Chronicles of Adair: The Missing Score (Last Updated 5/31)

Hello. It’s me again, the Fairelander. If by some small miracle you are reading this message, then perhaps you will understand my plight.

Perhaps you, too, still set your Scroll of Teleportation for Junction, only to see a blinking cursor above a nameless ocean. Perhaps you, too, still wake up giddy to greet the morning at Midas, only to rub the sleep out of your eyes and realize that Ishtar’s Gate has drifted away with the Mists. Perhaps you, too, adjust the pieces of your complete Her Highness’s Treasures gacha set, only to feel a profound emptiness—a void where something should be.

In my case, that void is the blank page I now hold in my hand, one page among many that I found washed up on the steps of Midas minutes before the Great Bongs of Doom sounded and the Fairelands vanished into the aether.

Chronicles of Adair: An Interlude with a Shapeshifter

Um, hello. Can you all hear me? Oh, what am I saying? You’re reading this note, after all, (or at least I hope you’re reading it!), and I’m writing it.

You’re probably wondering who I am. I’m not so good with introductions. (And no, you jokesters out there, my name is not “Not So Good with Introductions.”)  I generally try to blend in with the scenery, you see, and whenever I don’t, people gawk at me and call me a freak. But you all—you’re not like the other Mainland folk or the Outland folk, are you? You’re Fairelanders, like me. So I hope you won’t think poorly of me when I say that I am a Shapeshifter with no name, and Fantasy Faire 2019 is my very first Faire.  

Chronicles of Adair: Tensor’s Flying Market

Sometimes, it takes a complete change of scenery to make you realize how stuck in your ways you are. As a sage once said, In the winds, a rigid branch breaks; a pliant one bends yet keeps its shape. Keeping my shape, my principles, has never been an issue. But in Tensor’s Flying Market, I nearly broke.

Chronicles of Adair: Twilight Spring

When Mistress Lolth, blessed be Her name, pulled me from my tomb in the Underdark and charged me with infiltrating the Faire through Her daughter’s temple, I didn’t quite imagine this. Sure, the place was black and purple, as befits any Drow deity—but the light.

Oh, the light, and how it burned! There was a giant gaping hole in the ceiling, for crying out loud!

Chronicles of Adair: Nightshade Blossoms

Time is a funny thing. It distorts itself according to the task at hand. When I hike up a hill at midday, it dilates. The sun hangs still over my head, glaring relentlessly. And yet when I sit by the campfire with Sherrill sharing stories of The Citadel, it contracts. Too soon the moon crests, fades, and gives way to the pink of dawn.

I thought I would be used to it by now, being a monk. (Not to mention, I’ve had enough experience with time travel to last me my whole life. But that’s a story for another time.) Meditation does strange things to the mind. Enlightening, yes, but also bizarre. I guess I’ve come to think of meditation as something separate from the waking world: less real yet truer.

So when I landed at the Fairelands Junction and saw the afternoon sun reflecting blinding light off icicles, I expected it to be afternoon everywhere else. A false assumption.

Upon stepping into the portal to Nightshade Blossoms, I saw not blue skies but the sun peeking over the rosy horizon. Pink trees everywhere, wan in the early-morning light. Soft. Serene. Silent. A place to contemplate. Little wonder I had felt a magnetic pull to this portal.   

Chronicles of Adair: A Prelude to War

Here is the Faire. Here is the steeple. Open the gates and see all the people. Here is a Drow going upstairs. And here he is saying his prayers.

Or so he would were it not for one little fact: He had not seen the light of day in over a year, nor had he heard the lilt of his deity’s voice. He was, indisputably, alone in the dark.

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“Oh, I’m never alone in the dark!” I sang in my tomb, fondling a handful of spiders, beautiful messengers of my Mistress.

It’s true, Mistress hadn’t spoken to me in over a year, ever since I did her dark bidding at The Bazaar Dungeon. What, bidding on the internet on Loki Eliot’s sentinel statue? No, no, that kind of bidding is for humans and vampires, especially vampires who share a flat in New Zealand. It was offing Caesar that Mistress bade. I’ll never forget his last words: “Et tu, Fairelanderé?” Me, Kratz, a Fairelander? Hardly. And certainly never.  

Chronicles of Adair: The Return

As April 18th approaches, a nervous energy manifest in frenzied whispers, flying chips of marble, and needlework as fast as the flapping of pigeons’ wings rises from the bowels of The Grid and seeps into the corner of every tavern, masonry, and store, rousing residents from their sleep. Rapidly, this energy crystallizes from mist into a rope wound taut in a pulley that waits to draw back the purple curtains of the Faire. Some of this energy, however, has a habit of dissipating from The Grid into other realms: realms of pure imagination. In one such realm, a monk steps outside her sleepy hut, greets the sun with a yawn, and finds a package waiting for her.