Synopsis: From Rock to Wood

*cover images from www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net*

Long ago, a beautiful but pathetically weak faerie married a human, and they had several children. (No one cared because she was so incompetent with magic.) One of the boys, Namaka, took after his mother, but he hid it from everyone for fear of ostracism. After a disaster with the girl he grew up loving, he became a hunter of the insanely dangerous direwolves. A faerie woman who came to check on his mother learned of the direwolves, and she also became a hunter. The two met and ended up lovers, she teaching him how to use his magic. Then one day, Namaka was out with a less than competent group of hunters, and in trying to keep them alive, he had his own body destroyed. Namaka used his magic to move himself into a rock, and used death magick—an illegal and addicting form of magick—to keep himself alive.

Not as long ago, a gifted young faerie man married a human woman. But the faerie Council was appalled by his actions and stripped him of all the magick he could actively use in punishment. When his wife came with child, he accidentally used death magic to strip the unborn girl's own active magick, and in guilt threw himself into his work and left his wife at home. The guilt worsened the insanity risk from using death magick, and he ultimately killed himself, but none of the wife's station would verify his death so she could be legally declared a widow. She had the carpenter make her daughter an adolescent male doll and left, to seek proof of her husband's demise and hopefully return before her daughter outgrew the doll.

Nobody realized the girl, Aresh, wasn't human, which made her childhood difficult because she was so strange. She loved to wander, particularly in some woods her parents had favored, though those woods were rumored to be haunted. (Direwolves had since been hunted to extinction.) One day, she found an odd-seeming rock, and she brought it home and showed it to her doll. The rock glowed, then seemed normal, and after her teacher's called out at her next disastrous piano lesson, her doll asks her if she's ever tried to play by ear.

The hunter from the first human/faerie marriage had moved himself into the doll. He taught Aresh about her magic and the truth of death magick, even as quietly he used death magick himself to convert his doll body into a real one. By the time Aresh was old enough to marry, his body could function as a real one. She picked an ill husband because she felt sorry for him and knew she's immune to his Tb; Namaka swore he wouldn't let the husband leave Aresh with a child. It wasn't until Namaka killed the husband on Aresh's wedding night that she realized he'd been using death magick, but she couldn't bring herself to kill him or turn him in, making her an accomplice. She feared him, too, and let him seduce her.

Maftan, a faerie friend of Aresh's father, would sometimes come to check on Aresh. He recognized the death magick and threatened to turn Namaka in. Aresh used death magick on him to protect Namaka, but stopped herself from killing Maftan. With her newly-gained magick, she managed to hide both Maftan and the child she conceived with Namaka. Once with child, she quickly sought a husband to be able to pass the child as that person's, but the man she chose realizes what she was doing and threatened to expose her. Namaka killed that man and sought to kill the child, too, since it would cause problems. Aresh used her magick to protect her unborn child and ends up killing Namaka in the massive fallout.

Aresh could tell she was going crazy from the death magick, so after giving birth she left her child on a farmer's doorstep and turned her death magick on herself before she could kill anyone else. Maftan found her in time to stop her, and he took her to the faerie. He took responsibility for her before the Council and married her when she was well enough, and they were happy enough.

In a more modern era, Kyrie's always been a little odd, and unusual things tend to happen around her. Then one day, the great-grandson of Aresh and Maftan finds her, and it turns out she's his distant cousin, from that child Aresh left on the farmer's doorstep. She gladly learns about the magickal part of her heritage, and she researches about her foremother and her lover, compiling the best coherent record of Pinocchio and his girl for the faeries—and Kyrie's the one writing the novel.