Dennis L. McKiernan

With the deaths of her three sisters, the witch Hradian—sometimes a crone, other times not—had fled across many twilight bounds of Faery to a distant realm, this one a swamp filled with Bogles and Corpse Candles and other beings of hatred and dread and spite. And in that miasma-filled mire, she lived in a cottage perched upon stilts barely above the slough and its crawling sickness, her dwelling nought but a hovel deep in the grasp of dark shadows cast by a surround of lichen-wattled black cypress trees, their trunks wrenching up out of the slime-laden bog, their limbs covered with a twiggy gray moss dangling down like snares set to strangle the unwary.

And Hradian ranted and fumed and spied and plotted and contrived, yet rejected scheme after scheme, for it seemed all were too risky to her very own life and limb. After all, her three sisters—Rhensibé, Nefasí, and Iniquí—were more powerful than she, and they had all lost their lives. So her malice and bile and frustration and rage grew for over four years—as the days are counted in the mortal realm—for she would have her revenge against those who had done her and her sisters wrong. But it seemed no matter her craving for retribution, her designs would come to nought.

But then . . .

. . . Once upon a dreadful time . . .