From the day she killed her own parents, Quinn had known she was an impostor through and through.
She was a curseborn who had been swapped in. Her happy family was a lie, her loving parents were a lie, and even her life was a false tragedy waiting to be ruthlessly torn apart.
That was why she hated the Ebony Forest's false beauty.
Whenever these people wandered through their dreams, greeting others and spreading happiness, she felt an urge to "show them the tragedy of reality."
But she knew perfectly well that, had the [Minions of the Ebony Forest] not decided back then that she was merely "an innocent victim replaced by a hag"—
That it was a hag's evil deeds that had turned her into a hag—
Then the crime of slaughtering her family would have been more than enough to get her buried beneath the World Tree's roots and dissolved into soil.
Now she was merely a "puppet" obeying the Society's orders, a prisoner who sustained the Ebony Forest's dreams and stability with "wishes."
But at least she was alive.
At least she could still cackle in the shadows, mocking the people immersed in false dreams who could never have the love they wanted.
What lay at the heart of that impulse?
She thought it was envy.
Envy that the druids weaving dreams for those people were so kind, so protective of them.
While the one who had woven her dream, only to tear it apart without mercy, was a hag.
So she hated hags, and understood them all the better.
They were incarnations of ugliness, cunning, and evil.
They should not have been—
An eloquent poet who had saved a dream and preserved the peace.
Her eyes glimmered bright yellow, one slender, willow-leaf eyebrow raised higher than