The Unseelie Tower is the only permanent stronghold of the Unseelie Court. It is the place of residence of the Unseelie King, his courtiers and the gentry in the Unseelie Lands of Faerie.
Description[]
The Unseelie Tower is a dark gray, windowless tower. Growing all around the tower is a massive wall of steel-colored thorns, each one about a foot long and some as long as swords, sticking out at jagged angles. Scattered among the vines are the white skeletal remains of those who had tried to climb the wall. Set into the thorny hedge are tall bronze gates, guarded by Unseelie knights. Past the gates is a courtyard, with a cobblestone path leading to the tower's doors with a great black archway over it.
The tower is where the Unseelie retreat to when under siege. Its fortifications are said to be unmatched in Faerie, with the vines and the multitude of Unseelie guards and redcaps guarding it. Though difficult, it is not impossible to pass through the hedge of thorns to enter the courtyard outside the tower.
The inside of the tower is nearly featureless. Its corridors twist around in circles and gradually narrow towards the top of the tower. There is a point where the corridors split, with one path leading down and another leading farther up. On the path to the top of the tower is the residential area, the doors to the rooms richly decorated, including the room where Ash Morgenstern was kept during his stay there, hidden by a tapestry with a pattern of stars.
The throne room is found near the top of the tower, behind a tall, dark archway guarded by redcaps. The room is bare, with a floor made of dark gray stone scattered with heaps of tumbled boulders and only one massive window on the north wall that was sometimes transformed into a Portal. The throne is a boulder, carved into a seat, with a pattern of screaming faces and stone rising all around its back and sides.
Somewhere outside the throne room is a holding room where prisoners are kept prior to their audience with the King. It is a windowless stone room and a grating set into the ceiling where light filters through.
The prison cells are located somewhere in the lower levels of the tower, the corridors leading down steeply inclined and lined with the occasional green bough torches. The prisons are at the end of a long winding hall, through a doorway without a door cut into a thick, stone wall. The prison room is wide, square, and made of rough-hewn stone walls, and the cells' walls and bars are made of the same metallic gray, hard, thorny vines that surrounded the tower, growing from the ceiling to the dirt floor. The vines react—opens and closes—to the weapons and touch of faeries. The space is dimly illuminated by smoky torches high up on the walls.[1]
History[]
Emma crossing the wall of thorns.
In 2012, Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild were found in Unseelie Lands and were promptly imprisoned in the tower's cells.
Some time after, Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn went undercover to the Unseelie Tower as part of the Seelie Court delegation that came with the Seelie Queen to trade the copy of the Black Volume of the Dead for her son, Ash. They parted with the delegation at the gates to avoid the guards and had to pass through the wall of thorns to get inside the tower, becoming the first warriors to challenge the wall in a long time, and possible the first ones to survive it.
Inside the tower, they found the throne room in time to witness the meeting of the Unseelie King with Annabel Blackthorn and Ash before they went looking for the boy's room. They went undetected and were invisible to Unseelie eyes for a few minutes with the help of a Seelie concoction. When Emma and Julian tried to rescue Ash, the boy denounced them and they were caught by two of the Riders of Mannan protecting him. The pair was taken to the prisons and was reunited with Clary and Jace and were rescued by Adaon and Cristina Rosales shortly after.
Adaon took them all to the throne room under the pretense that they were his prisoners, just as Mark Blackthorn and Kieran were also delivered to the King. The Seelie Queen soon joined them; Annabel escaped with Ash through the Portal to Thule, and a fight broke out between her and the King and between the prisoners and the redcaps before Kieran killed the King. With the King dead, the Seelie Queen took Adaon as revenge, and the prisoners left Faerie using the Rosales family heirloom, except Julian and Emma who couldn't make it to the others in time and went to Thule through the Portal instead.
The throne room became charred when the King's body caught on fire, and the Portal to Thule closed upon his death.[1]
Residents[]
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