Chapter Text
When the Oak King proclaimed the new fae era, the ‘Season of Turning,’ we all assumed it would be a time of positive change, of growth. We are, after all, the stuff of fairytales, and we clapped ourselves on the backs for all the hardships we’d endured and looked forward to a better future.
We had our wars, battles and skirmishes, but we had many good things too. And to some, war was a very good thing anyway. We were prosperous. We had been gulled into thinking it would only get better. The Season of Turning, it held promise.
I’m certain some of us suspected the Oak King was wrong, folly though it might be to doubt the Seelie King of all that was good and light aloud. But none of us could have predicted a world turned to chaos and rust.
First, a creature who called himself the Nightmare King appeared, ruler of the darkest fears, able to see into the hearts of all and turn their lives to terror. He fancied himself a collector of fine things, if only to break them, and so he sought the esteemed Each Uisge – who styled himself ‘Augus,’ and stole him away to his underground lair.
There, horrors unspoken occurred, and when the Each Uisge returned twelve months later, he was sorely corrupted and sought power as he never had in almost all three thousand years of his life. He abandoned his vocation and ingratiated himself to the Raven Prince, eventually overthrowing him through means unknown.
Augus Each Uisge became the King of the Unseelie, with no view to making his Kingdom greater. A once-beloved member of the Raven Prince’s Unseelie Court, and a fine diplomat, was corrupted and filled with poison, unleashing a reign of terror, uncaring if he hurt Seelie or Unseelie both. With the assistance of the horrid Nain Rouge, the frightening Jenny Greenteeth, and the Dullahan, he worked to render the fae realms as barren as the Nightmare King seemed to want them. He poisoned lakes and rivers after having once been their nurturer, he trailed with him the Blight that caused freshwater fae to sicken and starve.
So the wars were not yet over, the Season of Turning not yet done with us.
A hero, then, was needed.
Gwyn ap Nudd, the Oak King’s War General and stoic warrior was nominated by the Oak King himself to be successor to the Seelie throne. Though many were unsure how he would manage a Court previously associated with leisure and frolicking, too many Seelie fae wished for the threat that was the Nightmare King and the Each Uisge to be eliminated.
With the assistance of a small band of unlikely fae – isn’t that always the way, in fairytales? – at a time when all seemed lost, and the fae world had begun to fragment and fritter away into nothing, Gwyn ap Nudd defeated the Nightmare King once and for all.
But Gwyn ap Nudd, unsuited to ruling a Court of leisure, was very suited to warfare and combat. It did not matter that Gwyn ap Nudd and the Each Uisge had once been friends, had even once conducted the Wild Hunt together, side by side. Eventually, with the help of the Each Uisge’s adopted brother, the Glashtyn, and a frost spirit named Jack, they tricked the evil Each Uisge into giving up the crown. The Glashtyn took up the Unseelie throne with a swan-maiden named Gulvi, the Each Uisge was tossed into a Seelie cell in the depths of the Seelie Court.
The fae realm was locked in a phase of unrest. The Each Uisge was imprisoned, but not dead. The Nightmare King was gone, but his legacy had left scars upon the world and the minds within it. Gwyn ap Nudd led the Seelie fae into a new realm; a martial realm of bloodshed. With no obvious villains to fight, and not warming to a life of luxury, he withdrew into himself and his Court, even as the Unseelie Court began to fragment away into weakness and unrest.
There are stories about heroes, and then there are stories about the madness that can befall heroes, that can turn even the strongest into dust. That can turn the Each Uisge to corruption, that can turn an Unseelie King into a fallen captive, and a Seelie King into his uncertain captor.
It was, after all, the Season of Turning.
~ Old Pete, storyweaver.