VI. Coming to the Grove as a Mortal

It happens rarely. When it does, it is almost never because the mortal went looking. One recent and notable exception is Professor Sabine Wreidt, who arrived at the Grove to negotiate the Liminal Compact with Moria Dawnwhisper, Jenny Dreadful, and Lord Lapine in attendance. That a mortal walked into one of the most significant cross-Crown negotiations in recent Fey memory, with Seelie, Wyld, and Unseelie all present at the same table, and walked out with a signed compact that bound all three to a shared purpose, is discussed in certain Fey circles still, in the specific tone reserved for things that should not have been possible and yet were. The four of them, three Fey of different Crowns and one mortal scholar, constitute something the Fey categorization system does not have a precise name for, which is itself a source of considerable unease in certain circles.

The Grove appears at the edges of places where Fey business of genuine significance is being conducted. If you are involved in Fey affairs at the level at which the Grove’s functions become relevant, and if the Grove judges that your presence at a particular moment would not be disruptive, you may find yourself stepping through a gap in a hedgerow that was not there a moment ago, or turning a corner in a forest and arriving somewhere the forest was not, or simply looking up from a campfire and realizing that the trees around you are arranged differently than they were.

If you arrive, the expectation is that you belong there for some purpose the Grove has assessed. Understand immediately and completely that this is not the same as being safe. The distinction matters more for mortals than it does for anyone else who might be present, and it matters in several specific ways that are worth understanding before you need to learn them from experience.

The Neutrality Does Not Cover You

The Grove’s neutrality is an agreement among the Fey. It governs how Fey treat one another within the boundaries. It does not govern how Fey treat mortals, because mortals were not party to the pact, were not present when the pact was established, and are not, in the specific legal grammar of Fey obligation, covered by its terms.

What this means practically: no Fey within the Grove will harm another Fey. A Fey who harms you within the Grove has violated nothing the Grove enforces. The Fey present may choose, for their own reasons, to leave you unmolested. Some will, out of courtesy, curiosity, or the specific Fey preference for interesting interactions over straightforward ones. Others may not. The Grove will not intervene on your behalf. You are a visitor in a space governed by rules that do not include you, surrounded by beings who are bound by those rules only in relation to each other.

This is not hostility. The Grove is genuinely indifferent to you. Indifference from something with the Grove’s accumulated power is not safe, but it is different from malice, and the difference is worth understanding.

Time Flows Differently Here, and You Cannot Afford That

The Fey experience of time is not the mortal one. A Fey who spends what feels like an afternoon in the Grove’s temporal instability and emerges to find that three years have passed in the mortal world has lost three years of a life that has no fixed end. They will have more. The loss is real but not irreplaceable.

A mortal who spends what feels like an afternoon in the Grove and emerges to find that three years have passed has lost three years of a life that is already finite and cannot be extended. The Grove’s temporal instability is not a problem for the Fey because the Fey do not run out of time. It is a profound problem for mortals because mortals do nothing but run out of time, and the Grove does not slow this process, does not exempt you from it, and does not warn you when the flow inside its boundaries has diverged significantly from the flow outside.

Mortals who enter the Grove for what they experience as brief visits have emerged to find parents dead, children grown, entire chapters of the lives they left behind concluded without them. The Grove did not steal this time deliberately. The Grove does not do things deliberately in the way that persons do things deliberately. It simply exists in a temporal condition that is not calibrated for finite lives, and if you bring a finite life into that condition, the consequences are yours to bear.

Glamour Is Not Safe for Mortal Minds

The Grove is saturated with Glamour, the raw magical energy of Fey existence, at concentrations that have been accumulating since before mortal consciousness existed to be affected by it. For the Fey, Glamour is native atmosphere. They were made from it, exist within it, and process it the way mortals process air: without effort, without particular awareness, without danger.

For mortals, Glamour at these concentrations is something the mind was not designed to accommodate. The effects vary by individual, by duration of exposure, and by the specific quality of Glamour present at the moment of exposure, since the Grove’s Glamour is not uniform but shifts with whatever is happening within the boundaries. Mild exposure produces the perceptual effects already described: temporal uncertainty, difficulty distinguishing memory from present experience, the backward bird-songs seeming to carry meaning that dissolves when you try to grasp it. Sustained exposure produces something more serious: a loosening of the boundary between what is real and what is merely possible, between what is happening and what the Grove’s accumulated Glamour suggests could be happening, between who you are and who the Fey around you might prefer you to be.

This last is the most insidious danger. The Fey do not alter mortal minds deliberately as a rule, though some do and the Grove’s neutrality will not stop them. But the ambient Glamour of a place this old and this saturated will alter a mortal mind without anyone’s intention, simply through sustained proximity. Mortals who spend too long in the Grove without the specific mental disciplines required to maintain their own perceptual framework return changed in ways they often cannot identify from the inside. Their companions can identify it. The changes are not always unwelcome. They are also not always reversible.

The Practical Guidance

What follows is assembled from the accounts of mortals who visited the Grove and returned to describe the experience. It is not comprehensive. A comprehensive guide to surviving the Convergence Grove as a mortal does not exist, because the variables are too many and too particular. What follows is the overlap between independent accounts, the things that enough different people found worth saying that they are likely to be worth knowing.

Do not lie within the boundaries. Not because the Grove will punish you: it will not. But every Fey present will know immediately that you have lied, and the pacts that govern the Grove do not extend to protecting you from the social and political consequences of having demonstrated your untrustworthiness in the one venue where every Crown, Court, and Revel takes such things most seriously.

Do not linger. The temporal instability and the Glamour saturation both become more dangerous with duration. Enter with a purpose. Accomplish it. Leave. Every additional minute in the Grove is a minute in which the cumulative effects of both have more time to accumulate.

Do not mistake the absence of hostility for welcome. The Grove is neutral among the Fey. To you it is indifferent, and the Fey within it are bound by its pacts only in relation to each other. Proceed accordingly.

Do not make promises you cannot keep. The oaths sworn in the Grove carry the weight of everything the Grove remembers, which is the weight of all Fey history. A promise made there and broken afterward produces consequences that follow you into every interaction with every Fey of every affiliation, because all of them were, in some sense, the witness.

Pay attention to the birds. This piece of advice appears in more independent accounts than any other. No one has fully explained what paying attention to the birds accomplishes. The accounts note it with the consistency of something that worked rather than the consistency of something someone was told to do. Pay attention to the birds.