"And that is how I ended up in your splendid company, your ladyship. I thank you for listening to my long tale of woe, challenge, and finally, triumph," I finished. It had been cathartic to speak at length about my history. Until that point, I alone knew it. My secrets had only ever been doled out in parts, shared with people I'd never see again or with those forever silenced in death.

There came a burst of applause. The Lady had been as attentive an audience as one could ask for. She'd oohed and ahhed at moments that almost made her seem human. That was, if I ignored her eyes. The glamour that bled out of those orbs held the weight of every drop of the lakes that dotted the mountain. I had no doubt that if she used the Evil Eye on me, I’d be a dead man.

Completing my bow, my whole body sagged. I was not exhausted—I had more energy in me now than when I'd died. It was beyond emotion or the tiredness of the day. My body shook as if I’d chiselled the words into stone. I had been talking for hours, days perhaps, but the moon still hung above me.

With what strength I had left, I allowed myself to fall sideways rather than forwards. I didn’t relish ruining my new face mere hours into its use. I blinked. Hours? That felt wrong. I lay back, and tiredness slid over me like a tide. I had to consciously focus on each breath.

The Lady approached me, kneeling beside me. She stroked my long hair out of my face, the silk having come undone somewhere during the telling. It was a refreshing touch, like a cool breeze on a summer's day.

"Thank you. You have a true gift with words, with faces, with dance and song. I think you should sleep now. I offer you a place to rest, free of obligation and safe from harm. You shall awake tomorrow with your rewards. I have not enjoyed a story so much as this in a millennium."

"It's bad luck to sleep without a name," I mumbled, vaguely recalling old superstitions. Babes must be named when their eyes first opened, and before their wailing ceased. That's how you got changelings, or so the superstition went.

"Then I shall give you one, for a time. There was a bard of old you remind me of. Taliesin. Do you mind if I give it to you?"

My brain was foggy. I was aware that I would have to sleep, and I was faced with a choice: to sleep without a name or to accept one given by a fae.

Giving a fae your name was definitely bad. No one had ever written down what to do about taking one. I fumbled for an answer, but a wave of calm washed over me as our eyes met.

As if I had any chance of outmanoeuvring this ancient being. She'd trapped me in time, wrung me of my secrets, and I could very literally have been dancing in the palm of her hand around a spoonful of water for all I knew.

She was beyond me. I could only hope her intentions were good. At this point, I’d consider it an epic achievement just to wake up tomorrow.

"Taliesin is good," I managed to mumble before a slipped into a timeless slumber.

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Waking from a deep, restful rest in a ring of wildflowers would be a wondrous way to start any day. Finding that the ring of flowers was circled with snow added a fresh layer of whimsy to it. I was not dead, nor did it feel like I had died again.

I had no doubt the scenes of last night were real. They felt seared into my memory. The Lady's glamour was also nowhere near. Not that I’d notice her if she didn’t wish me to. I was already quite adept at controlling my glamour, and I likely had fewer years than she had centuries.

The next thing I noticed was my clothes. Someone—I suspected I knew who—had dressed me as a wandering minstrel. It was a mix of practical travel clothes, my jacket layered like a gambeson but with pleated sleeves and strikingly red trousers. All the rest of my clothes were black or grey. I recognised the look from the tournaments I used to attend, always coming in a respectable third, only once accidentally winning. An achievement that sounds better than it was, as I was at that point a couple of years older than most competitors due to my cultivation issues.

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The look was completed by a lute lying on the grass next to me. Another skill I'd built over the last few years as I sought to ever add the exact right kind of value. I could feel the enchantment radiating off it, so tentatively, I picked up the instrument.

Glamour flowed through me. The instrument held more potential than any weapon I'd ever been close enough to examine. If it had been a weapon, the Knightly Orders would have gone to war over it, but as an instrument, I hadn’t the foggiest idea how it would be valued. I strummed across its strings, and it was, of course, beautifully in tune.

A fear wound itself around my heart. The fae generally known as the Lady of the Lake was one of the Seelie and the most powerful and grounded of their kin. Their gifts tended to be swords and a destiny. Usually bloody and violent.

Whether that destiny was due to their power or because they’d burdened some poor soul with an incredible artefact—the kind that drew the sort of attention from which Destiny with a capital D was forged—I wasn’t sure. Not having it be a blade might at least somewhat temper my destiny. As if sensing the perfect time to reveal itself, I felt a small wisp of blade glamour.

Blade glamour. From. My. Lute.

A terrible certainty settled upon me. An inevitability. Placing a hand around the neck, I pushed a touch of glamour into it, and things began to change. The lute transformed into a blade, a bastard sword—my preferred weapon. The changes didn’t stop there. With a billow of smoke, my minstrel's attire was swallowed, only to be revealed as pitch-black armour.

There was an extremely vexing moment when a helmet grew over my head in a burst of smoke. That was when I realised the transformation was tugging on my glamour to fuel itself. Worse, I’d just bound the artefact to myself.

The whole damn thing was a soul enchantment. Bound to my soul until it left this plane. Normally, I'd say until death, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough to part us.

"Well, I have woken in worse situations," I said to banish the mood settling over me. I mean, I'd woken up yesterday knowing I was going to die.

As my senses returned, I decided there and then to use the blade as little as possible. Pulling on the glamour, I was again washed with smoke. I could now sense that the armour and the minstrel's outfit were just empty vessels for my glamour to enforce.

This was apparently a significant difference from the practices of the lost Realm of the Mystic East. The Mystic East was a fraught topic. Depending on your source, one of two things happened. Court scholars would tell you that long ago, our realms exchanged knowledge about cultivation, sharing our understanding of glamour and seeking to learn about their view of Qi. But if you checked first-hand sources from the time, a woman named Zhang Jinghua came through a rift, beat up our sorry excuses for cultivators, and was so vexed by our total lack of skill that she imparted much of her knowledge upon us just so we wouldn’t disappoint whoever found us next.

The court scholars would tell you that she lauded our skills, and saw little flawed in us. That implying she was disgusted with certain practices, and behaviours is but a mere fantasy. These same scholars were always the ones who struggled to explain why the Great Empire of Atlantis became the lost Empire of Atlantis the very same year she appeared.

Apparently, our ability to enforce our armour was a trick she didn’t entirely hate, so that got to stay. That and she preferred our witches's brews over her people's alchemical practices, her rant against 'pills' was scathing.

Cultivator armour could be enforced with glamour; in doing so, a cultivator sacrificed some of their available glamour but in return gained more protection than they might otherwise achieve with regular enforcement. There were numerous other trade-offs, ranging from mobility to combat styles.

Armour choice was a huge topic of discussion across Euross. Albion was obsessed with plate armour, which ate up lots of glamour, but in turn made its Knights into tanks capable of dealing with the huge monsters that tended to spawn there.

My new armour was half-plate—far more than I was used to wearing.

I began to cultivate, the bellows breathing drawing in glamour so quickly it made me light-headed. It was a method that assumed you couldn’t absorb glamour easily. Now? My Hearth was straining to contain the rushing energy. I began to funnel the excess into the armour.

The glamour around me was dense, not quite the almost-liquid density of the mirror pool, but soupy and rich.

I’d more than stumbled into the stuff of legends—I’d danced right into its maw. If I was to survive long enough not to become a footnote, I had to get my head screwed on right and avoid finding it bitten off. I folded my legs beneath me and thought about what to do next.

I was not much of a planner, which might surprise most given my meticulous planning of revenge, but that was out of necessity. I needed a plan, so I made one. I’d found that focusing on my needs was the best defence against disappointment. Wants bred dissatisfaction.

Needs were simpler. I rarely lost what I needed, and I rarely wanted for much. In fact, I hadn’t wanted anything beyond “escape” and “cause maximum damage.” Did I need to cause damage? Yes—otherwise my mind would have wandered into the madness of the Unseelie long ago.

What did I need right now?

As if sensing its moment, my stomach grumbled.