Notes

okay so imagine this:

bronach is a college student who's basically got it all: she's an immigrant, has had to fight for every single thing she has, but she's working her way towards a business degree and she's got a loving boyfriend who she's sure she's going to end up marrying.

and then on a camping trip gone wrong, she ends up lost in the woods: the in-between place. it's teo years for her, but only a few days for all of her friends. she stumbles out of the woods with a pair of one year old twins clutched in her arms. she claims to have found them, and no one really believes her, but what else can they say? she has scars she shouldnt', she has skills she shouldn't, she is traumatised in a way she shouldn't be.

her relationship is strained. she and her boyfriend raise the twins together after no one is able to find their parents. her boyfriend drop sout of schoool to be a full time dad, while bronach struggles toward a degree that she doesn't want anymore. the twins are three years old when bronach graduates. she and her boyfriend break up and he ends up getting custody over their daughter. they both have visiting rights, but that stops when they're ten. none of them can handle it anymore, and the kids were never very close in the first place.

the twins are raised separately. iris' father is kind, gentle, but endlessly hurt by bronach, and this attitude has influenced iris. she is reserved to the point of being cold (sometimes), insanely protective of her father (and the people she views as hers), serious and determined and driven. she wants to succeed where her father was forced to fail (namely college) and she kind of resents her mother for what she did.

killian, on the other hand, takes after bronach more than iris takes after her father. bronach used to be tough, hot-headed, a real spitfire, but in the wake of everything that's happened to her, she is a lot quieter, a lot more thoughtful, though with just as bad a temper. killian, too, is impulsive and has a temper, but he's also super friendly and outgoing, very loyal to his friends, endlessly excitable and curious. he loves his mother and thinks iris and their father are kind of jerks for blaming her even after all these years.

it's bronach's death that brings them together. the funeral, yes, but it's there that they meet athel and naava and learn the truth: their mother met and fell in love with a fae prince in those woods, and gave birth to iris and killian there. bronach and donovan became the keys to the veil that blocks the seelie and unseelie planes (and the human plane is accessible only through the seelie plane), but donovan died years ago. with bronach's death, the magic of the keys has officially passed down to iris and killian. killian readily agrees to go with the fae. iris does not.

in the end it's her father who eventually convinces her (unknowingly) to go. he says how he regrets how much he hated bronach all these years, and that he misses her and still loves her, etc etc, and iris realizes not only that holding on to her grudge is stupid, but also that she has to protect the world for her father's sake. so she goes with killian and the fae to the fae planes.

there the rest happens: they become entrenched in seelie politics and learn to harnes their physical and magical capabilities. killian proves himself a fair hand at throwing knives and fighting with daggers, while iris' talents lie more in potions and spells. she meets ambrosia and starts to learn dark magic, there is betrayal, etc etc.

perhaps iris and ambrosia find their hapy ending, perhaps they do not. naava dies, and killian and athel survive to live and love. theodoric and his wife live happily with their baby, while killian and iris are only too happy to be fourth and third in line for the pixie throne, respectively (they're like sixteenth in line for the fairie throne, because rosemonde had many older siblings and the one who inherited the throne has kids too). iris becomes an ambassador to the unseelie realm, ahriman and demogorgon become much more amenable now that the unseelie aren't being needlessly demonized and ostracized, and things are pretty good.