CHARACTERS OF UNKNOWN GENUS
K’VRUCK: Allegedly the most ancient of the Unseelie caste of Royal Hunters—although it is not substantiated that he is truly Unseelie. He was once the Unseelie King’s favored companion and “steed” as he traveled worlds on its great black wings. Enormous as a small skyscraper, vaguely resembling a dragon, it’s coal black, leathery, and icy, with eyes like huge orange furnaces. When it flies, it churns black frosty flakes in the air and liquid ice streams in its wake. It has a special affinity for Mac and appears to her at odd moments as it senses the king inside her (via the Sinsar Dubh). When K’Vruck kills, it is the ultimate death, extinguishing life so completely it’s forever erased from the karmic cycle. To be K’Vrucked is to be removed completely from existence as if you’ve never been, no trace, no residue. Mac used K’Vruck to free Barrons’s son. K’vruck is the only being (known so far) capable of killing the immortal Nine.
SWEEPER: A collector of powerful, broken things, it resembles a giant trash heap of metal cogs and gears. First encountered by the Unseelie King shortly after he lost his concubine and descended into a period of madness and grief. The Sweeper traveled with him for a time, studying him, or perhaps seeing if he, too, could be collected and tinkered with. According to the Unseelie King, it fancies itself a god.
ZEWS: Acronym for Zombie Eating Wraiths, so named by Dani O’Malley. Hulking anorexic vulturelike creatures, they are five to six feet tall, with gaunt, hunched bodies and heavily cowled faces. They appear to be wearing cobwebbed, black robes but it is actually their skin. They have exposed bone at their sleeves and pale smudges inside their cowls. In Burned, Mac catches a glimpse of metal where their faces should be but doesn’t get a good look.
PLACES
ARLINGTON ABBEY: An ancient stone abbey located nearly two hours from Dublin, situated on a thousand acres of prime farmland. The mystically fortified abbey houses an Order of Sidhe-Seers gathered from six bloodlines of Irish women born with the ability to see the Fae and their realms. The abbey was built in the seventh century and is completely self-sustaining with multiple artesian wells, livestock, and gardens. According to historical records, the land occupied by the abbey was previously a church, and before that a sacred circle of stones, and long before that a fairy shian, or mound. Sidhe-seer legend suggests the Unseelie King himself spawned their order, mixing his blood with that of six Irish houses, to create protectors for the one thing he should never have made—the Sinsar Dubh.
ASHFORD, GEORGIA: MacKayla Lane’s small, rural hometown in the Deep South.
BARRONS BOOKS & BAUBLES: Located on the outskirts of Temple Bar in Dublin, Barrons Books & Baubles is an Old World bookstore previously owned by Jericho Barrons, now owned by MacKayla Lane. It shares design characteristics with the Lello Bookstore in Portugal, but is somewhat more elegant and refined. Due to the location of a large Sifting Silver in the study on the first floor, the bookstore’s dimensions can shift from as few as four stories to as many as seven, and rooms on the upper levels often reposition themselves. It is where MacKayla Lane calls home.
BARRONS’S GARAGE: Located directly behind Barrons Books & Baubles, it houses a collection of expensive cars. Far beneath it, accessible only through the heavily warded Silver in the bookstore, are Jericho Barrons’s living quarters.
THE BRICKYARD: The bar in Ashford, Georgia, where MacKayla Lane bartended before she came to Dublin.
CHESTER’S NIGHTCLUB: An enormous underground club of chrome and glass located at 939 Rêvemal Street. Chester’s is owned by one of Barrons’s associates, Ryodan. The upper levels are open to the public, the lower levels contain the Nine’s residences and their private clubs. Since the walls between man and Fae fell, Chester’s has become the hot spot in Dublin for Fae and humans to mingle.
DARK ZONE: An area that has been taken over by the Shades, deadly Unseelie that suck the life from humans, leaving only a husk of skin and indigestible matter such as eyeglasses, wallets, and medical implants. During the day it looks like an everyday abandoned, run-down neighborhood. Once night falls it’s a death trap. The largest known Dark Zone in Dublin is adjacent to Barrons Books & Baubles and is nearly twenty by thirteen city blocks.
FAERY: A general term encompassing the many realms of the Fae.
HALL OF ALL DAYS: The “airport terminal” of the Sifting Silvers where one can choose which mirror to enter to travel to other worlds and realms. Fashioned of gold from floor to ceiling, the endless corridor is lined with billions of mirrors that are portals to alternate universes and times, and exudes a chilling spatial-temporal distortion that makes a visitor feel utterly inconsequential. Time isn’t linear in the hall, it’s malleable and slippery, and a visitor can get permanently lost in memories that never were and dreams of futures that will never be. One moment you feel terrifyingly alone, the next as if an endless chain of paper-doll versions of oneself is unfolding sideways, holding cutout construction-paper hands with thousands of different feet in thousands of different worlds, all at the same time. Compounding the many dangers of the hall, when the Silvers were corrupted by Cruce’s curse (intended to bar entry to the Unseelie King), the mirrors were altered and now the image they present is no longer a guarantee of what’s on the other side. A lush rain forest may lead to a parched, cracked desert, a tropical oasis to a world of ice, but one can’t count on total opposites either.
THE RIVER LIFFEY: The river that divides Dublin into south and north sections, and supplies most of Dublin’s water.
TEMPLE BAR DISTRICT: An area in Dublin also known simply as “Temple Bar,” in which the Temple Bar Pub is located, along with an endless selection of boisterous drinking establishments including the famed Oliver St. John Gogarty, the Quays Bar, the Foggy Dew, the Brazen Head, Buskers, The Purty Kitchen, The Auld Dubliner, and so on. On the south bank of the River Liffey, Temple Bar (the district) sprawls for blocks, and has two meeting squares that used to be overflowing with tourists and partiers. Countless street musicians, great restaurants and shops, local bands, and raucous Stag and Hen parties made Temple Bar the craic-filled center of the city.
TEMPLE BAR PUB: A quaint, famous pub named after Sir William Temple who once lived there. Founded in 1840, it squats bright red and cozy, draped with string lights at the corner of Temple Bar Street and Temple Lane, and rambles from garden to alcove to main room. The famous pub boasts a first-rate whiskey collection, a beer garden for smoking, legendary Dublin Bay oysters, perfectly stacked Guinness, terrific atmosphere, and the finest traditional Irish music in the city.
TRINITY COLLEGE: Founded in 1592, located on College Green, recognized as one of the finest universities in the world, it houses a library that contains over 4.5 million printed volumes including spectacular works such as the Book of Kells. It’s ranked in the world’s top one hundred universities for physics and mathematics, with state-of-the-art laboratories and equipment. Dancer does much of his research on the now abandoned college campus.
UNSEELIE PRISON: Located in the Unseelie King’s realm, close to his fortress of black ice, the prison once held all Unseelie captives for over half a million years in a stark, arctic prison of ice. When the walls between Man and Faery were destroyed by Darroc (a banished Seelie Prince with a vendetta against the Seelie Queen) all the Unseelie were freed to invade the human realms.
THE WHITE MANSION: Located inside the Silvers, the house that the Unseelie King built for his beloved concubine. Enormous, ever-changing, the many halls and rooms in the mansion rearrange themselves at will.