Daugi whined through chattering teeth, folding her paws over her ears as she kept an eye on the door. Fenn soothed her with gentle scratches behind the ear as he read, trying to still her fidgety unease. Was it just him, or were those noises getting louder? Despite the pervasive squelchy gurgling that ran claws down the inside of their skulls, the boy kept hunkered down, skimming through the text.

Much like the Fae scattered throughout the rest of the world, frost fae often organize themselves in rough communities known as… Several Courts are known to exist within Salva… ordian forest of Corone…

...utterly unfettered by the cold; one could stand naked in the most bitter of snowstorms and be perfectly comfortable…
Frost fae blood may be well worth the study. It is apparently non-magical in nature, hence, it must be composed of a natural combination of elements that could theoretically be recreated and replicated. Imagine all the potential uses for a liquid incapable of freezing…

...reamers find themselves longing for faerie revels. As one girl put it, they were practi…

Possessing a gift for “dream walking”... itchment”...

…paired rituals to create new life… an exhausting process, hence any Court must think carefully befo... initiation…

…believed that a frost fae’s appearance is an indication of the properties of their soul, especially once… with cruel features is probably cruel as well. Likewise, one with a more bestial appearance might… result, Fae children born with severe physical defects are believed to have spiritual ones as well, and thus are often abandoned or cas…

The last paragraph stood out pretty starky to Fenn. Oh. Ohhh. Pieces to a puzzle he didn’t even realize he was putting together clicked into place. His hand went to his throat, unease crawling under his skin. As far as he knew, he had always been voiceless, and it certainly seemed to be a defect to him. If this book was accurate, then that gave him a faint idea of why he had never known where or who he had come from. His birth Court had probably ditched him the first chance they got. While that answered a few unfortunate questions, it wasn’t quite what he set out to learn. Where did it talk about magic? Did it have more information on what Courts might be hidden in Corone? Or Salvar?
What were Fae supposed to be like and how did one find them, damn it?

The dripping in the background seemed louder, somehow. Fenn flipped a few chapters back to a section he had initially skipped, desperate to learn more. The tome was especially fuzzy here, and his frosty fingers weren't helping matters.

…adolescent met... formation… awful and wonderful to behold…

Damn these mold blots; the knowledge was literally rotted away. This bit felt important to him. Fenn seethed in snowy uncertainty and scrutinized the useless page for words that no longer were there. Adolescent what? What happened then? When did his adolescence end, even?

Fenn glanced up suddenly as Daugi uttered an abrupt growl at the door. The ghastly drippings were starting to take on an eerie quality...

As it came louder, the sound became very, very wrong. They struck Fenn's ears as a deep black. A bleeding, noxious obsidian. Festering and drying, the sound of withered teeth scraping against flesh. Of scabs sloughing off skin. Rotting and consuming, hollow and ravenous.

Fenn grip on the manuscript loosened and it dropped to the knotty floorboards and hunched over, pressing his hands to his ears. They were sticky with a thinly trickling seepage of his tarry blood.

It was a melody, almost. Green gurgles sung their roots into the mind, growing like an unwanted infection. Mushy. Crusted. Of bitter and bile. Warm. Dripping. No cure was on hand to the fester, the seething. The noises slithered past the study and down the hall.

Fenn collapsed, wishing to drown it out with a cry of his own. Tears stung his eyes. A song, a scream, it didn't matter. He could see Daugi howl, but her cry was swallowed up by the static.

The voice, black and green all over, whispered to the soul in worldless languages. Telling it of a need. Pleading for space to encompass, to overgrow. Gangling vines, frothing teeth, and the gnashing eyes, an inutterable whisper. The things it asked for; insatiable. Expanding. Devouring. That the sound alone caused Fenn to perceive such a disjointed picture of reality was impossible. And yet, there it was, blinding him. He could see nothing else but it.