#w&b

COLOR PALETTE .

The Blooming Queen’s hair as it is when the story starts: a rotting, brown-sweetened gold, like a bruised persimmon, pale orange undertones mottled with the hues of overripe peach flesh.

All the reds of an autumn forest, but especially the deep, bloody reds that certain trees produce—crimson with a cool tinge to it, a violet-indigo like shadows blooming at twilight.

The dry, wilted brown of fallen leaves; the papery chestnut of dying grass; the goldenrod that adorns fields in sways and swirls until first frost.

Dusk-light that pours like honey, a sighed warmth that pools into all the places where you have gone hollow.

The depthless dark of the Withering Queen’s eyes, like earth black with everything once-bloomed and dying; the burnished gleam of the wilt-prince’s eyes, dark like his mother’s until the light hits right. Then, they’re veined in the softness of mercy.

The orange ember-brilliance of Tselvya’s flames, of Genevieve’s hair, of chrysanthemums and marigolds throwing flamboyant blooms into the slow subside of midsummer sunshine.

THE BLOOMING COURT .

Butterflies and moths and beetles have domain over this land, where the flowers are bright and the berries overripe, sweet and heady and repugnant. The Blooming Queen dotes upon them, and they grow larger than they have any right to be.

The fae sworn to the blossom-queen adorn themselves in red, red jewels and red flowers and red life, carnage bloodied down the tips of sharp teeth and talon-pointed nails. They pluck the eyeballs out of freshly slaughtered game and feast on fruit bruised to the point of bursting, and all the flowers they touch bloom big and bright and radiant, incandescent—almost frighteningly alive.

Death will always be much too slow to come, here where life rots to the very core.

THE WITHERING THRONE .

The wilt-queen rules from a throne of bones and moonflowers, and her flesh is so brittle that she appears to be no more than a dead body propped up in a borrowed imitation of life. A single touch of her finger leaves spiderwebs of pale mold behind, dozens of white moths fluttering about her shoulders and settling atop the crown of fresh roses adorning her hair. As the moon rises and falls and rises again, the moths drop all around her, and the roses lose their bright sweetness, rotting into a slow, violet-brown mass, until the Withering Queen is draped in nothing but corpses.

The wilt-queen offers her white-clad followers all manner of delicacies over the course of their midnight banquets, and she eagerly partakes in the festivities herself, her dainty corpse-mouth red with the hearts of small, dead creatures. She caresses bony fingers—spindly like the stems of wilted flowers—down the edges of dewy blossoms and trapped prey animals before she drains all the life out of them, her face going from dead-eyed translucence to pink and flushed in the space between one exhale and the next.