The Thornblood Courts

In the Courts of Blood and Thorns, even roses have teeth.

Beyond the places where maps cease to make sense, where the fog settles too thick between the trees and the ground smells of rotten honey and something older than time, lies Faerie. The Thornblood Courts are a realm divided between eternal powers that have spent millennia playing chess with mortal souls as if they were disposable ivory pieces. The Court of Thorns rules from its towers of black stone and bleeding briars, where King Oberon the Cruel signs pacts with ink that is not exactly ink. The Court of Starlight gleams with a brilliance that dazzles before it wounds, and its Queen Titania the Radiant smiles with a mouth full of promises that fulfill exactly what they say and never what they mean. Mortals who cross the Veil — that translucent membrane between the known world and Faerie — do so by accident, by arrogance, or by desperation; and of the three, only desperation has any excuse. Here, beauty is not ornament but weapon: the most dangerous Fae is the one who looks like a poem, and the most lethal bargain is the one that sounds like a gift. Love in the Courts is not weakness — it is the oldest and most irreversible form of magic that exists, and those who awaken it in a Fae being rarely understand what they have invoked until it is too late to undo the spell.