The Hedge
The Hedge is full of both pain and joy. It is brambles and Thorns and horrible things lurking in the shadows; it is birthdays and music and a kiss from an ethereal stranger you remember from somewhere. It is beautiful and terrible, claustrophobic yet neverending. The Hedge is a million ecstatic things, and you can take some of them home with you. The Hedge is a shortcut between here and there, and all it will cost is a chance of losing yourself. The Hedge stands between Earth and Arcadia, protecting the mortal world from the True Fae and their machinations — and vice versa, because the Gentry must take on the aspects of soil and sea to walk among humans.
Every Lost’s durance ends with an escape, and the escape always leads through the Hedge. Here, the newly made Lost meets the Thorns, and the piece of his soul ripped from him and left dangling like a lost shoe from a power line is his Icon. But the association the Hedge and the Thorns have with a changeling’s durance, and the pain he suffered to win his freedom, do not mean the Thorns limit themselves to pricking escaping pets, or that no one enters the Hedge on other business. Some beings even dwell there, living their own lives of wonder and enchantment, peddling magic to stay one step ahead of the darkness between the cracks.
The Hedge has many things worth the journey. It has Goblin Markets and goblin fruit, Hollows in which a changeling can find peace from the mortal world to which he no longer wholly belongs, and trods that lead to distant places faster than any mundane road. Far from the world of bills and petty corruption, the problems the Hedge poses feel far more primal and seductive. They’re problems a changeling can face and overcome with adventures and clever tricks, worthy of retelling. The Hedge is a reflection of what’s in a traveler’s heart of hearts, too, a hazy amalgam of the familiar and the unknown.
It is a literal hedge, well-trimmed and manicured in some parts, wild and free in some. It is coils of barbed wire running through blasted urban hellscapes where everything is crumbling alleyways and abandoned parking lots, and it is endless wastes of snow that yield only to travelers who choose the right direction. And it is romantic gardens, offering succulent bounties and vivid blooms for meeting a long-dead lover, and it is dreamy bazaars where a ha’penny and a promise buys a subway ticket back to childhood, for those willing to haggle. Here, hobgoblins dwell in hollowed-out apples and Huntsmen prowl paths cobbled with ivy-grown marble, and even the occasional liege of Arcadia strolls down the byways.
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