In the swirling shadows of night, the dreadfully silent Wraith King lifted the mighty pen softly. A cold ancient malice coursed within his wispy darkness, that nameless reminder of the ever delicate balance of life and death, each a scale the wise remove their blindfold to see and so judge beneath the same moon, lest the unenlightened forget their true origins…

So they wish to play a game, they do, he thought in the venom-drenched tangles of mind – the same sought century after century by their ancestors. All the Crowns across the land would know the untimely gloom of a storm brewing unseen over the horizon, like so much combustible fae dust gathered up into a great cloud, primeval as the deepest sea, ascendant as the highest skies, and as brilliant as every old star.