Act One: The Sweetest Bite
The hive sang, but Puck could no longer hear it.
She had been a jester once. A darting, laughing thing of blue silk and silver bells, serving the old Seelie Queen with riddles and tumbles. Now she knelt on the cold, obsidian floor of a broken throne room, her wrists bound in weeping amber.
Her body was no longer her own.
It had started as a whisper in her ear during the Great Moult—a spore, fine as ash, settling behind her left eye. Then a twitch in her wing. Then a hunger. Not for nectar or summer fruit, but for warmth. For the wet, secret heat inside other faeries.
Now, her belly was a swollen pearl. Translucent. And inside, moving like a dream you can’t wake from, the new Queen stirred.
“Pretty little Puck,” cooed the thing that wore her throat like a glove.
Puck’s mouth opened. Not her words came out.
“I am the Parasite Queen. And you, my first vessel, will be my midwife.”
Puck tried to scream. Instead, her hands—her own hands, still blue-nailed and clever—lifted to her stomach and pressed. The skin split not with blood, but with golden light. From the incision crawled a creature no larger than a thimble: a perfect, awful miniature of the queen within. It had Puck’s eyes. Puck’s smile. But its body was a knot of glistening tendrils, each one searching.
The little parasite blinked up at her.
“Mother,” it whispered.
Puck wept. The Parasite Queen laughed—a sound like breaking honeycomb.
“Act one is complete,” the Queen said, stepping out of Puck’s hollowed chest. She was tall now, a crown of writhing pupae on her brow. “Now, my child. Go. Find the Seelie Court. And when they offer you sweet wine and a seat at their table… eat them from the inside out.”
The little parasite—Little Puck, the court would call it, not knowing—spread its wet, iridescent wings and flew into the twilight.
Behind it, the true Puck collapsed, empty as a shed skin. And somewhere in the dark, the Parasite Queen began to hum a lullaby.
Hush, little vessel. The hive has need of you.
End of Act One.
The brilliance of Act 1 is that the parasite does not cause pain. It causes joy.
Other faeries notice. "Are you feeling quite right, little puck?" asks a dryad. You lie. You say you are fine. But a voice—soft, maternal, wrong—whispers in your skull: "Don't tell them. We are becoming better."
This is the turning point of Act 1. The Parasite Queen begins to assert her will. You, the Little Puck, find a hidden hollow log. You are compelled to shed your skin.
Mechanically, this is often depicted as a "reverse skill tree." You lose innocent abilities:
Your appearance warps. Your pointed ears soften into gills. Your moss-green eyes turn into compound lenses. You are no longer a puck. You are a nymph stage of the new queen.