Title: Setting
Rating: Gen
Length: ~350 words
Contents: Faerie food and drink, hints of violence to come
Author's note: This is incredibly self-indulgent fic of a thing I'm hosting this weekend.

Summary: Laying the table, laying the trap

Serith left her cell phone on her back porch and stepped into her yard. The late summer scents of dry grass and old leaves twisted around her with the wind in her hair. She took a moment to close her eyes and feel the passing of the season, time slipping around her like a river. Eyes still closed, she took another step forward, and another, until she stepped between trees that sank their roots nowhere near her home.

This place. She opened her eyes, drawing in a breath that carried with it no hint of the season at all. It was a dream place, tied to the mortal world by nothing more than a thread of poetry and a million stories. Tonight, she'd open the way for others to come here. For some, they would never return.

She snapped her fingers and pinpricks of light flickered and fluttered into place in the tree branches. They muttered cold sparks for a moment, then steadied into the warm tawny glow of candle flames. No candles ever burned so evenly as these.

Serith glanced around at tables piled high with sweets: honey cakes and candied fruits, sugar-sweet chocolates as light as air, meringues in fanciful shapes edged in gold. Not a single fly showed an interest; no gnats flew to investigate. Although the scents rose with a heady warmth, the insects knew: nothing here would satisfy.

She didn't hope to catch a fly, tonight. Humans were easier to fool.

Wine, too, she laid out, deep ruby and sparkling white, spiced mead and sweet watermelon summer. Crystal goblets caught the light and scattered it in rainbows, reflections shed and caught and sent laughing back and forth between them. The goblets whispered to each other like the pleased hum of party guests.

Music, she knew, she'd have to pay for. She'd found two fiddlers and a singer on Craigslist who'd accepted her offer of $50 cash and free food and drink for the night. She hoped they left before midnight, as they'd been instructed. Musicians were better bait than catch, but she could hardly warn them.

She wondered what they'd remember, come morning.