The Abduction Tale

     There were once creatures borne from the dreams of angels, and they were called, appropriately, the ange’. They were graceful, beautiful and kind to all they encountered. The common fae adored them, and the noble fae, the sidhe, despised them. It is the greatest secret of the sidhe, and especially house Ailil and Gwydion, that they slaughtered the ange’, and did so with cold iron.

     This secret was borne silently for centuries, and after the sidhe’s return, they were reassured by discreet inquiries that all mention and thought of the ange’ was long dead. Then, ten years later, a pale infant was born…with wings and a prophecy hanging over her head:

          A gift of dreams to the waking world, to treasure and guard. Only love’s truest touch may soil this  snow, and guardianship is for a devoted heart. A stain on the feather, and the gift will be revoked for all eternity.

     The first child to ever be brought into the world already Chrysalized made all of the world’s fae rejoice, save the sidhe. One look at the growing Diamanta Rothwell, orphaned and given to Brandenburg’s troll/boggan duo to raise, and one could guess that she was of no particular known kith. As she reached maturity, it was commonly agreed amongst the Eiluned, with the encouragement of their Ailil cousins, that she couldn’t be allowed to remember. A few humans, lost amidst the herd of creatures that were always trying to get the Gift of Dreams, reported when her dreams became violent and laced with faint memory. It was then that an Eiluned advisor to the High King mentioned having the Gift of Dreams up for a visit.
     Yes, it was the house of secrets that put the group of Sabbat vampires on Dia’s trail. It was they who watched from the nearby rooftops as the pack of bloodsuckers had their fun. There was a bit of consternation when she managed to escape, but the reassuring report from Hearth Home’s heart-broken fae took care of any doubts. The Eiluned, knowing the prophecy which had dogged the Gift of Dream’s wings, had no fears she would return, would reincarnate.

     Of course, they didn’t know Jonas Foster.

     When Iris to-be-Foster was born, and reports reached the Eiluned, they panicked. This time, there was no fail-safe prophecy they could use to ensure her permanent demise, and clearly (not knowing of Jonas Foster’s bargain,) the first prophecy had been misread somehow. Immediate attempts were made to seal Iris’s fate as neatly as they’d managed Dia’s. Again, they hadn’t counted on the love of one former death mage and hit for hire. It’s not known, except by Jonas himself, how many people he killed in the first five years of Iris’s life. With the help of her daemonic ‘stepfathers,’ Jonas managed to establish a clear reputation: come after Iris, and die. As the Eiluned house watched, Iris grew, and there was, thankfully, no sign of her remembering the fate of her long-dead kith.
     This all changed in November of 2026, the year Iris turned nineteen. A Shadow Court seer had a vision which portrayed, rather violently, the extermination of house Eiluned, Gwydion and Ailil. In a panic, the seer (a satyress named Autumnly) went to her liege lord and explained her vision. Her liege lord was King Melige of the Kingdom of Willows. He took action: calling a minor baron, the Lord Lindent n’Lauen, Melige arranged with him to have Iris Foster carefully extracted. Lindent sent a pair of sluagh spies to Brandenburg, Virginia to see how difficult a straight kidnapping would be. Their report was thorough and depressing: no one, but NO ONE got within a hundred yards of the reborn Gift without someone in the city’s know being aware of it. Lindent began working on a different tactic. Calling an old friend, the Duke Filippo Cervalio of Paradys, North Carolina. Filippo had an even more depressing thing to report: the History Clock, a hereditary treasure of his family’s, had been stolen. While Filippo explained that such a thing had been arranged, something had gone wrong, and now the clock and its’ thief were both missing. Lindent spoke to those members of his house, and one woman, a sly creature named Georgina Collindale, mentioned that there was something in Brandenburg even the famed Rough Riders knew nothing of.
     A mortal dreamer by the name of Derrick Marshfeld was not only a dealer of antiques in Paradys, but a man with a debt problem: he’d bargained with demons and lost more than just his soul. He had made these bargains under the watchful eye of a Baali named Ishmael Garver, (or Mark Cavendish, as Derrick knew him.) Derrick had been looking for a way to fulfill his debts for quite some time, and when he found an intricate clock, clearly hundreds of years old, he offered it to Ishmael as payment to clear his debts. At the same time, Derrick had told his lover Georgina about Ishmael, and how the vampire had managed to live in Brandenburg for over three decades. Georgina reported this to her lord, Filippo, who passed on the information to Lindent.
     Thus began a spate of bargaining between the Baali and a number of individuals. Derrick offered the History Clock in lieu of payment for a couple of his daemonic debts. Recognizing immediately what it was the mortal had, Ishmael agreed, and stowed the clock away in a place only he could find, putting a clever replica (daemonic make) in his store. Lindent sent a liason to Ishmael to bargain for the kidnapping of Iris Foster, his lover, the Lady Elaine Delacour. Ishmael, recognizing something in Elaine’s eyes, agreed to kidnap Iris and turn her over to the Eiluned in exchange for a scrap of paper reckoned to be thousands of years old. The paper held a bit of a spell used for daywalking vampires, in theory, of course. Ishmael never let on that he had the rest of the paper, pieced together over eighty years, but simply made the exchange. He then set about the delicate process of kidnapping the reborn Gift of Dreams, Iris Foster.

     In May, his plan came to fruition: Ishmael neatly plucked Iris off of the streets and tucked her away in a specially designed box: a box made by demons, which effectively blocked any and all supernatural searching techniques. When Lady Elaine came to retrieve her former liege lord’s prize, (Lord Lindent having died of a mysterious wasting sickness a month prior,) Ishmael warned her repeatedly to not remove Iris from the box for any length of time beyond four hours. Elaine took the box and waved his warnings to silence. With Iris in hand, Elaine fled to France, intenting to confront the leader of her house and demand the title and power she’d earned by weaving herself into these machinations. All that she left for King Melige, (and therefore, Duke Filippo,) was assurance that Iris was safely in the dark house’s hands.
Of course, something went horribly wrong as she traveled with her small retinue through France. Stumbling into a Nightmare Realm, Elaine lost what little sanity she had, as well as her entire retinue. Oh…and Iris. TheNightmare Realm sucked the container into itself and incorporated it into a strange dreamhaven of sorts for one of the Lost: a sidhe of Beaumayn who had taken no mortal form, and lost all semblance of sanity. The Beaumayn, a man of painful beauty by the mythic name of Beaumanyce Murral the Golden, opened his borders to let Elaine out onto the Silver Path, stranding the woman in the Waking World when a trod opened and spat her out. Only one bit of her mission remained in her mind, and that was to go to the home of Dona Elena Atima Justinicus, a Lasombra vampire of insane power. Lindent had made more than one bargain, and had a copy of the paper he’d given to Ishmael. Dona Elena’s quest for the spell was well-known in certain circles of the occult world, and she’d offered a safe haven for the Eiluned and his prize in one of her homes, deep in the wastelands of Siberia.
     Dona Elena was displeased when Elaine came to her home empty-handed and babbling. Without a second thought, she slaughtered the Eiluned sidhe and began arrangements to get the paper from Ishmael Garver. Duke Filippo and King Melige were left to assume that Iris, if not dead, had been ‘taken care of.’ The History Clock was becoming a much more worrisome item. Neither lord knew what had become of the clock, and all of the duke’s searching was leading him to a number of dead ends. Meanwhile, in Brandenburg, Ishmael was teaching a sluagh childling named Charlotte how to harness her inherent fae abilities and telling her a tale of the sidhe. A very, very bloody tale…