shook. Her cup of tea clattered and rattled in her grip, and the half-gone tea inside of it sloshed around violently.

She wanted to attack. She wanted to refute even the mere idea of what Administrator was suggesting in the strongest terms she possibly could — and her strongest terms were quite potent, indeed. Befitting, for the Queen of the Faeries, the keeper of the dead.

She did not. Not because the idea of violence itself was abhorrent or wrong, but because she was quite certain that it would mean she had lost, that Queen Administrator was the one in the right. It would mean that there was no other way for her to win other than to claim it through sheer brute strength, and that was no victory at all in a competition of words and ideas.

"You offer me 'maybes' and 'might haves,'" she said instead, keeping her voice deliberately steady. "Can you offer no more than that? Have you no answer with greater weight and certainty?"

"Would you be any more inclined to believe it, if I could?" answered Administrator.

No, she would not. Already, she was questioning something she had seen with her own eyes, weighted as it was with the truth of a reality aborted.

"Then why should I pretend as though this has changed anything at all?" Glaistig Uaine asked. She tried to ignore how petulant it sounded, for that was ill-befitting the Faerie Queen.

Administrator gave a little smile, somewhat sad and understanding. "Because it already has."

She lifted her cup of tea back up to her mouth and drained the rest in one go, then set it down upon the tray and stood. She gestured with her hand again, and one of the other woodland sprites floated over to her, dropping a small package into her palm. This package, labeled "Earl Grey" in long, looping script, she set on the tray, as well.

"This tea set and tea, I leave you as a gift," she said. "A token of my esteem, and an apology for arriving unannounced."

She stepped back from the table, and between one moment and the next, she shed the guise of the Lady of the Lake, Queen of the Faeries of Avalon, and returned to the form she had possessed when she arrived.

"Door me."

The pane of light that had heralded her coming now appeared again, etching itself in midair and then unfolding into a doorway to another place. Queen Administrator paused only long enough to glance back over at her over her shoulder, a scant few seconds where their eyes met and an indescribable something passed between them, and then she walked back through and the portal vanished behind her. She was gone.

Glaistig Uaine looked down, staring into the swirling, murky brown liquid of her tea. In spite of how delicious it had been upon her tongue, she could not bring herself to drink it.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

NOTES

This one was a lot of fun to write. A lot of fun, for all that it's almost entirely dialogue. It also feels much shorter than 4700 words.

And yes. In my headcanon, Glaistig Uaine is Irish. It might not be supported in canon, especially when Glaistig Uaine seems to have been a name that was given to her rather than one she chose for herself, but my logic was that the figure of the "Glaistig Uaine" is far more obscure to anyone outside of Scotland and Ireland than Titania or Queen Mab. It would make more sense if the person bearing the name of such an obscure figure bears it because it's not obscure to her or the people who named her.

Hence her knowledge of Gaelic. Because she's a native speaker. That's just my headcanon, though, so feel free to disregard it.

As is my wont and my tendencies, Taylor's woodland sprites this chapter came from somewhere in Nasu. Specifically, they featured in one of the Kara no Kyoukai: The Garden of Sinners episodes, where they used memory modification magecraft - see what I did there? It seemed fitting to use them as I did, especially considering who Taylor was visiting.

Special thanks to all my Patrons who have stayed with me this far, through all the rocky moments and dry stretches. You guys are the best.

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