“Heilyn’s mother, for instance, is no Titania. By human standards she can be cruel and heartless and her morals non-existent. You may not judge by the accepted code of our world. Faery is not immoral, but amoral in our terms. A leopard is beautiful and dangerous; it kills and devours its prey with dreadful ferocity and mates where it will. It is not evil, it follows the dictates of its own nature and instinct, yet in a human such behaviour would be condemned. So it is with the Otherworld. An ogre will rip you to shreds but it is not personal. Just a method of food preparation.”

Merlin gave them a few moments to digest this comment, their revulsion causing the glimmer of a smile.

“The next question is where are these other worlds, to which the answer is ‘right here’,” he continued. “They permeate our world in the same…