Sir October Daye (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
errantdetective) wrote2014-11-09 09:31 pm
errantdetective) wrote2014-11-09 09:31 pm
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entranceway app!
Name: Shana
DW username: effulgent
E-Mail: shananagin @ gmail
IM: aboutblood
Plurk: antivillain
Other Characters: Killian Jones | unhand
Character Name: October Daye
Series: The October Daye series
Timeline: At the end of the most recent book, A Winter Long.
Canon Resource Link: The Series’ Page on the Author’s Website. Also, the very skimpy wiki. Alas, obscure canon!
Character History: October Daye was born in the month of October to a mortal man and Amandine, a very powerful Fae with a kooky sense of humor. Their lives were happy and relatively normal until Toby turned 7 and the baby magic that kept up her illusions started to fail. Then, Sylvester, Duke of Shadowed Hills, showed up to give her the Changeling’s Choice her mother had refused to give her. Faerie or Mortal. Which world did Toby belong to? The little seven year old didn’t understand how big a choice she was making and ran to her mother, screaming that she was just like mommy. Either way, her life in the mortal world would have been over. Sylvester whisked Toby and Amandine off to the Summerlands. Had she chosen human, they would have killed her, but as it was, they just faked her death. Her mother didn’t take the choice well. If Toby had died, she would have gotten to continue playing Faerie bride and living with her mortal husband. She got to keep her child, but her sanity started slipping away.
Toby grew increasingly frustrated with her mother’s craziness and the Faerie world, which looked down on changelings, especially ones as powerless as she was. At 25, she ran away. She looked about 16 at the time due to her fae lineage. Devin found her and took her Home. The Home feifdom was populated mostly by young changelings, ones like Toby that had fallen through the cracks and had nowhere else to go. Devin gave her a place to live and a crew to call family in exchange for favors that got bigger and bigger the longer she stayed with him. She knew he was using her, that he couldn’t be trusted, but she didn’t care, and Devin enjoyed the shock he caused by having Amandine’s daughter on his arm. Once she established he didn’t own her, even if she did work for him, she fell in love with him, despite everything, and it lasted until she found him in bed with her friend. She started seeing a Selkie friend of hers at that point, Connor, though eventually he called it off because his family was opposed to the relationship.
She found the Queen’s lost knowe, a sort of carved out place between worlds where the Queen held her court, but the Queen didn’t want to give a mere changeling credit for it when she had so many of her own pureblood knights looking for it. Sylvester and Evening Winterrose, a friend of the family, insisted she got the credit, then insisted that Sylvester be allowed to knight her and take Toby into his service. The Queen never forgave Toby for it. Sylvester’s terms included that she left Home and Devin for good, and she happily agreed. She got her private investigator’s license and started playing Faerie Bride to a human man, Cliff, though they never got married. She had a baby, Gillian, and everything was wonderful for a little while until Sylvester’s wife, Luna, and his daughter, Rayseline, were kidnapped by his twin brother, Simon and a mad Fae poisoner named Oleander. Toby tracked them down, and they turned her into a fish for her troubles.
When she woke up, she found that 14 years had passed and the world thought she was dead. Evening came to collect her and get her back on her feet, as much as she could, but Toby was miserable. Her family had moved on, and was angry with her for what they felt she had put them through. Since they didn’t know she was Fae, as her mother had drilled in repeatedly how important it was that no human ever find out, she had no good explanation to offer them. She started working deadend night shifts at grocery stores to make rent, and cutting herself off as entirely as possible from her faerie friends. She didn’t try to make friends with mortals, either. She was doing penance for her failure.
It went all right until Evening Winterrose was murdered and left a voicemail on Toby’s phone, binding her with old magic to solve the crime or die. Toby quickly found out what it was that Evening had died to protect: a hope chest that could turn a changeling all the way human or all the way fae. To protect herself from the temptation to use it, she passed it off to Tybalt, the local King of Cats who she didn’t like much, but trusted to keep his word. He did more than just protect it. He helped save her life when she’d been shot with iron, and then again when she and her friends were attacked by the same thug. He even offered her a shirt covered with blood to help her find the crime. Toby has the power to read memories off blood, and some of the blood on the shirt belonged to the thug that had shot her. Some of it belonged to Tybalt, too, so the act was especially generous, as she could have found out more about him than he might care to share.
She also reconnected with Sylvester and his court. Luna and Rayseline had returned mysteriously while Toby was a fish, but they weren’t quite right, especially Rayseline, who had grown up in captivity. They’d married her off to Connor, but it was a marriage of politics rather than passion, and Connor made it clear he still had feelings for Toby, despite her attempts to put him off. Luna and Sylvester were very happy to see Toby again and made it clear they had never resented her for her failure, even if Rayseline and Toby herself still held her responsible. Toby also met a young page named Quentin, who was pureblooded and an stuck-up, but after she talked to him for a while, she managed to get him to unwind a little bit.
She reconnected with Devin, who offered her help and sent two of his charges, Manuel and Dare, to follow her around and protect her. Toby didn’t entirely appreciate the gesture, since it felt like babysitting, but they did save her life a few times. Devin also patched her up after some of the more deadly attempts on her life, and they reconnected physically as well, putting aside the past and starting up where they’d left off. When the iron poisoning became too much, he called in a favor with the Luidaeg. The Luidaeg is one of the oldest monsters in Faerie, Maeve’s firstborn daughter and not someone you generally fuck around with. Calling her in was a hell of a move. One that Toby ended up repeating on Luna’s suggestion. She traded a key and the answer to question for the Luidaeg’s answers to four of Toby’s. She only asked three, holding the other one as an assurance the Luidaeg wouldn’t kill her. The Luidaeg wouldn’t kill someone who held her in debt, so she had to let Toby go, no matter how much it infuriated her.
She didn’t like where the answers led, but she followed the path anyway, right back to Devin’s door. It turned out he’d lost it, too obsessed with his own mortality when surrounded with immortal purebloods. He wanted the Hope Chest and he was willing to kill Evening and Toby to get it. When Toby went to confront him, Dare tried to protect her and Devin shot her. Manuel shot Devin in response, and his death was enough to make the curse release its hold on Toby. She blamed herself for Dare’s death, even though it hadn’t been her doing. Dare had looked up to her as a hero, and she’d let her down. She kept the knife Dare had given her, though, in hopes that the next time someone looked to her as a hero, she’d be able to do better.
It wasn’t much later when Sylvester came knocking on her door again, asking for another favor. He needed her to go to the small neighboring fiefdom of Tamed Lightning and check in on his niece, January, who hadn’t been picking up the phone for a few days. He wanted her to bring Quentin with her, as he was sure it would prove educational. When Toby showed up at the computing company that served as the fiefdom’s headquarters, she learned that someone was murdering people, and it was happening in such a strange way that the Night Haunts that replaced Fae bodies with human look-alikes when they died weren’t coming, and so Toby couldn’t find any memories on the blood. The murderer had also killed the local Queen of Cats, which got Tybalt’s attention, so he joined the investigation. It took Toby a while to find the murderer. In the process, January was killed and Quentin very nearly died too, which made Toby feel like she was a very bad person for him to be around, though he seemed unconvinced. Toby ended up raising one of the victims from the dead to try and solve the case, and called the Luidaeg to ask her last question and summon the Night Haunts to question them on why they weren’t taking the bodies.
She learned in the end that it was a bitter changeling that had been doing the killings, with the help of January’s adopted daughter, April, who was the world’s only digital dryad and didn’t realize the people wouldn’t reboot like computers did. April learned what she had done and ended up taking over the company and the fiefdom. Tybalt started avoiding Toby, spooked by her raising the dead, which isn’t something a Daoine Sidhe changeling should be able to do. Toby was pretty sure the Luidaeg was going to kill her now, since though the two of them had started a very strange friendship ever since their first meeting, she had consistently told Toby that when Toby asked the last question, the Luidaeg would kill her. The Luidaeg took her sweet time about it, though, so Toby went to her house to ask her what was up. The Luidaeg then called her an idiot and invited her inside. They were friends now, and the Luidaeg didn’t want Toby dead.
Some of Toby’s friends’ children vanish in the night, leaving only the lingering scent of burning candlewax. At the same time, Quentin’s human girlfriend Katie vanishes, and Tybalt comes to call in Toby’s favor since a lot of Cait Sidhe kittens have vanished including Tybalt’s heir, Raj. To make matters worse, a Fetch shows up to foretell Toby’s death. The Fetch is an exact doppelganger of Toby with a surprisingly bubbly personality that calls herself May Daye. Toby figured out quickly that the villain was Blind Michael, a particularly twisted Firstborn Fae that kidnapped children to be a part of his Hunt. In order to get to his land, the Luidaeg turned Toby into a child and sent her with a magical candle with strict orders not to let it go out. In return, Toby would owe the Luidaeg Quentin followed her, much to Toby’s displeasure as he was one more person she’d have to protect. Toby managed to get most of the children free, but two were left: Katie, the mortal, was turning into a horse since she wasn’t fae, and Karen, who could talk to people in dreams and whose spirit was trapped while her body remained at home. Toby could have rested there, since she had rescued most of the kids, but she felt a responsibility to rescue the ones that were left. She had to save everyone, despite frequently declaring she wasn’t a hero. Turns out, she was more of one than she thought. In the end, she recruited her Fetch to help her, despite the fact that May was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to do that, traded herself for the children, and ended up rescued by all of her friends. That still wasn’t enough for her. She traveled back one more time to face Blind Michael. This time, she killed it, ending it for good, but she still carried the memories. She’ll never be entirely comfortable with the smell of candlewax.
May moves in with Toby, though it’s very unconventional to be living with your personal death omen, but hey, May’s good at paying rent and she cooks. But then the Queen gives Toby the title of Countess and Evening’s old knowe, Goldengreen, as payment for Toby’s services. Toby wants neither and suspects a trap, since the queen hates her. Then, people start falling ill. Toby’s convinced it’s Oleander, one of the two villains that turned her into a fish, but no one can find any trace of her. The queen’s convinced it’s Toby, though the people that are getting sick are people Toby would never hurt, people Toby loves. Among the victims is Lily, a very sweet Undine that’s always cared deeply for Toby. She passes away, but first Toby promises she’ll take care of Lily’s collection of stray fae. Toby isn’t sure how, but she does promise, since she can’t let innocents get hurt. She ends up bringing them to her new knowe. Toby starts investigating the case, though the Queen’s suspicions mean she has to be careful. She gets shot with Elfshot, a nasty substance that will make a pureblood sleep for 100 years and outright kill a changeling.
Just before Toby can die, her mother, Amandine, comes back and pushes Toby’s blood enough of the way towards pureblood to burn out the poison. Toby wakes up with more questions than answers. She’s not Daoine Sidhe. Daoine Sidhe can’t do that. She later learns that her mother, Amandine, is actually one of the Firstborn daughters of Oberon, and that her species is actually called Dochas Sidhe. They make the Daoine Sidhe, well known for their bloodwork, look like amateurs. She also learns that she should have had stronger blood from the start, but her mother and Sylvester and all the people who absolutely knew had lied to her. Before she has time to process, the Queen arrests Toby and sentences her to death, using her new title to get around Fae conventions that would normally force her to go through Sylvester, who would never allow such a thing to happen. She imprisons Toby in iron, but yet again, Toby’s friends come to her rescue, sneaking into the prison and freeing her while she’s on the brink of death. She recovers, and clears her name. It was indeed Oleander, with the help of Rayseline, Sylvester’s daughter. Rayseline escapes, but not before killing Oleander. Toby is saddened by the loss of Rayseline, since once, she’d viewed the girl with a lot of fondness, but happy that she can now date Connor, as the marriage has been officially annulled. She’s angry at Sylvester and Luna for lying to her, but happy all the poisoned people survived. She’s also stronger than ever before, now that her blood has been pushed further towards Fae.
The Luidaeg comes to call in her favor. It’s yet another lost child case. Those keep falling into Toby’s lap and never get any easier to handle since the loss of her own child. This time it’s two fae boys, sons of Duchess Lorden from the Undersea kingdom, whose capture has the water fae threatening war with the land, though the Queen claims she doesn’t have them. Toby has three days to find them. Toby suspects Rayseline, who is still at large, but the tricky part will be finding her. The stakes are already insanely high, but then Rayseline does the unthinkable and kidnaps Toby’s daughter as well. Now it’s personal. She figures out the location through blood magic and talking to the Night Haunts again to get access to the memories of a dead selkie, then gathers her team and goes to confront Rayseline.
The battle is bloody and awful, and in the end, Connor, Rayseline, and Gilly all get shot with ellfshot. Toby goes to her daughter immediately, as Rayseline and Connor are purebloods and should be able to survive, even if they’ll sleep for a century or two, but Gilly’s weak blood means she’s in very much danger. Also, she’s seen far too much of faerie to continue living as a mortal. Toby has to give her the Changeling’s Choice. But Toby is her mother’s daughter. When Gilly chooses human, instead of letting her die as she’s supposed to, she reaches into Gilly’s blood and takes out everything that’s fae, including the elf shot. Gilly lives, but now Toby’s lost all chance of ever seeing her daughter again. To make matters worse, though Connor is a pureblood, nothing can save him from a shot through the heart that killed him before the poison had a chance to do its work. She’s lost her daughter and her boyfriend all in one blow. At least she’s managed to prevent a war. She finds the traitor that helped Rayseline and gives her knowe and title to one of the lost boys to help keep relationships good between land and sea. She hadn’t wanted the title anyway.
Her losses are almost too much to take, and Toby starts to attempt suicide by carelessness. She takes on bigger and bigger risks, shoving away family and friends when in other circumstances, she’d allow them to help her. Tybalt’s avoiding her again, but for once it’s more out of respect for her losses than because he’s weird and a cat. Then Etienne, one of Sylvester’s other knights, comes to hire her to find his daughter. Chelsea’s a changeling, Tuatha de Danann like her father, a teleporter, and she’s entirely out of control. Most changelings are nearly powerless, capable of illusions and small magic, but not much else. They inherit all of the limits and none of the powers of their fae parents. Chelsea’s different, one of the changelings people tell stories about, that inherits all of the powers and none of the limits. She’s ripping holes through the walls of reality, and no one can so much as find her, let alone make her stop. To make matters worse, her mother is a folklore professor, and has entirely figured out what Etienne and her daughter are. Even so, Toby takes the case.
Tybalt starts helping when Chelsea ends up accidentally opening a door from the lava kingdom into her kingdom and injuring several Cait Sidhe and killing Tybalt. As a king of cats, he has nine lives, so he’s fine, but it’s still absolutely horrifying to Toby, who likes Tybalt a lot despite their very weird relationship. She also accidentally dragged Raj along with her. Toby and Tybalt manage to find Raj by taking a road between Fae dimensions, and realize he’s in a deep, deep part of Faerie where no one’s been since Oberon, Maeve, and Titania vanished. It is really not good that Chelsea ended up here. She’s tearing holes through reality and she could take the world down if she’s not stopped.
The Luidaeg gives them charms to help find Chelsea, and they chase her down to Dreamer’s Glass, a Duchy that borders on Tamed Lightning run by the very ambitious and conniving Duchess Riordan. Toby figures out that Riordan is using a blood charm to keep Chelsea coming back, but before they can do anything about it, Tybalt gets attacked by Raj’s father, who hates Toby and wants the power he hasn’t managed to get through Raj. While this is how succession usually goes in the Court of Cats, involving Toby is not allowed. They escape, and Toby tracks down Chelsea and the Duchess to the deeper Faerie realm that Duchess Riordan wants to colonize. It turns out she’s working with Raj’s father, and Toby and her friends end up having to take them all out and trap Duchess Riordan within the deeper Faerie realm. They get Chelsea back, though, and Toby uses a power dampener long enough to get her to stay still. Then she gives Chelsea the changeling’s choice, and when Chelsea chooses Fae, she burns out all the human until Chelsea’s a normal pureblood, with all the normal pureblood limits. Also, Tybalt admits his feelings, and Toby realizes she returns those feelings, and the two of them start dating.
Someone’s peddling drugs on Toby’s streets. Goblin fruit is a drug that’s pleasant and harmless to purebloods and deadly to changelings. Toby’s infuriated that it’s being sold, and even angrier when it turns out it’s the Queen who’s allowing it out there. The Queen is legitimately incurably crazy, and Toby finally knows it for sure. All she needs to do is find the old king’s real heir, a girl called Arden that’s been missing since long before Toby can remember, and stage a revolution. That task is made somewhat more difficult when she gets hit in the face with a goblin fruit pie. Just one taste is enough to get a changeling addicted, even one whose blood has been strengthened as much as Toby’s has. Also, once she’s had that taste, her body wants the ride to be stronger, and automatically thins her blood, making her so weak that she’s practically human. Though she was a fairly weak changeling when the series started, she’s gotten used to being pretty powerful, magically speaking, and she doesn’t know how to handle being helpless anymore. She hates that everyone always has to protect her, and she hates even more how much she craves goblin fruit.
She locates Arden and convinces her to help, but first she has to rescue Arden’s brother, poisoned with Elfshot and kept prisoner in one of the Queen’s iron dungeons, and she needs to beat the addiction. In order to do both, she breaks into the Queen’s knowe. The hope chest lets her become more fae just in time for her to venture down and get poisoned by iron while rescuing the brother. Tybalt comes with her, and he ends up fatally wounded, but Toby trades a favor to the Night Haunts for the secret to how to revive him. She forces him back to life, refusing to let him go. Toby has a lot of trouble letting people she loves go, and since her blood magic’s getting so strong, she no longer has to let them go. They defeat the Queen, and Toby uses her blood magic to burn out some of the more complicated traces of the Queen’s magic in hopes that it will make her slightly less insane, and because she knows for certain that it will make her less dangerous. She escapes, but Arden gets her throne, and Toby gets recognized as an official hero.
Simon Torquill, Sylvester’s twin brother and the man who changed Toby into a fish, reappears on Toby’s doorstep, but all is not as it seems. There’s a lot he can’t tell Toby, like the fact that he used to be married to Toby’s mother, or that Toby has a sister somewhere. Despite Toby’s unrelenting rage at his existence and the fact that he turned her into a fish, she begins to suspect he’s not the bad guy here, that in fact, there’s someone worse out there, someone who’s been pulling more strings than Toby knows. Someone who shows up and kills the Luidaeg when she says too much, though Toby’s blood magic is strong enough that she actually manages to resurrect her. Toby doesn’t let even death take her friends away from her. Not anymore. Unfortunately, the binding still holds and the Luidaeg can’t tell Toby anything. Luckily, she starts to figure it out right when Evening Winterrose comes back from the dead. It turns out Evening is a hell of a lot more powerful than Toby ever suspected: she’s the Firstborn Daoine Sidhe, and everyone in that bloodline will do what she says without questioning it. Unfortunately, that includes Sylvester. It doesn’t include Luna, and she agrees to help Toby, but only if Toby will help clean up the mixed-up blood that runs through Rayseline’s veins. Rayseline’s still asleep, but Toby agrees, hoping the change will help make Rayseline a little more stable, a little closer to the girl she once was.
Toby confronts Evening, and manages to get the Luidaeg to help her fight by exploiting a loophole in the geas that forbids her to harm a child of Titania: she’s allowed to aid a child of Oberon, and Oberon claims Toby’s line. Then the Luidaeg and Evening start a fight with Toby’s fate hanging in the balance, as Evening’s determined to claim her since she can’t control her and can’t kill her. The Luidaeg wins Toby over to her side with blood, which is what it always comes down to with Toby. Simon arrives, free of Evening’s control, with poisoned arrows, and Toby uses one to take down Evening, leaving her in an enchanted sleep. Evening is basically who the Snow White tales were based off, so fully killing her is next to impossible, but leaving her to sleep for a few centuries while trapped in deeper Faerie will at least delay the problem substantially. Toby returned home, victorious again, though angry with Sylvester and Luna for keeping secrets about her past from her yet again, and Tybalt proposed to her. Considering how short their lives were likely to be at this rate, why wait?
Toby will arrive shortly after saying yes.
Abilities/Special Powers: Toby is a changeling, which means she’s half-fae, half human. She’s Dochas Sidhe, a species of fae that to her knowledge, encompasses only herself and her mother. As such she is especially skilled in blood magic. She can ride the memories contained in blood by tasting it or use her own blood or the blood of others in spells. The uses and constraints of blood magic aren’t clear even to her, but she’s used it to even bring back the dead, though this is not a good plan and almost kills her. She can also “taste” the balance of a person’s blood and figure out what sort of fae they are or what mix. She’s particularly attuned to the distinct signature smell magic leaves and can identify a person by it.
In addition she can weave illusions to make herself look human or keep people from looking at herself or a vehicle. Her illusion magic isn’t as strong as her blood magic, but even that has strengthened since her mother changed the balance of her blood and made her more fae than human. Like her mother, she does have that power, to change the balance of the blood or take out one side entirely, but it’s a big deal that hurts both her and whoever she’s doing it to enough that she’s unlikely to break it out lightly.
Though she’s not immortal, she can expect to live for centuries in the unlikely event that she’s not otherwise killed. Iron hurts her a lot, limiting her magic and making her sick. Silver’s unpleasant too, but not to the same degree.
Third-Person Sample: It’s not the first time Toby’s found herself in a strange world. She just wishes the universe hadn’t been cruel enough to dump her in the fish pond.
She pulls herself out, wringing water from her hair and checking her ears to make sure they’re still round. She doesn’t know how likely it is she’ll run into humans here, but better to be safe than a government experiment. Her knee is bleeding, skin scraped off against the stone of the fountain. That’s good. She’s always at her best when she’s bleeding. Pity it means her jeans are torn. She’d liked these jeans. But fine. Other things to worry about. Like where she is, and how she got here. The second part troubles her more, honestly. She’s been trapped before in strange places and magical realms that she had no business being in, but there’s always been a reason. She’s followed the path revealed by candlelight or taken the Rose Road or gone through the portal of a mad changeling. She doesn’t just… show up in a place. Something’s wrong with this.
“Okay, Toby,” she mutters, “Just figure out where you are, find a way out, and you and May can laugh about this later. Simple.” Because she’s ever had a simple day in her life. Right.
Still, there’s something about this place that’s naggingly familiar. She starts walking, frowning around at her surroundings, as she tries to puzzle it out. It’s nowhere she’s been, that much is clear, but there’s something familiar in the checkerboard hills, in the inherent strangeness of the land.
“Some say to survive it, you need to be mad as a hatter,” Toby mutters, looking around. “Wonderland. Huh.” For some people, this might have seemed impossible, but the way Toby’s life had gone lately, she wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Etienne secretly had a fluffy tail and bunny ears.
She shoves her hands into her jacket pockets and keeps walking. Wonderland may be known for its tea parties, but right now she’s hoping there’s some coffee too.
First-Person Sample: [Toby looks annoyed, though this isn’t all that unusual for her. She doesn’t look Fae, at least. Her illusions are firmly up, magic dulling the points of her ears and filling in the color of her eyes until she looks like a normal human, though a cranky one.]
This is not what I had hoped to wake up to, you know. Being abducted into a storybook has this way of just ruining my day.
[She looks around, tugging her brown leather jacket closer around her. She’s not comfortable with this situation. That much is obvious.]
Anyone have any information about what’s going on here? Besides the obvious, I mean. I’ve figured out it’s Wonderland, I just want to know if someone’s going to force me to play croquet with a flamingo. I’ve never even played normal croquet. I don’t even wanna think about what happens when you bring birds into it. Let’s all avoid finding out, shall we?
DW username: effulgent
E-Mail: shananagin @ gmail
IM: aboutblood
Plurk: antivillain
Other Characters: Killian Jones | unhand
Character Name: October Daye
Series: The October Daye series
Timeline: At the end of the most recent book, A Winter Long.
Canon Resource Link: The Series’ Page on the Author’s Website. Also, the very skimpy wiki. Alas, obscure canon!
Character History: October Daye was born in the month of October to a mortal man and Amandine, a very powerful Fae with a kooky sense of humor. Their lives were happy and relatively normal until Toby turned 7 and the baby magic that kept up her illusions started to fail. Then, Sylvester, Duke of Shadowed Hills, showed up to give her the Changeling’s Choice her mother had refused to give her. Faerie or Mortal. Which world did Toby belong to? The little seven year old didn’t understand how big a choice she was making and ran to her mother, screaming that she was just like mommy. Either way, her life in the mortal world would have been over. Sylvester whisked Toby and Amandine off to the Summerlands. Had she chosen human, they would have killed her, but as it was, they just faked her death. Her mother didn’t take the choice well. If Toby had died, she would have gotten to continue playing Faerie bride and living with her mortal husband. She got to keep her child, but her sanity started slipping away.
Toby grew increasingly frustrated with her mother’s craziness and the Faerie world, which looked down on changelings, especially ones as powerless as she was. At 25, she ran away. She looked about 16 at the time due to her fae lineage. Devin found her and took her Home. The Home feifdom was populated mostly by young changelings, ones like Toby that had fallen through the cracks and had nowhere else to go. Devin gave her a place to live and a crew to call family in exchange for favors that got bigger and bigger the longer she stayed with him. She knew he was using her, that he couldn’t be trusted, but she didn’t care, and Devin enjoyed the shock he caused by having Amandine’s daughter on his arm. Once she established he didn’t own her, even if she did work for him, she fell in love with him, despite everything, and it lasted until she found him in bed with her friend. She started seeing a Selkie friend of hers at that point, Connor, though eventually he called it off because his family was opposed to the relationship.
She found the Queen’s lost knowe, a sort of carved out place between worlds where the Queen held her court, but the Queen didn’t want to give a mere changeling credit for it when she had so many of her own pureblood knights looking for it. Sylvester and Evening Winterrose, a friend of the family, insisted she got the credit, then insisted that Sylvester be allowed to knight her and take Toby into his service. The Queen never forgave Toby for it. Sylvester’s terms included that she left Home and Devin for good, and she happily agreed. She got her private investigator’s license and started playing Faerie Bride to a human man, Cliff, though they never got married. She had a baby, Gillian, and everything was wonderful for a little while until Sylvester’s wife, Luna, and his daughter, Rayseline, were kidnapped by his twin brother, Simon and a mad Fae poisoner named Oleander. Toby tracked them down, and they turned her into a fish for her troubles.
When she woke up, she found that 14 years had passed and the world thought she was dead. Evening came to collect her and get her back on her feet, as much as she could, but Toby was miserable. Her family had moved on, and was angry with her for what they felt she had put them through. Since they didn’t know she was Fae, as her mother had drilled in repeatedly how important it was that no human ever find out, she had no good explanation to offer them. She started working deadend night shifts at grocery stores to make rent, and cutting herself off as entirely as possible from her faerie friends. She didn’t try to make friends with mortals, either. She was doing penance for her failure.
It went all right until Evening Winterrose was murdered and left a voicemail on Toby’s phone, binding her with old magic to solve the crime or die. Toby quickly found out what it was that Evening had died to protect: a hope chest that could turn a changeling all the way human or all the way fae. To protect herself from the temptation to use it, she passed it off to Tybalt, the local King of Cats who she didn’t like much, but trusted to keep his word. He did more than just protect it. He helped save her life when she’d been shot with iron, and then again when she and her friends were attacked by the same thug. He even offered her a shirt covered with blood to help her find the crime. Toby has the power to read memories off blood, and some of the blood on the shirt belonged to the thug that had shot her. Some of it belonged to Tybalt, too, so the act was especially generous, as she could have found out more about him than he might care to share.
She also reconnected with Sylvester and his court. Luna and Rayseline had returned mysteriously while Toby was a fish, but they weren’t quite right, especially Rayseline, who had grown up in captivity. They’d married her off to Connor, but it was a marriage of politics rather than passion, and Connor made it clear he still had feelings for Toby, despite her attempts to put him off. Luna and Sylvester were very happy to see Toby again and made it clear they had never resented her for her failure, even if Rayseline and Toby herself still held her responsible. Toby also met a young page named Quentin, who was pureblooded and an stuck-up, but after she talked to him for a while, she managed to get him to unwind a little bit.
She reconnected with Devin, who offered her help and sent two of his charges, Manuel and Dare, to follow her around and protect her. Toby didn’t entirely appreciate the gesture, since it felt like babysitting, but they did save her life a few times. Devin also patched her up after some of the more deadly attempts on her life, and they reconnected physically as well, putting aside the past and starting up where they’d left off. When the iron poisoning became too much, he called in a favor with the Luidaeg. The Luidaeg is one of the oldest monsters in Faerie, Maeve’s firstborn daughter and not someone you generally fuck around with. Calling her in was a hell of a move. One that Toby ended up repeating on Luna’s suggestion. She traded a key and the answer to question for the Luidaeg’s answers to four of Toby’s. She only asked three, holding the other one as an assurance the Luidaeg wouldn’t kill her. The Luidaeg wouldn’t kill someone who held her in debt, so she had to let Toby go, no matter how much it infuriated her.
She didn’t like where the answers led, but she followed the path anyway, right back to Devin’s door. It turned out he’d lost it, too obsessed with his own mortality when surrounded with immortal purebloods. He wanted the Hope Chest and he was willing to kill Evening and Toby to get it. When Toby went to confront him, Dare tried to protect her and Devin shot her. Manuel shot Devin in response, and his death was enough to make the curse release its hold on Toby. She blamed herself for Dare’s death, even though it hadn’t been her doing. Dare had looked up to her as a hero, and she’d let her down. She kept the knife Dare had given her, though, in hopes that the next time someone looked to her as a hero, she’d be able to do better.
It wasn’t much later when Sylvester came knocking on her door again, asking for another favor. He needed her to go to the small neighboring fiefdom of Tamed Lightning and check in on his niece, January, who hadn’t been picking up the phone for a few days. He wanted her to bring Quentin with her, as he was sure it would prove educational. When Toby showed up at the computing company that served as the fiefdom’s headquarters, she learned that someone was murdering people, and it was happening in such a strange way that the Night Haunts that replaced Fae bodies with human look-alikes when they died weren’t coming, and so Toby couldn’t find any memories on the blood. The murderer had also killed the local Queen of Cats, which got Tybalt’s attention, so he joined the investigation. It took Toby a while to find the murderer. In the process, January was killed and Quentin very nearly died too, which made Toby feel like she was a very bad person for him to be around, though he seemed unconvinced. Toby ended up raising one of the victims from the dead to try and solve the case, and called the Luidaeg to ask her last question and summon the Night Haunts to question them on why they weren’t taking the bodies.
She learned in the end that it was a bitter changeling that had been doing the killings, with the help of January’s adopted daughter, April, who was the world’s only digital dryad and didn’t realize the people wouldn’t reboot like computers did. April learned what she had done and ended up taking over the company and the fiefdom. Tybalt started avoiding Toby, spooked by her raising the dead, which isn’t something a Daoine Sidhe changeling should be able to do. Toby was pretty sure the Luidaeg was going to kill her now, since though the two of them had started a very strange friendship ever since their first meeting, she had consistently told Toby that when Toby asked the last question, the Luidaeg would kill her. The Luidaeg took her sweet time about it, though, so Toby went to her house to ask her what was up. The Luidaeg then called her an idiot and invited her inside. They were friends now, and the Luidaeg didn’t want Toby dead.
Some of Toby’s friends’ children vanish in the night, leaving only the lingering scent of burning candlewax. At the same time, Quentin’s human girlfriend Katie vanishes, and Tybalt comes to call in Toby’s favor since a lot of Cait Sidhe kittens have vanished including Tybalt’s heir, Raj. To make matters worse, a Fetch shows up to foretell Toby’s death. The Fetch is an exact doppelganger of Toby with a surprisingly bubbly personality that calls herself May Daye. Toby figured out quickly that the villain was Blind Michael, a particularly twisted Firstborn Fae that kidnapped children to be a part of his Hunt. In order to get to his land, the Luidaeg turned Toby into a child and sent her with a magical candle with strict orders not to let it go out. In return, Toby would owe the Luidaeg Quentin followed her, much to Toby’s displeasure as he was one more person she’d have to protect. Toby managed to get most of the children free, but two were left: Katie, the mortal, was turning into a horse since she wasn’t fae, and Karen, who could talk to people in dreams and whose spirit was trapped while her body remained at home. Toby could have rested there, since she had rescued most of the kids, but she felt a responsibility to rescue the ones that were left. She had to save everyone, despite frequently declaring she wasn’t a hero. Turns out, she was more of one than she thought. In the end, she recruited her Fetch to help her, despite the fact that May was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to do that, traded herself for the children, and ended up rescued by all of her friends. That still wasn’t enough for her. She traveled back one more time to face Blind Michael. This time, she killed it, ending it for good, but she still carried the memories. She’ll never be entirely comfortable with the smell of candlewax.
May moves in with Toby, though it’s very unconventional to be living with your personal death omen, but hey, May’s good at paying rent and she cooks. But then the Queen gives Toby the title of Countess and Evening’s old knowe, Goldengreen, as payment for Toby’s services. Toby wants neither and suspects a trap, since the queen hates her. Then, people start falling ill. Toby’s convinced it’s Oleander, one of the two villains that turned her into a fish, but no one can find any trace of her. The queen’s convinced it’s Toby, though the people that are getting sick are people Toby would never hurt, people Toby loves. Among the victims is Lily, a very sweet Undine that’s always cared deeply for Toby. She passes away, but first Toby promises she’ll take care of Lily’s collection of stray fae. Toby isn’t sure how, but she does promise, since she can’t let innocents get hurt. She ends up bringing them to her new knowe. Toby starts investigating the case, though the Queen’s suspicions mean she has to be careful. She gets shot with Elfshot, a nasty substance that will make a pureblood sleep for 100 years and outright kill a changeling.
Just before Toby can die, her mother, Amandine, comes back and pushes Toby’s blood enough of the way towards pureblood to burn out the poison. Toby wakes up with more questions than answers. She’s not Daoine Sidhe. Daoine Sidhe can’t do that. She later learns that her mother, Amandine, is actually one of the Firstborn daughters of Oberon, and that her species is actually called Dochas Sidhe. They make the Daoine Sidhe, well known for their bloodwork, look like amateurs. She also learns that she should have had stronger blood from the start, but her mother and Sylvester and all the people who absolutely knew had lied to her. Before she has time to process, the Queen arrests Toby and sentences her to death, using her new title to get around Fae conventions that would normally force her to go through Sylvester, who would never allow such a thing to happen. She imprisons Toby in iron, but yet again, Toby’s friends come to her rescue, sneaking into the prison and freeing her while she’s on the brink of death. She recovers, and clears her name. It was indeed Oleander, with the help of Rayseline, Sylvester’s daughter. Rayseline escapes, but not before killing Oleander. Toby is saddened by the loss of Rayseline, since once, she’d viewed the girl with a lot of fondness, but happy that she can now date Connor, as the marriage has been officially annulled. She’s angry at Sylvester and Luna for lying to her, but happy all the poisoned people survived. She’s also stronger than ever before, now that her blood has been pushed further towards Fae.
The Luidaeg comes to call in her favor. It’s yet another lost child case. Those keep falling into Toby’s lap and never get any easier to handle since the loss of her own child. This time it’s two fae boys, sons of Duchess Lorden from the Undersea kingdom, whose capture has the water fae threatening war with the land, though the Queen claims she doesn’t have them. Toby has three days to find them. Toby suspects Rayseline, who is still at large, but the tricky part will be finding her. The stakes are already insanely high, but then Rayseline does the unthinkable and kidnaps Toby’s daughter as well. Now it’s personal. She figures out the location through blood magic and talking to the Night Haunts again to get access to the memories of a dead selkie, then gathers her team and goes to confront Rayseline.
The battle is bloody and awful, and in the end, Connor, Rayseline, and Gilly all get shot with ellfshot. Toby goes to her daughter immediately, as Rayseline and Connor are purebloods and should be able to survive, even if they’ll sleep for a century or two, but Gilly’s weak blood means she’s in very much danger. Also, she’s seen far too much of faerie to continue living as a mortal. Toby has to give her the Changeling’s Choice. But Toby is her mother’s daughter. When Gilly chooses human, instead of letting her die as she’s supposed to, she reaches into Gilly’s blood and takes out everything that’s fae, including the elf shot. Gilly lives, but now Toby’s lost all chance of ever seeing her daughter again. To make matters worse, though Connor is a pureblood, nothing can save him from a shot through the heart that killed him before the poison had a chance to do its work. She’s lost her daughter and her boyfriend all in one blow. At least she’s managed to prevent a war. She finds the traitor that helped Rayseline and gives her knowe and title to one of the lost boys to help keep relationships good between land and sea. She hadn’t wanted the title anyway.
Her losses are almost too much to take, and Toby starts to attempt suicide by carelessness. She takes on bigger and bigger risks, shoving away family and friends when in other circumstances, she’d allow them to help her. Tybalt’s avoiding her again, but for once it’s more out of respect for her losses than because he’s weird and a cat. Then Etienne, one of Sylvester’s other knights, comes to hire her to find his daughter. Chelsea’s a changeling, Tuatha de Danann like her father, a teleporter, and she’s entirely out of control. Most changelings are nearly powerless, capable of illusions and small magic, but not much else. They inherit all of the limits and none of the powers of their fae parents. Chelsea’s different, one of the changelings people tell stories about, that inherits all of the powers and none of the limits. She’s ripping holes through the walls of reality, and no one can so much as find her, let alone make her stop. To make matters worse, her mother is a folklore professor, and has entirely figured out what Etienne and her daughter are. Even so, Toby takes the case.
Tybalt starts helping when Chelsea ends up accidentally opening a door from the lava kingdom into her kingdom and injuring several Cait Sidhe and killing Tybalt. As a king of cats, he has nine lives, so he’s fine, but it’s still absolutely horrifying to Toby, who likes Tybalt a lot despite their very weird relationship. She also accidentally dragged Raj along with her. Toby and Tybalt manage to find Raj by taking a road between Fae dimensions, and realize he’s in a deep, deep part of Faerie where no one’s been since Oberon, Maeve, and Titania vanished. It is really not good that Chelsea ended up here. She’s tearing holes through reality and she could take the world down if she’s not stopped.
The Luidaeg gives them charms to help find Chelsea, and they chase her down to Dreamer’s Glass, a Duchy that borders on Tamed Lightning run by the very ambitious and conniving Duchess Riordan. Toby figures out that Riordan is using a blood charm to keep Chelsea coming back, but before they can do anything about it, Tybalt gets attacked by Raj’s father, who hates Toby and wants the power he hasn’t managed to get through Raj. While this is how succession usually goes in the Court of Cats, involving Toby is not allowed. They escape, and Toby tracks down Chelsea and the Duchess to the deeper Faerie realm that Duchess Riordan wants to colonize. It turns out she’s working with Raj’s father, and Toby and her friends end up having to take them all out and trap Duchess Riordan within the deeper Faerie realm. They get Chelsea back, though, and Toby uses a power dampener long enough to get her to stay still. Then she gives Chelsea the changeling’s choice, and when Chelsea chooses Fae, she burns out all the human until Chelsea’s a normal pureblood, with all the normal pureblood limits. Also, Tybalt admits his feelings, and Toby realizes she returns those feelings, and the two of them start dating.
Someone’s peddling drugs on Toby’s streets. Goblin fruit is a drug that’s pleasant and harmless to purebloods and deadly to changelings. Toby’s infuriated that it’s being sold, and even angrier when it turns out it’s the Queen who’s allowing it out there. The Queen is legitimately incurably crazy, and Toby finally knows it for sure. All she needs to do is find the old king’s real heir, a girl called Arden that’s been missing since long before Toby can remember, and stage a revolution. That task is made somewhat more difficult when she gets hit in the face with a goblin fruit pie. Just one taste is enough to get a changeling addicted, even one whose blood has been strengthened as much as Toby’s has. Also, once she’s had that taste, her body wants the ride to be stronger, and automatically thins her blood, making her so weak that she’s practically human. Though she was a fairly weak changeling when the series started, she’s gotten used to being pretty powerful, magically speaking, and she doesn’t know how to handle being helpless anymore. She hates that everyone always has to protect her, and she hates even more how much she craves goblin fruit.
She locates Arden and convinces her to help, but first she has to rescue Arden’s brother, poisoned with Elfshot and kept prisoner in one of the Queen’s iron dungeons, and she needs to beat the addiction. In order to do both, she breaks into the Queen’s knowe. The hope chest lets her become more fae just in time for her to venture down and get poisoned by iron while rescuing the brother. Tybalt comes with her, and he ends up fatally wounded, but Toby trades a favor to the Night Haunts for the secret to how to revive him. She forces him back to life, refusing to let him go. Toby has a lot of trouble letting people she loves go, and since her blood magic’s getting so strong, she no longer has to let them go. They defeat the Queen, and Toby uses her blood magic to burn out some of the more complicated traces of the Queen’s magic in hopes that it will make her slightly less insane, and because she knows for certain that it will make her less dangerous. She escapes, but Arden gets her throne, and Toby gets recognized as an official hero.
Simon Torquill, Sylvester’s twin brother and the man who changed Toby into a fish, reappears on Toby’s doorstep, but all is not as it seems. There’s a lot he can’t tell Toby, like the fact that he used to be married to Toby’s mother, or that Toby has a sister somewhere. Despite Toby’s unrelenting rage at his existence and the fact that he turned her into a fish, she begins to suspect he’s not the bad guy here, that in fact, there’s someone worse out there, someone who’s been pulling more strings than Toby knows. Someone who shows up and kills the Luidaeg when she says too much, though Toby’s blood magic is strong enough that she actually manages to resurrect her. Toby doesn’t let even death take her friends away from her. Not anymore. Unfortunately, the binding still holds and the Luidaeg can’t tell Toby anything. Luckily, she starts to figure it out right when Evening Winterrose comes back from the dead. It turns out Evening is a hell of a lot more powerful than Toby ever suspected: she’s the Firstborn Daoine Sidhe, and everyone in that bloodline will do what she says without questioning it. Unfortunately, that includes Sylvester. It doesn’t include Luna, and she agrees to help Toby, but only if Toby will help clean up the mixed-up blood that runs through Rayseline’s veins. Rayseline’s still asleep, but Toby agrees, hoping the change will help make Rayseline a little more stable, a little closer to the girl she once was.
Toby confronts Evening, and manages to get the Luidaeg to help her fight by exploiting a loophole in the geas that forbids her to harm a child of Titania: she’s allowed to aid a child of Oberon, and Oberon claims Toby’s line. Then the Luidaeg and Evening start a fight with Toby’s fate hanging in the balance, as Evening’s determined to claim her since she can’t control her and can’t kill her. The Luidaeg wins Toby over to her side with blood, which is what it always comes down to with Toby. Simon arrives, free of Evening’s control, with poisoned arrows, and Toby uses one to take down Evening, leaving her in an enchanted sleep. Evening is basically who the Snow White tales were based off, so fully killing her is next to impossible, but leaving her to sleep for a few centuries while trapped in deeper Faerie will at least delay the problem substantially. Toby returned home, victorious again, though angry with Sylvester and Luna for keeping secrets about her past from her yet again, and Tybalt proposed to her. Considering how short their lives were likely to be at this rate, why wait?
Toby will arrive shortly after saying yes.
Abilities/Special Powers: Toby is a changeling, which means she’s half-fae, half human. She’s Dochas Sidhe, a species of fae that to her knowledge, encompasses only herself and her mother. As such she is especially skilled in blood magic. She can ride the memories contained in blood by tasting it or use her own blood or the blood of others in spells. The uses and constraints of blood magic aren’t clear even to her, but she’s used it to even bring back the dead, though this is not a good plan and almost kills her. She can also “taste” the balance of a person’s blood and figure out what sort of fae they are or what mix. She’s particularly attuned to the distinct signature smell magic leaves and can identify a person by it.
In addition she can weave illusions to make herself look human or keep people from looking at herself or a vehicle. Her illusion magic isn’t as strong as her blood magic, but even that has strengthened since her mother changed the balance of her blood and made her more fae than human. Like her mother, she does have that power, to change the balance of the blood or take out one side entirely, but it’s a big deal that hurts both her and whoever she’s doing it to enough that she’s unlikely to break it out lightly.
Though she’s not immortal, she can expect to live for centuries in the unlikely event that she’s not otherwise killed. Iron hurts her a lot, limiting her magic and making her sick. Silver’s unpleasant too, but not to the same degree.
Third-Person Sample: It’s not the first time Toby’s found herself in a strange world. She just wishes the universe hadn’t been cruel enough to dump her in the fish pond.
She pulls herself out, wringing water from her hair and checking her ears to make sure they’re still round. She doesn’t know how likely it is she’ll run into humans here, but better to be safe than a government experiment. Her knee is bleeding, skin scraped off against the stone of the fountain. That’s good. She’s always at her best when she’s bleeding. Pity it means her jeans are torn. She’d liked these jeans. But fine. Other things to worry about. Like where she is, and how she got here. The second part troubles her more, honestly. She’s been trapped before in strange places and magical realms that she had no business being in, but there’s always been a reason. She’s followed the path revealed by candlelight or taken the Rose Road or gone through the portal of a mad changeling. She doesn’t just… show up in a place. Something’s wrong with this.
“Okay, Toby,” she mutters, “Just figure out where you are, find a way out, and you and May can laugh about this later. Simple.” Because she’s ever had a simple day in her life. Right.
Still, there’s something about this place that’s naggingly familiar. She starts walking, frowning around at her surroundings, as she tries to puzzle it out. It’s nowhere she’s been, that much is clear, but there’s something familiar in the checkerboard hills, in the inherent strangeness of the land.
“Some say to survive it, you need to be mad as a hatter,” Toby mutters, looking around. “Wonderland. Huh.” For some people, this might have seemed impossible, but the way Toby’s life had gone lately, she wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Etienne secretly had a fluffy tail and bunny ears.
She shoves her hands into her jacket pockets and keeps walking. Wonderland may be known for its tea parties, but right now she’s hoping there’s some coffee too.
First-Person Sample: [Toby looks annoyed, though this isn’t all that unusual for her. She doesn’t look Fae, at least. Her illusions are firmly up, magic dulling the points of her ears and filling in the color of her eyes until she looks like a normal human, though a cranky one.]
This is not what I had hoped to wake up to, you know. Being abducted into a storybook has this way of just ruining my day.
[She looks around, tugging her brown leather jacket closer around her. She’s not comfortable with this situation. That much is obvious.]
Anyone have any information about what’s going on here? Besides the obvious, I mean. I’ve figured out it’s Wonderland, I just want to know if someone’s going to force me to play croquet with a flamingo. I’ve never even played normal croquet. I don’t even wanna think about what happens when you bring birds into it. Let’s all avoid finding out, shall we?