Snippet of an Unwritten Book

I had this idea almost a year ago, but I quickly realized that it's not a story I can tell yet. It needs more time to grow solid enough that I can grab it, even if just by a strand, and pull it out.

It feels YA, only due to it's dark pall, but really I would say it's the kind of book I would have like to read in 7th or 8th Grade.

Here is the only solid snippet, when Alria first encounters Queen Mab

Its raining on the lawn behind the house. There is a woman there, standing on the grass. She is turned away, her hand raised to grey boiled sky. And she stands too still.

Something in that posture makes Alira shiver.

The woman is solid as stone, not brittle, but sharp. Her black dress melds with her black black hair and lends to her shape the frightening, hidden unknown of a shadow in a dark room.

Alira forces herself a single step forward and the old boards of the porch groan.

The shadow woman turns, her profile somehow sharper still, but this of glass and ice for her skin is white like fallen snow and in the rain it glimmers just the same. She raises her eye, meets Alana’s.

“Child.” She says. One word only. But in it there are vast oceans of scorn.

“Who are you?” Alira asks, the rain so loud she can hardly hear herself.

The woman turns to face her now, and she regrets speaking at all. There is something dangerous in this woman, something predatory. Something no more akin to kindness than a starved animal. It is faint but enough to make her careful. As to set the back of her neck tingling.

Her eyes are perhaps too black, her cheeks too high.

Alira fights the urge to turn away. “Who are you, I said!”

The woman’s face barley moves but Alira knows. This is not a woman to make demands of. This was a mistake and it will not be forgiven. She has spoken out of turn, offered offense, and the animal within the woman comes forward. The corner of her mouth flickers, her brow begins to bend but stops. A glimpse. But it is enough.

This is not a woman at all but a beast wearing a woman’s shape.

It smiles.

The wind rises, howling, from nowhere. The rain pours. Lightening sparks and cackles within the black clouds above, freezing the raindrops in shapes of bright glass and there, around the woman’s head, for a moment only, she sees spikes, gleaming points, regal.

A crown.

“I am” it whispers “a warning.”

And is gone.

The idea is a kind of Series of Unfortunate Events meets The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Two children who, unknown to themselves, are foundlings- half-Fae, raised in the world of mortals. They move in with their strange uncle (there's always gotta be a strange uncle in these kinds of stories) in his weird old victorian house (there's always gotta be. . . you get it.) which is just a bit more than it seems.

I mention Unfortunate Event because it's my intent to portray the Fae in a way that's closer to the legends- feral, powerful, and dangerously un-caring when it comes to mortals.

I won't yammer on about what I have figured out, I'll just leave it here. Maybe In a few years I'll have some good news on it's completion.