Thomas Marlow was not lost.

That was the mistake everyone else would make later: to say the boy wandered, strayed, disobeyed. But Thomas had gone into the forest on purpose. He went because the forest listened better than people did, because trees did not rush him when he paused mid-thought, because moss did not flinch when he spoke aloud to himself in fragments and half-sentences and loops.

He was practicing names.

Names had weight. Thomas could feel it even then, though he did not yet have language for the pressure that gathered behind certain sounds. Some names rang clean and fell away. Others stuck in his mouth like burrs. He was trying to understand why.

The forest that evening was ordinary in the way thresholds often are: damp, blue-shadowed, full of the small movements of things that prefer not to be noticed. Thomas knelt to examine a beetle turned on its back, counting its legs twice to be sure. He did not hear the horse.

When the sound finally arrived, it arrived all at once: breath like wind through glass, hooves that did not strike the ground so much as persuade it to make room.

He stood.

She was already there.

Titania did not enter the forest. She cohered inside it, as if the idea of her had finally finished deciding where to land. Her steed’s eyes held galaxies—not reflected, not imagined, but actively rotating, blue stars turning in slow, precise spirals. The horse was white in the way bone is white: patient, ancient, unconcerned with dirt.

Titania herself was wrong in a way Thomas immediately understood.

Her armor fit like an argument. Her wings were too deliberate, their patterns too intentional to be decoration. And her hair—gathered into that impossible, obnoxious arc of luminous turquiose—rose and fell as if gravity had been politely dismissed. It was not optional. It was a declaration.

She looked at him as though she had already been listening.

“…Thomas.”

She spoke his name once, softly, not as a question. The sound landed between them and stayed there.

Thomas did not answer. He could not. His body had gone still in the particular way it did when too much meaning arrived at once. He noticed, distantly, that her eyes were not the same color as the forest but were in conversation with it, correcting its hues as they met.

“You are very good at standing on edges,” Titania said. “You do it without knowing you are doing it.”

The horse lowered its head. Its breath steamed faintly, though the air was not cold.

Thomas swallowed. “I wasn’t trespassing.”

Titania smiled—not kindly, not cruelly, but with recognition. “No. You were tuning.”

She dismounted in one smooth motion, armor whispering rather than clanking, and stepped closer. The forest seemed to blur around her, the edges of leaves softening, colors bleeding as though the world had suddenly decided to try watercolor.

Thomas did not.

He remained stubbornly exact: wool rough against his wrists, dirt under his nails, the ache in his knees from kneeling too long. He was a pencil drawing surrounded by wet paint.

“That will change,” Titania said, glancing at him the way one might glance at a clock about to strike. “But not yet.”

He dared to look up at her fully then. “Why do you know my name?”

“Because you listen,” she said. “And because you do not lie to yourself about what you hear.”

This felt true in a way that frightened him.

Titania extended a gloved hand—not commanding, not pleading. Simply present.

“Come and see,” she said.

The forest opened.

Not split—opened, like breath held too long finally released. Light poured in, fractured and layered, colors stepping out of themselves. Thomas saw figures ahead: winged shapes suspended in veils of shimmer, courts arranged not in lines but in resonances. He saw small fae watching with expressions that ranged from delight to calculation. He saw patterns that reminded him of the beetle’s legs, the way symmetry hid exceptions.

Faerieland did not announce itself as a place. It announced itself as a rule set.

Titania stood beside him now, her wings catching and scattering the light, her hair leaving slow, luminous echoes when she moved.

“You may refuse,” she said, because she always said this. “But you will never stop hearing us after this moment.”

Thomas looked at the path—or what passed for one—and felt the tug of it, the unbearable relief of entering a system that acknowledged how his mind already worked.

He nodded once.

The forest behind him did not close. It simply stopped insisting.

When Thomas stepped forward, the first wash of color caught him at the ankles, then the knees, then the chest. He felt his edges soften, not dissolve—translated. The world began to hum, each thing announcing itself in layered meanings. Titania watched closely, head tilted, as if listening to a tuning fork strike true.

“Seven years,” she said, not as a sentence but as a measurement.

He did not understand what that meant yet.

Only later would he realize that what she had taken was not his time, but his ability to pretend that words were harmless.

And Faerieland, pleased with its acquisition, turned its colors just a little brighter around him.

AUTHOR’S ADDENDUM (Episode #1)
This episode draws from the Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin ballads, the Persephone–Hades cycle, and the logic of glamour captivity found in Labyrinth, Pan’s Labyrinth, pre-Shakespearean faerie lore, filtered through my own queer coming out amid neon lights and protective drag queens. Visual and tonal influences include David Bowie’s Jareth, Annie Lennox and Tilda Swinton’s cold sovereignty, Margaret Keane’s witness-eyes, and insectoid folklore where beauty is a form of power rather than comfort.

🎙️ Listen to a podcast about this story here. (9 mins)

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