Cass’s people are among the most interesting I have met. Nevermind their personalities and their appearance, but the smells. So many different scents, each one of them different, revealing secrets to the people who know what to sniff for.

The first time I met them, I could not see what they truly looked like.  They looked like the boy next door, the hawk-nosed businessman, the homeless man huddled in the alley, high on goddess knows what.  But when their masks are stripped away, what a vision they are.  Strange,  like spirits, glorious yet pitiable.  Each one taken and changed to suit those who stole them away.

Some are like beasts, not the pureness and elegance of my form, but travesties of nature.  Some are living embodiments of elements, burning hot or cold as their nature forces them to.  Walking among them are visions out of storybooks; giants, trolls, and other things too hideous to mention.  A few are shrunken and wizened, as if their time beyond the Hedge sucked out  all their youth and vitality, chewed them up and spat them back out again.

But what power they have.  Indiviudally they may be weak, falling before the Keepers or those who seek to return them to their slavery, but together they could rival, perhaps even defeat the gods.

Watching them, they are like many packs combined as one.  Smaller groups bound together with pledges of protection and friendship, bound to seasons and courts and ultimately to the Duchy.  The amount of power they hold, what I saw when they paid court and welcomed the new Spring Queen was almost terrifying to behold.   The horrors they went through to earn them that power, I don’t know if I could have withstood it with my mind intact.  There are those whose mind didn’t survive.  How they made it back home, I have no idea.

Oh, but their scents.  Cass smells like flowers, Shining Africa like deep fertile soil.  I could spend a lifetime sniffing them and never get bored.  For some of them, I know their scents can easily be explained away if it breaks through their Mask – a delicate floral perfume, for instance.  For others, it would be more difficult.  But there is a connection between their scent and their fae mien, as Cass calls it.  Those like her would smell of the flowers they have.  Jeremiah Storm has the faint scent of ozone.  Max smells like – goddess forgive me for the pain I caused when I asked him why.