The Iron Legends: Winter's Passage\Summer's Crossing\Iron's Prophecy (24 page)

Dame Liaden

An ancient faery who lives in a small, dilapidated cabin
beneath two rotting trees in the frozen wood of the Winter Realm. She wears a
gray robe and cowl draped over her body like old curtains. She cares for a
wrinkled, ghastly baby in a stained white blanket, a hideous child with a
deformed head too large for its body, tiny, shriveled limbs and skin tinged an
unhealthy blue. She must wash her child in the blood of human infants in order
to make it healthy again, if only temporarily.

Narissa

This snow faery encounters Ash with Meghan and Puck as
they make their way from the Chillsorrow Manor toward the trod to the Voodoo
Museum in New Orleans. She overhears that Ash has made a bargain with Meghan and
delights in the chance to tell Mab and the Unseelie Court about his potential
betrayal.

THE IRON REALM

(the Iron Kingdom, the Iron Court)

When Meghan first enters the Iron Realm, then known as
the Iron Kingdom, she sees a blasted wasteland, filled with old technology,
scrap piles and acid rain that can burn through human and faery flesh. The
encroachment of Iron is poisoning the traditional Nevernever and threatening the
balance of Faery. Ultimately, it is Meghan who learns to balance the old and new
and how one can complement the other, saving all of Faery and taking the throne
as the Iron Queen.

This is Meghan’s first view of Iron, from
The Iron King:

A twisted landscape stretched out before us, barren and dark,
the sky a sickly yellow-gray. Mountains of rubble dominated the land: ancient
computers, rusty cars, televisions, dial-phones, radios, all piled into huge
mounds that loomed over everything. Some of the piles were alight, burning with
a thick, choking smog. A hot wind howled through the wasteland, stirring dust
into glittering eddies, spinning the wheel of an ancient bicycle lying on a
trash heap. Scraps of aluminum, old cans and foam cups rolled over the ground,
and a sharp, coppery smell hung in the air, clogging the back of my throat. The
trees here were sickly things, bent and withered. A few bore lightbulbs and
batteries that hung like glittering fruit.

Here is Meghan’s first impression of Machina’s tower in
The Iron King:

At last, the mountains of garbage fell away, and the lead
packrat pointed a long finger down a barren plain. Across a cracked, gray
plateau, spiderwebbed with lava and millions of blinking lights, a railroad
stretched away into the distance. Hulking machines, like enormous iron beetles,
sat beside it, snorting steam. And silhouetted against the sky, a jagged black
tower stabbed up from the earth, wreathed in smog and billowing
smoke.

Machina’s fortress.

As Meghan lies dying at the foot of Machina’s oak tree,
her last act, the act that heals her and transforms her into the Iron Queen, is
to infuse the combined powers of Summer and Iron into the land itself. Here it
is, as described in
The Iron Queen:

Movement swirled around me, flashes of color, showing a land
both familiar and strange. Mountains of junk dominated the landscape, but moss
and vines grew around them now, twisted and blooming with flowers. A huge city
of stone and steel had both streetlamps and flowering trees lining the streets,
and a fountain in the center square spouted clear water. A railroad cut through
a grassy plain, where a huge silver oak loomed over crumbling ruins, shiny and
metallic and alive.

“Summer and Iron,” Machina continued softly, “merged together,
becoming one. You’ve done the impossible, Meghan Chase. The corruption of the
Nevernever has been cleansed. The Iron fey now have a place to live without
fearing the wrath of the other courts.”

More areas within the Iron Realm:

Machina’s Tower

Machina’s fortress was a jagged, black, iron tower
stabbing up from the ground, surrounded by smog and billowing smoke. Huge, sharp
and metallic, full of harsh lines and sharp edges, the tower is filled with
ramparts covered in thorned metal creepers and jagged shards sticking out from
the walls for no apparent reason. A staircase spirals hundreds of feet along the
tower walls. At the top of the stairs is a large iron door bearing the insignia
of a barbed crown; it leads into an enormous garden. Smooth iron walls surround
the garden, topped with jagged spines, and the garden is filled with metal trees
and stony paths. At the center of the garden is a water fountain made of
clockwork cogs of varying sizes. The clockwork fountain opens a wall, behind
which lies the enormous iron throne of King Machina.

The Obsidian Plains

This was Ironhorse’s domain before his heroic death. A
massive black plain made of volcanic glass, it is home of Ironhorse’s kin. In
the center of the Plains lies the Molten Pool.

The Molten Pool

This pool is a bubbling lake of liquid hot magma at the
center of the Obsidian Plains. Close to the Molten Pool, the air is hot enough
to peel skin from bone and is infused with the smell of sulfur and
brimstone.

Caves of the Packrats

The packrats’ caves run underneath the entire Iron
Realm, a maze of tunnels that lead to the boiler room of Machina’s black
fortress. The tunnels converge on a giant, cathedral-like cavern filled with
mountains of trash, at the center of which sits a throne made entirely of junk.
It was from this cavern that Ferrum, the former Iron King, ruled the packrats
until Machina’s death.

The Desert of Lost Things

A vast desert filled of sand dunes, the Desert of Lost
Things is where all things go that are lost in the mortal world.

Mag Tuiredh

Also known as the Fomorian city, Mag Tuiredh was once
the home of an ancient race of giants. Formerly an evil place, full of curses
and unknown monsters, it is one of the darkest places in the Nevernever and also
the location of the Clockmaker’s tower—the only place in the Nevernever where
time is recorded. Everything built there is giant-size, with twenty-foot
doorways, streets wide enough to drive a plane through and stairs as high as a
normal-size human.

A massive city filled with black towers that belch smoke into a
mottled yellow sky, Mag Tuiredh used to sit half in and half out of the mortal
realm, in the country of Ireland. Eventually the city was pulled completely into
the Nevernever and the Fomorians were driven into the sea, abandoning the city
for thousands of years, until it was eventually corrupted by the Iron Realm and
became home to the gremlins.

When Meghan takes the throne as the Iron Queen, she restores
Mag Tuiredh and makes it the seat of her power.

Denizens of the Iron Realm:

Tertius

This Iron knight first served King Machina and later the
false king, Ferrum. Having been created by Machina, along with his brethren, in
the images of those in the Summer and Winter courts, Tertius is a physical
replica of Prince Ash, but with eyes of gunmetal gray instead of silver. He is
responsible for stealing the Scepter of the Seasons from Tir Na Nog, and the
murder of Prince Sage, an act which begins a war between Summer and Winter.
Tertius is killed by Puck, stabbed through the chest, while Meghan faces off
against the false king, Ferrum.

Diode

Diode is a hacker elf, a timid member of the Iron fey
who joins Glitch’s revolution against the false king. He has huge black eyes
with lines of green numbers scrolling across them. Diode has immense knowledge
at his disposal and acts as an adviser and assistant to Glitch, and later
Meghan.

The Clockmaker

The Clockmaker is a mysterious Iron fey who dwells in a
giant clock tower in the city of Mag Tuiredh. He is a small, hunched creature,
half the size of a human, wearing a bright red vest adorned with several pocket
watches. His head is a cross between human and mouse, with large round ears,
bright beady eyes and a mustache that looks suspiciously like whiskers. He also
has a thin, tufted tail, and wears a pair of tiny gold glasses that perch on the
end of his nose.

The Clockmaker has the ability to see how everything starts,
and the exact moment its time runs out. He gives Meghan the key that allows her
to enter Ferrum’s iron fortress, as well as a pocket watch that saves her from
one of the false king’s lightning bolts.

Spikerail

The Iron horse who, at the request of the late
Ironhorse, by way of Grimalkin, brings his herd of mechanical horses to the aid
of Meghan and her followers in the final battle against the false king.

THE WYLDWOOD

This forest of perpetual twilight is the first area of
the Nevernever Meghan sees when she enters the faery world to find her little
brother. This vast space holds many mysteries and fey creatures never before
seen by human eyes. The following are just a few of the known regions located
within the wyldwood.

In
The Iron King,
Meghan enters
the wyldwood for the first time through the trod that has formed in Ethan’s
closet. Here is what she sees:

Pale silver light flooded the room. The clearing beyond the door
frame was surrounded by enormous trees, so thick and tangled I couldn’t see the
sky through the branches. A curling mist crept along the ground, and the woods
were dark and still, as if the forest was trapped in perpetual twilight. Here
and there, brilliant splashes of color stood out among the gray. A patch of
flowers, their petals a shocking, electric blue, waved gently in the mist. A
creeper vine snaked around the trunk of a dying oak, long red thorns a stark
contrast to the tree it was killing.

A warm breeze blew into the closet, carrying with it a shocking
assortment of smells—smells that should not be together in one place. Crushed
leaves and cinnamon, smoke and apples, fresh earth, lavender and the faint,
cloying scent of rot and decay. For a moment, I caught a tang of something
metallic and coppery, wrapped around the smell of rot, but it was gone in the
next breath. Clouds of insects swarmed overhead, and if I listened hard I could
almost imagine I heard singing. The forest was still at first, but I then caught
movement deep in the shadows, and heard leaves rustle all around us. Invisible
eyes watched me from every angle, boring into my skin.

Places you may encounter—or wish to avoid—
while making your
way through the wyldwood:

The Briars

Also known as the Brambles or the Thorns, the Briars is
a giant black hedge maze that runs through the entire Nevernever, including both
the Winter and Summer courts, reaching to the End of the World. The Briars are
sentient and sadistic, a force that cannot be tamed or understood.

The Briars contain the highest concentration of trods anywhere
within the Nevernever. There are doors hidden throughout the Briars, some
constantly shifting, some only appearing at a special time under special
circumstances. The hallways of the briar maze are filled with whispered voices
and the walls are constantly moving, writhing and reaching for you. Deadly
creatures watch you from the shadows and stalk the corridors, including giant
spiders, dragons and swarms of wasp-fey. The Big Bad Wolf also claims to have
stalked the Briars from time to time.

The Reaping Fields

The Reaping Fields are where all major battles between
Summer and Winter are fought. Bisected by a frozen river and surrounded by the
ruins of an ancient castle, the fields smell of blood from all the battles
fought over the centuries.

The Bone Marsh

A murky gray swamp, filled with twisted green trees and
a preternatural mist, the Bone Marsh is so named because of the bleached-white
bones that stick out, intermittently, from its muddy depths. A dangerous part of
the wyldwood, filled with catoblepas, jabberwocks and various other predators,
including the Bone Witch.

The Hollow of Death

A valley of darkness and thorns, the ground blackened
and poisoned, pulsing with hate, blood and despair, the Hollow of Death was once
home to a wyvern’s nest. Silent as a tomb, this dark valley is the place where
Ariella was killed, and the place where Ash vowed to kill Puck. A cursed place,
decorated with the bleached skeleton of the deadly wyvern, this is where the
resurrected Ariella dwelled while waiting for Ash to find her on his journey for
a soul.