hill of snow

It’s impossible to know how something is going to arrive when you summon it.
Sometimes it’s huge and dramatic, like it was with Titania. Sometimes they come in a burst of thunder or flame. Once, this thing I’d summoned arrived in a shower of rotting meat, and it took me a month to get the smell out of my old lab. Less often, they simply appear, like a slide-show image suddenly projected on the wall, drama-free.
Mab came in a bell tone of sudden, awful, absolute silence.
There was a flash—not of light, but of sudden snow, of frost that abruptly blanketed everything on the hilltop and gathered thick on my eyelashes. I reached up a hand to flick the snowflakes out of my eyes, and when I lowered it, Mab was there, again in her crow black dress, with her midnight eyes and ebon hair, floating three feet off the ground. The frost was spreading from her, covering the hilltop, and the temperature dropped by twenty degrees.
In the same instant, everything on the hilltop ceased moving. There was no wind. There were no fitful drops of rain. Just pure, brittle, crystalline silence and a sudden bleak black presence that made me feel like hiding behind something, very quietly.
Mab’s dark, bleak gaze took in the hilltop at a glance, and stopped on Lily and her supporting coterie. Mab’s left eye twitched once. And she spoke in a low, dreadfully precise voice. “Cease. This. Rudeness. At once.”


Cold Days Chapter 52, Page 490