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The only place in town where she wouldn't have to see it looming over her all the damn time would have been on top of the mountain itself. Driving to work: mountain. Yoga class. Mountain. Taking Benjy to the vet once he started losing control of his bladder and pissing everywhere in the apartment. Mountain. Stepping outside for a smoke. Mountain. Picking up a bag of frozen vegetables to stir into the pasta. Mountain. Scrolling through instagram at night when she should have probably been shutting off the screens and settling down for bed: you guessed it, peering in through the window. Mountain again.

Brunch with her mother. Mountain. When she finally agreed to let her mother set her up with the son of a friend, and he spent a significant part of their first date talking about microdosing DMT while she picked at her shrimp scampi, the mountain was at the restaurant with them. It accompanied her on the walk home.

She could feel the mountain weighing down on her like some unbearable loneliness, like someone she loved was buried beneath it. But the mountain was ancient, a couple of million years, give or take, and so that would have to have been in a past life. Sometime in the Pliocene, probably, or maybe the early Pleistocene. Dramatic times. Ice caps forming, sinking sea levels, forests giving way to savanna. So unlike the tepid rains and mild winters she was used to. Early Australopithecus, bipedal, tool-using, stone-using. He would have chipped away at a stone, incrementally, over hours, days, and then stood on two feet and handed it to her. A piece of rock shaped like a heart.

And then overseeing the stables is the marshal, and then the seneschal, the lords, the queen, the king; and above them all the princess, who being departed from this world rules us all with unearthly insight. If she would have her will be known she speaks through the tongue and lips of the lowborn who, lifted from the squalor, represents the muck and dirt and filth our princess - God guard her soul! - lies buried in.

He is slightly built, the squire, in the bloom of youth, his face smooth like a woman's, beard not yet grown in; and to see the princess wrest his eyes up in his skull, beneath his soiled face all the lightness and delicacy and grace of the princess animating his muscles, her voice issuing from his throat, it is to see him transformed. It is for this reason it could not be a noble's child in this role, nor a girl, for our princess is the spirit and soul of the land itself, the rocks and dirt, the crude boy-child with the root between his legs, and in him she is realized, not as divinity nor as paragon but as regent. Through his body she enacts laws, sets tariffs, threatens wars, orders executions. May her reign last eternal, amen.

In his downtime, the squire is beaten by his knight, develops some measure of competency in armor maintenance, grows a set of new and different callouses. His voice breaks and resettles. His beard finally comes in. In time, he will join the ranks of knights himself. His princess no longer speaks through him; she has long since found another. You may see him riding abroad, an odd tincture to his mien unlike the other knights. Some of the countryside left in him. How he lopes his steed along the patchy dirt roads. How he knocks the dirt from his boots. How, having accepted your humble invitation, he lets one shoulder slump lower than the other as he sits back at the table.

“They call her sword Belladonna.”

“Is it poisonous?” I asked.

Here, he would accept consolations for his imminent demise, lips pursed in mock solemnity, before continuing: "Alas, these mythical glancing blows - a nick here, a scrape there - are these wounds befitting of a sword? La Belladonna is a hermaphrodite of sorts, a woman's curse on a man's weapon. A discreet cut, a nick, all duplicitousness and subterfuge, to insinuate the death unobtrusively. This, on an obtrusive three-foot blade whose stroke would be more than lethal enough in itself!

"If she had brains," he would continue, "she'd shatter that sword into fragments and instead make of it a dart, a stiletto, some dainty little implement scarcely larger than a nail file. Imagine her brushing past me on the street, bundled up incognito, scraping me so lightly across the back of the hand that I fail to notice. The wound, insignificant as it is, has been planted. You have doubtless heard the stories of the Marquis de Carre, its previous owner, that idiot fop who while examining his new purchase nicked his thumb on the blade. The scratch did not heal. It simply grew, winding its way across his hand and up his arm, as shallow as ever, even as they swaddled his arm in dressing to try and stanch it." Here Luciano would bare his teeth in the delighted shudder of one enjoying a good ghost story. "They say that by the time infection finally took him, his body was more than forty percent wound."

Here, a shadow would fall over the party, the assembled guests sinking for a moment into unease, before Luciano would banish the gloom with a roar of boisterous laughter. "But quite fortunately for us, the signorina is as stubbornly incongruous as her weapon, and insists on wielding it as a sword, no matter how unbefitting it or she may be for the role. So, I say, bring on La Belladonna!" and here he would raise his glass in toast. "Let her attempt to graze me with her sword while I attempt to run her through with mine. I think, once she is dead, I will display the sword in my study. See which guests succumb to the temptation to examine it, and run their fingers over the blade." Luciano tended to lapse into an unseemly sadism on occasion, a cruelty that had for some reason overshot his would-be assassin and was now an attraction on its own. "La Belladonna must be a seductress, not a fighter. On display, at least, she might have a chance to do her work."

What Luciano failed to realize - what none of us could have known at the time - was that from the moment he had learned of its legend, La Belladonna had already left its mark on him. What must have been a mere pinprick of dissatisfaction at first soon deepened into an obsession. He would trot out his dissertation at every party and social gathering, forever iterating and elaborating upon it. Ceaseless tirades over the incompatible natures of La Belladonna, the soul of a dagger in the body of a sword, and how it should broken down to be one thing or another, et cetera, the wound consuming everything until it was all he could talk about by the end. When the anatomists autopsied Luciano, they found his brain riddled with lesions, each chained to the last as if they had ruptured in sequence.

"Just ignore it," Dorte's mother told her, "don't look down - Dorte, listen to me! Come along now! Just keep walking." "You must not listen to the bog," her teacher said in class, "for it has nothing wise to say and no good will to grant you." "Boo you nasty dirty thing!" her brother Jesper yelled, and flung rocks into the bog instead, deep gulping upheavals of mud as the bog spluttered and moaned. Dorte felt sorry for the bog, and when she lost her first tooth, hid it away in the back of her drawer, carried it secretly in the palm of her hand. When they next went over the bridge, she swung out her arm and let the tooth drop, like a single flake of sugar.

The bog closed around it without hesitation, water puckering around its edge, sucking it down sweetly. Dorte's mother, striding rapidly as she usually did when crossing the bridge, failed to notice.

Dorte fed the bog all her baby teeth. As she got older she would come to the bridge by herself, crouching down between its railings, looking down at the dark mirror of bog reflecting sky, overgrown with islands of peat and hillocks. She'd give it a gummy smile, tongue still probing the fresh gap in her mouth, and listen to the bog pant and ripple back in anticipation. She'd let her tooth fall to disappear into the murky water, the great dark gaps between the moss, the bog giving a single-toothed grin back.

Dorte grew older. One day she lost the last of her baby teeth, though the significance of it did not strike her till weeks later. Months passed, and the bog began moaning again, pleading ever more piteously than before, swelling up against the mossy logs, confused and whimpering. Dorte held out her empty hands and shook her head desperately, trying to explain to the dumb and senseless bog that she had no more teeth to give it.

"Now look what you've done," said her mother, who in the intervening years had finally noticed what Dorte had been doing. "You've gotten it used to getting teeth, and now it's only going to be disappointed."

The bog even went so far as to follow Dorte home one day, lapping at their doorstep and swamping her mother's garden. It took her father and two neighbors digging a drainage ditch and shoveling in gravel to finally drive the bog back. "I hope you're happy!" said her mother, stomping through her ruined fennel. "It's going to be a nuisance now, begging for teeth from everyone!" Her voice grew foreboding. "They're probably going to have to put it down."

Dorte was horrified. She went pleading with all her friends and classmates for more teeth to feed the bog, but seeing as how they were her age, most of them had freshly run out of baby teeth as well. She was able to scrounge up one or two more, as well as specimens secured from younger siblings, but in the end none of them were as invested in the bog as she was, and it soon became clear that she could only keep this up for another few months, at best. In her most dire moments, Dorte considered flinging herself down, mouth first, upon her bedpost, or else inviting Jesper to fling a rock at her as well, but after much trembling and deliberation, imagining the jagged bloody roots still jutting from her gums, could not bring herself to do the deed.

Part 3: Masks

Contrary to mortal masquerades, at fae balls it is the custom to wear one's true face on the surface, while maintaining the facade of one's choice just beneath. Attendees are unmasked twice, thrice, a dozen times a night, either privately or in public, contorting mercurially over the course of the evening or else the same every time, a shifting tapestry of social hierarchies and relationships played out through pantomime and caricature. Like many other fae festivities, the masquerade serves as a burlesque of mortal affairs, those poor wretches who must tramp around with their identities in plain view at all times, concealing all sorts of resentments and insecurities and ambitions underneath.

Given the frequent masking and unmasking, faces interchanged like dance partners, it is also a prime opportunity for the enterprising rapscallion to make away with a fae's true face.

Tyros at the art may opt for a simple snatch and grab, but quickly find that fae, when not ready to be unmasked, tend to keep a hostile demeanor behind their faces. Many an attempted theft has gone awry when the unmasking reveals not an ex-lover or historical visage or the queen defaced with goatee and mustache, but instead the face of a rabid barking dog, a coif of vipers, a rotting skull teeming with wasps, the sun.

Such gaffes make up scattered spots of entertainment among the partygoers, the resulting shrieks of horror or agony calling attention to the scene. It is true that a thief both bold enough and swift enough might be able to snatch up a mask and disappear into the crowd, leaving behind their victim as distraction, but nonetheless this method cannot be recommended to those who have yet to dedicate their convictions to the craft.

Rather, the more widely accepted technique is to charm one's victim into voluntary revelation, hopefully in a private alcove somewhere, with windows flung open wide enough for one to make their escape. "But enough of who you are - why don't you show me who you want to be?" is the traditional, if trite, approach, and if the ball is in full swing should be more than enough to land you a tête-à-tête. More elaborate intimacies may be inappropriate if your intention is to simply ransom the true face back, but if blackmail is to be involved, we trust you to have enough familiarity with your target to conduct yourself accordingly.

(A word of warning, though, of the fae with ambition. While not as nakedly antagonistic as, say, a steel set of jaws, removing an immaculate ivory mask to reveal the blazing countenance of Our Lady of the Firmaments might come as equal, if not more of, a shock.)

To reduce the unpredictability of such revelations, there are those who opt instead to make a parlor game of the unmasking, with rules and contrivances and so forth. "Show me my mother's face before she had a name," is a perfectly acceptable feint in these scenarios, as are "Show me the animal Aesop last ate", "Number your eyes by my wives and your teeth by my years", "Who would you be if you were my lover", and various riddling games in which one's partner must shapeshift into the answer.

The disadvantage of this technique is that such games are commonly played in groups, but with a sufficiently boisterous set of players and enough free-flowing wine, any half-decent rapscallion should be able to find an opportunity to make a grab for a face and scarper, or else discreetly secret one away amidst the festivities. The most vital thing is to keep careful track of who are wearing their true faces and who are not, for as the games and intimacies among players grow more involved, the distinction is apt to get blurred.

Having acquired a true face as trophy, you may now indulge in the luxurious phase of negotiation. Most fae will be more than happy to haggle for their face back, still warm in the afterglow of the party and magnanimous in their offers. Given, we trust, that you have not followed the example of the hapless thief who attended a masquerade, and of all the masks on display, chose to make off with a wrought iron one featuring curling horns and an ominous disposition. The fool kept the mask mounted in his study, and was unnerved to find its visage growing more ominous and grotesque with each day, while its owner, freed from the constraints of a true face, rose through the echelons of society as a gust of petals, the Lord High Minister, Lady Morivingen, a stampede of elk, a shower of sunbeams and gold, etc. As the mask glowered down at the thief relentlessly, grown hideous and malevolent, he became helplessly paranoid of its protean owner, seeing retribution lurking in every face and lack thereof.

In the end, his house burned down with him in it, and no such mask matching that description was ever recovered from the ashes, at least according to the report that the Lord High Minster penned.