Arcade (or as it is more often called, Arcadia) is the realm of the True Fae. It is neither the wellspring nor the gutter of imagination, but imagination defines it. Arcade is a stage, with the will of the True Fae its lights and sounds, and their changeling and hobgoblin captives its actors. In Arcadia, the whims of the Fae are the laws of physics. And that can make it damn hard to get home.

The Fae, The Gentry, Your Keepers The Fae are caprice wrapped tight around endless desire. Standing in the right spot, with the right manner of looking, a Fae could create everything they can imagine. Literally any desire that might fleetingly cross their mind, Arcadia can provide. After 1,000 lifetimes’ whims met with only as much difficulty as you desired in the moment of seeking them, you might grow bored. Spoiled. You might lack a certain empathy for the world you are making and remaking. You would be, after all, the only subject in a world of objects. A Fae won’t remember a time when they weren’t the master of their own destiny. (Perhaps not can’t, but certainly won’t.) They have always walked amid the briars and the dreaming places, taking the very air and shaping it. Building a world out of bodies that were to hand. Like yours. Once The Fae are from Arcadia, and of it. In Arcadia, they can shape the very fabric of the world. Tell any story. Be any villain. Or hero, if it could suit them. They are inscrutable, but not unknowable. They have voices, patterns of behavior, ways of moving through Arcadia, esoteric families they love and war with. The logic of their actions isn’t always sound to an outside per- spective, but given time and a safe place to stand, you could begin to predict them. Unfortunately, being able to sense the direction of the tide can’t keep you from get- ting knocked over by it. And for most changelings, the motivation is indistinguishable from the act. The Fae are the instrument that created the durance. The Fae use changelings. They don’t lack for options. The Hedge is bustling with creatures that can carry out a Faerie’s desires, not counting those she might simply summon forth. Perhaps it’s more satisfying to take a life than it is to create one. Tearing a goblin from their life is even destructive in a way you and they recognized in one other, when they risked to meet your eyes. But they seek out humans and set them apart in Arcadia, bestowing both greater “favor” and more severe punishment. And while a goblin is only a stroll away, a kidnapped human from the exotic mortal world is more of a challenge. It’s tedious to steal a baby and hand raise it to harvest the fruit that shrivels at your touch. But it’s quite the game to lure an adult who’s strong of limb and wishing softly for a different life. A Fae with a captive becomes their Keeper, and their recreator — by drawing on Arcadia to reshape a human into a changeling. That person’s original temperament or skill might be taken into account in their reshaping, but no more so than that Fae’s own desire. Fae make change- lings out of your bones and their whims. It’s hard to say how time passed. In Arcadia, time felt more like a visiting guest than a steady companion. Someone for whom you dusted off the furniture and made polite conversation with. But whom, in their absence, you couldn’t quite remember how you knew. Events occurred, certainly. But whether they all happened in one heart- breaking instant, or dripped along over lonely centuries, is hazy. Other strange beings cross through Arcadia, or live within it, hidden at the end of some long forgotten path, like the Huntsmen in their distant woods. Before a Keep- er steals their hearts, before they are called up and filled with a new heart’s desire, their footsteps measure out the natural order of the forest. Now She looks you straight in the eye and says, “We should celebrate,” before clapping her hands and pouring lavender champagne into your open palms. She draws your hand to- ward her mouth, and when you startle awake you’re not sure if it was a memory or a threat. Maybe she did like flowers and the color purple and treating you like a vessel to fill. Maybe she just tripped down the Dreaming Roads, straight into the back of your head, to remind you that no matter how far you run, you’re always going to be Hers. Your memories are shaky these days, and your dreams are worse. Whether your time with the Fae was an inter- minable drudge or a relentless hail of activity, it’s blurring around the edges. But the general shape remains, and ter- rifying moments sometimes burst through and leave you shaking. The time you were whipped for bringing a green fruit to the table. The honeysuckle smell of the gardens, where you buried maiden after maiden. The crunch of boots on dry grass. Warm skin pressed against yours. A hammer in your hands. Blood on your lips. You’re not sure you want to remember more. Your life is already a dull thrum of risk, and borrow- ing trouble from the past only opens you up to new ones. Every new memory you pin down cracks the boundar- ies you’ve drawn between before and after. It makes it harder to keep the two separate, and stay integrated into the world you ran back to. But actively trying to forget — pushing away your past in favor of a human present — is dangerous, too, even if it makes some days smoother. When you forget too much, you lose sight of how fragile your freedom is. Because your past hasn’t forgotten you, and you’re still on the run. No matter how scorched the plain on which their towers once stood, no matter how bloodless and cold the body — what Arcadia shows you can never really be trusted. That doubt makes your palms itch every time you walk through an archway, or go 10 minutes out of your way to avoid it. The Fae are petty, yet careless. The Fae are vengeful, but bored. It’s not exactly flatter- ing if your best hope for freedom is that your Keeper let you go because they’ve forgotten you exist. But it’s better than nothing. Otherwise, someone lurks in your doorways and mirrors, and they want their pet back, if for no other reason than that you tried to take it away. Nothing here can quite be trusted either, but you ran a hard road to get home. It would be a shame not to try to live in it. Living in the world requires a different kind of pro- tection than it used to. Driving while black didn’t stop be- ing a thing, but the cops in the trooper car that slides up next to you might not have their humanity evenly applied. The man with no face who follows you for 25 minutes, each step landing precisely a fifth of a second after yours, a drum beat. The woman who smiles up at your security camera as she hammers on the call button again, showing her rows and rows of shining teeth. The black dog with eyes that make you dizzy, who’s been howling outside your office all day. The voice whispering misogynoir in your ear, coming from the winking man on the other side of the train car. In place of a heart, a Huntsman is filled with your Keeper’s possessive desire. They can’t be diverted, because nothing is left inside them but someone else’s want. They can’t be killed, not permanently, because that want will simply fly back to your Keeper, and be poured into a new vessel. A hunt can only ever be delayed. But in between being hunted, you still have the rest of your life. That’s where courts come in. They help you fit a story to the events of Arcadia, get your feet back under you, and keep the monsters from your door. Every city divides their time and responsibilities a little differently, building on the metaphors that speak to that community. Seasonal courts, which divide the year into quarters and trade authority with the passing of one into another, are common, but not universal. Some cities may share power between all courts at all times, collectivizing the skills of diverse changelings toward projects too big for any one group to manage. Some may ossify into a permanent hierarchy, preferring any kind of stability or continuity to the constant anarchy of Ar- cadia. As every changeling is both unique to themselves, and fundamentally alike, so are cities. Courts hold a large measure of authority, and speak to an emotion that burns in you — Desire, Wrath, Fear, Sorrow. Joining one is em- bracing, and giving in to, that emotion. Building it a home in your heart, and letting it drive you instead of consume you. Living an emotion in high definition can be exhaust- ing, but a line to someone who feels the same way you do can be powerful, and empowering. And anyway, all your friends are there. You ran away from Arcadia to find a human life again, but even if you slip right back into your old life, it’s hard to keep a secret that big. It puts distance between you and the people who knew you before. People who might not react well to dis- covering the tufts of hair you can’t seem to slick down are actually antlers, who might not understand why you can’t bear the taste of apples. The burden’s a little easier with other changelings; they see you more clearly. They know what it’s like to be changed, to have been lost. The Durance The Fae might please themselves to follow rules in snatching someone away, but they follow them in their own way, and only as long as it entertains them to do so. You tripped, and accepted a hand up. You said yes to a pretty face whose whisper you almost heard. You walked through the wrong door, and let go of the handle. You stepped onto a circle of bare sand ringed with sweet-smell- ing brush. You were framed by the trunks of two spot- ted sycamore trees. You picked a salmonberry from the low branches of a bramble. Then the air grew thorns, and 66 something sour and strange wrapped around your heart and yanked you in. There would be a reason, because everything has a reason. Reasons to blame yourself and reasons to doubt your memory and reasons to let Arcadia swallow you up. Requests you made, favors you were owed, offenses you committed. Someone is at fault for every bent blade of grass or dusty cufflink or hot gasp of desire. And if you asked your Keeper, that someone must have been you. Those are the things they wanted you to think, when they gave a care to your thoughts. They wanted you to believe you alone were responsible for your suffering, and however they chose to treat you was far more gracious than you deserved, than you would have gotten from someone fairer and less fond of you. But the Gentry are liars, and you know that now. They told you they had good reasons. But in the end, they were there, and you were to hand. Once The things that happened next, you endured. This was your durance. One evening, for novelty and want of an earring, they tore you out of your life and sat a doll of straw and pennies in your place. They put your eyes in a crystal jewelry box, filled the holes in your skull with silver pearls and star- dust, and left you buried in the sand like a forgotten toy. Then, when the nacre crept out of your eyes and covered your skin, they dug you up and hung you alongside a long golden teardrop that blinked slowly and lay still. Your eyes haven’t seen your own face since. For petulance, you were stolen because you somewhat resembled a man who once attended a wild menagerie of sparkling beasts. He stretched and molded your face until you looked more like the one who got away, and in time you answered to what might have been that man’s name. But as he often reminded you, you couldn’t hope to be as talented as your predecessor until you really became him. If you don’t start remembering soon, he’ll reclaim this name you haven’t earned. In a wooded glen on the edge of his es- tate, a dozen iron statues with half-familiar faces stare back. For avarice, your skill was rewarded. More and better tools, useful assistants, endless materials. Each clockwork treasure whisked from your hands even as you paused to admire its smooth, animated motion. But the praise was riddled with concern. Surely, with what you had at your disposal, you could do better? What was troubling you, that so diminished the quality of your delicate brass ma- chines? She knew you were capable of producing better work. Tomorrow you would do better. You had better. For entertainment, your living flame was coaxed out of your body into a lantern. It went up in steam and smoke when you tried to climb back into it. For years after that, you lit the zoetrope that told unkind versions of the sto- ry of your life. When she grew tired of laughing at your charred body, broken hearts, and missed opportunities, she put you in a drawer and let you burn down to a gut- tering spark. Each time she pulls you out and breathes life back into your flame, she asks for a new story. You’re running out of stories. For desire, you were stolen away to grace the arm of a demon lover. They tended to your growth with great care and thoughtfulness. Your neck was elongated just so. Your limbs pulled long and lithe as a spider. Your cheekbones sharpened, and your eyes pulled wide and bleached clear. Beauty is the polish added to a lustrous metal, the flower clipped just so. Beauty speaks for itself. Without words if necessary. Your tongue will regrow once you know to use it just so. In the meantime, while your glass slippers may yet cut your feet, be assured that the blood sets off your skin beautifully. For loneliness, you followed her over stone and field, a step behind but never out of sight, and sang. You grew tired of your own songs, repeated year on year, and then the ones you invented as you trailed her through empty places. Now your songs are only sound, all meaning taken from you by endless repetition. You walked with her till your joints grew brittle, and your hair went white. Walked till she had to guide you by the hand, lest you tumble in your blindness. Until your bones shrank further and further, delicate as the toy songbird she kept in the cage hanging from her neck. Now Your durance was unique, but you see common themes when you trade stories with your friends and read court histories about the ones who came up before you. Places you were taken, people you were made to be. Your Keeper’s fingerprints linger on your body, and their words scratched out a home in your mind. And on the other side of your captivity, that sets you apart from who you were. It doesn’t leave you in wreckage, but neither are you unscathed by it. And your Keeper’s fingerprints don’t only linger on you. They also reach out into the lives of everyone you knew before. Leaving you with one of the hardest choices a newly escaped changeling has to make. What to do with the creature made of gum wrappers and newspaper clip- pings that’s squatting in your old life. Maybe you can get that life back — catch the rhythm and slip in at an op- portune moment. Kill your fetch for taking your place and daring to believe they’re you. Run your old life again. Or don’t. Maybe you feel too different from the person you were when you and your fetch parted ways. They were the one who finished your degree and found a job and a boy- friend and a graying poodle.

You try not to remember your own durance (or your escape) in too much detail, or else you’d never stop shak- ing. But the highlights stick. A Fae wanted something from you, that they were willing to use you up to get, and you escaped while there was still something left to save. Stories that you can spin out of horror, funny or sad or cautionary. Most days you accept who you are now, maybe even love it — after all, what they made you into also brought you out of their power. You try to remember what’s worth knowing, while denying your Keeper free rent in your nightmares. You made a friend who knows as much about who you can be as who you were. You get by. The Wyrd Turn around seven times widdershins at twilight, and a new path opens. Promise you’ll always be by your sister’s side and you will, even if it means following her to the ends of the Earth and beyond. Meet a mysterious stranger who saves your life and prepare to hand over your first- born child someday. Take the power of the Fae for your own, but remember it has no trouble biting the hand that wields it. The Wyrd is the ineffable force that governs all fae magic. It binds pledges and connects changelings to Fa- erie. The Gentry embody it, and it runs through Arcadia’s veins. The closer a fae being is to the Wyrd, the more powerful they become. From its coffers flows Glamour, a currency paid in feelings and passions that buy fae mira- cles. But those are all just symptoms. The Wyrd has no guiding impulse, but it gives and it takes in equal measure, always. It’s the power of reciprocity. It makes the rules and doesn’t care if you never got the memo. Even the masters of Faerie capitulate to the Wyrd’s decrees. Once It took 580 sacrifices before you figured it out. You counted, because you thought if you remembered each one then somehow, somewhere, they wouldn’t be gone. And because you knew the numbers, one day you under- stood: She was predictable not because she simply loved so to sacrifice her subjects to her bloody banner, but be- cause if she didn’t, someone she didn’t choose would fall in their place. You snuck into the garage, where he always told you never to go, and you found the old jalopy gathering dust there under the tarp. Because it was forbidden, you used the clockwork fingers he gave you to make the engine sing, and you left the garage door in splinters as you careened down the path. You knew, then, that his usual trick of flitting to your side no matter where you roamed didn’t work anymore. That the pacts he made with the wind and the stars were right here under your hands, in chrome and leather, and that the demands were now yours to make. 68 You never would have found your way back but for the sad-eyed panda woman and her helpful brood. They seemed so friendly, you couldn’t imagine they would ex- pect repayment. Maybe they didn’t. But you found your- self deep in debt anyway, and wondered whether they’d even accept anything you had to give. Now Just as gravity is the force that says when you drop an apple it falls down to the ground, the Wyrd is the force that says when you gain something you must pay some- thing in return. This is why all fae creatures — including you — make deals and promises. If you don’t define the price when someone gains something, the Wyrd will do it for you, and nobody wants that. This is also why, when somebody breaks an oath or skips out on what they owe, the Wyrd steps in to make restitution happen one way or another. It’s why Goblin Debt demands its due even when you haven’t seen that troll in years, and why the True Fae must accept limitations and rules even while their natures strain to be boundless. Loopholes exist, but even they en- sure a balanced checkbook in the end. The Wyrd’s tender of choice is Glamour, the stuff of pure emotion and daydream. You know it as the tantaliz- ing scent you pick up when your neighbor’s little girl cries alone on the porch, and when your lover’s breath catches as he speaks your name; the rush of feeling alive as you take in these cherished moments and breathe them back out as power. They give, and you take; then you pay, and you receive. You’ve heard a few names whispered at the edges of hearing, the few unfortunate souls who once tried to cheat the Wyrd’s system. No one likes to talk about what happened to them. Hedgevine gossip says that’s a rabbit hole even the Lost would do best to avoid.