A/N: The Dresden Files belongs to Jim Butcher. I just play in his driveway. (Rated T for language and fantastical violence)

Prompt from the LJ Day by Drabble Blue Skies event, #13 (verse from Coldplay, below)

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

-Viva la Vida by Coldplay

The Feary, the Monsters, and the Wardrobe

Every so often I like to impart a little wisdom to others. A little lesson or two from hard experience. Ready? Here it comes.

When given the opportunity to sell your soul, don't take it. I'm not going to lie, I wouldn't change my decision for anything in the world; Maggie, my daughter, was worth it. I'd do it again if I had to. God knows there's enough "people" in this world (and others, for that matter) that would jump at the chance to get their hands on one Harry Dresden, well-used. The kind of people that would bid on me on eBay.

Mab won, by virtue of actually being the least horrible option, what with her threadbare sanity and all. That threadbare sanity totally got scored incorrectly on my cost-benefit analysis.

It had been a very long hike through the snow to demesne of the Queen of Air and Darkness herself. I was still recovering from that whole being-dead thing, which Mab didn't seem to think should slow me down at all. She kept walking faster and faster, insisting that I would feel better when I was "home." When the castle of ice of Arctis Tor appeared before us (literally, Mab summoned it, which is kind of irritating come to think of it) I distinctly recall feeling worse.

Mab led me through the gates where we were met by the Leanansidhe who wore a grin. "You are looking more substantial than last we spoke, child," she said. She was a symphony in green velvet and red hair shining.

"Uh, thanks, Godmother." I looked from Lea to Mab, who seemed entirely too delighted. Uh oh. Mab practically wrote the book on Don't Get Mad, Get Even. I considered the facts, as any good detective would do; I'd bargained my soul for power from her and then offed myself to cheat her. She'd already shown her anger on Demonreach. Now she was smiling. Grinning, even. She was positively effervescent.

This was so not a good thing.

Oh no, she wouldn't kill me. That would be counterintuitive. There are things infinitely worse than death in the Winter Court.

I took a deep breath, cursed what I was certain was frostbite in my lungs and faced the proverbial music. "Okay," I demanded. "What. What the hell are you grinning at me like that for?"

Mab shuddered, the smirk never leaving her lips or her eyes. "It feels so satisfying to finally have you under my power."

"Look, your Highnessness, I already told you. I won't be your monster. You can't afford to micromanage me like that. Ain't gonna happen. Now what the hell do you want?"

The smile vanished. "You will learn your place, Knight, and you will show respect for your Queen."

Gag me. "Sorry, let me try that again," I said, forcing politeness into my tone. "What the hell do you want, my Queen?"

She glared at me for another moment, then finally nodded to Lea, who produced an ancient-looking key. Made of ice. Figures. She dropped the key into my outstretched hand. It was lighter than I thought it would be, but still quite large, not quite the length of my palm. I stood there for a beat, waiting for an explanation that was never going to come.

"Okay, I give up. What's the key go to?"

"Your rooms, dear boy," Lea purred.

"My what?" I looked from Lea to Mab and back to Lea again. Mab wasn't going to be any help. She'd wandered off and was stooped over, smelling-I swear it-a rose bush that was entirely encased in ice. See what I mean? Questionable sanity.

"It is customary," Lea explained, "for the Winter Knight to have his own quarters within the Palace so that he is always at the Queen's hand."

"Yeah that sounds like a fun place to be." I sighed. "Okay, where is it?"

"Just off of the Great Hall," Mab answered from her bent position where she was petting an ice sculpture of a Scottish terrier. At least I hoped it was an ice sculpture. Probably not. "You'll know it when your key turns the lock."

"Duh. That's usually a good indication that a key works."

Mab was standing again, grinning at me. Quite the chatterbox. Not.

"So, um. I find my room, and then what?"

"There will be proper attire in the wardrobe. You will dress and come to the Hall to be presented formally to the Court," Mab answered.

"Uh huh. Didn't you already do that, broadcasting that, whatever-that-was ceremony on the Table all over Winter? I've got to look some of those Little Folk in the eye, you know. They ask some really embarrassing questions." I resisted the urge to point an annoyed finger at her. Barely.

Mab's smile took on a rather feline air. I swear there were feathers sticking out of her mouth. "Your Godmother will escort you to the Hall, and you may find your rooms from there. Consider it your first quest."

I swallowed, not liking the sound of that at all. I shoved my apprehension away and settled into my old default response to anxiety-wiseassery. I clicked my heels together and gave Mab a sarcastic salute, which was mostly lost on her, before marching dramatically behind Lea. I stopped short of humming a battle hymn, but once I started thinking of one, it got stuck in my head. Sigh.

When we were out of sight of the Queen, which is all relative in her own demesne, I cut the childishness and briefly increased my stride to walk next to my Godmother. She met my gaze when I looked at her. Her impish grin was replaced by a calmer expression, brow smooth, lips set in a gentle line. At least she didn't look like she was keeping secrets anymore. She still probably was. Strictly speaking, Faeries cannot lie, but they are notoriously adept at deception, truth-bending, fact-withholding, and secret-keeping. Mab and Lea are so good at it, in fact, that they make the rest of Faerie look like a bunch of push-overs. I'd gotten one over on them before. Maybe I'd just gotten lucky then.

Uh oh. I was getting dangerously close to needing to give myself a pep talk. Can't have that.

"So what's it about finding my room that makes this a quest? Do I have to answer thee questions three?"

The Leanansidhe's brow furrowed, puzzled. "No, there are no questions to be answered."

Mental note: introduce these people to Monty Python. "What do I have to do? I mean, it's Mab, right? It's not that simple. It never is." I looked down at my wrists, which were sporting awful purple and green bruises from the freakish life support system she'd put me on at Demonreach. I tried not to imagine all the awful things that could be waiting for me in the Great Hall, like slavering, three-headed hounds, ogres, berserk pixies, that sort of thing.

I should have asked for berserk pixies. I'd expected a handful of doors to try the key in. We rounded a corner and Lea slowed to a halt. I stopped as well and stood there gawking at what lay before me. I began counting doors, but stopped at thirty. There must have been at least four times that that I could see, and the far end of the hallway was shrouded in darkness, making it impossible to tell how far it really stretched. I sighed. Figures.

"So, uh. Do I get a hint or what?"

My Godmother was smiling again. Damn it. She tapped a long, white finger on the key in my hand. "The key opens sixteen of these doors. You are to wear the Mantle of the Winter Knight to the ceremony. Only one of them exists. It is in one of the wardrobes in one of the rooms accessed by that key. That room will be your quarters while you are in Winter."

I scanned the hall. All of the doors were identical. "Anything else?"

"There are seven scores of doors along this hallway."

One hundred and forty doors. Hey God? It's me, Harry. I'm really sorry about, well, everything. If you could just turn me into a pile of ash now, that'd be great. "Oh. Well. Why didn't you say it would be easy?"

I took a step into the hallway and stopped to think strategy. All of the doors were identical and I had no means of marking those that I had tried, so I would have to be methodical. The simplest thing to do would be to try all of the doors along the right side of the hallway, then come back down the other side. Or I could zigzag back and forth across the hall. But that would probably be what Mab expected, so I could walk all the way to the far end of the hallway and zigzag back to the front. But then, Mab would expect me to think of tha-.

Okay, overthinking this a bit too much. Heh. Never been accused of that before. I sucked in a deep breath and blew it back out. I was burning daylight standing here trying to think around Mab. I approached the nearest door to my left, slowly slid the key into the hole, and turned.

Nothing.

Naturally. That would have been too easy.

I jimmied the key out of the door and tried the next one on the same side of the hallway. No dice. This continued for a few minutes. I was just thinking about giving up and going to the other side of the hallway when I felt tumblers slide. The key turned easily. I smiled triumphantly and swung the door open and stepped inside. "Well that wasn't so bad," I whispered to the dimness.

One of these days, I'll learn to stop handing the Universe lines like that.

I cast my eyes about for a wardrobe, but the room was darker than the hallway outside. I found a candle on a little table by the door, muttered, "Flickum bicus" and the candle leapt to flame, illuminating at least the immediate vicinity around me in a comfortable orange glow. I carried the candle with me through the room, assessing my surroundings. I was standing in a parlor furnished in sculpted chairs and sofas that may or may not have been more comfortable than they looked. The floor was bare ice with no carpeting or relief from the cold. I thought of my apartment in Chicago and felt a twinge of pain, suddenly wishing that I had that cozy little hole to go back to when this was over.

Turning away from the uninviting furniture, I moved into the room to the right, a bedroom, my boots echoing faintly the tinny sound ice makes when it isn't quite solid. The bed against the far wall was a truly hideous thing. It was nearly impossible to make out the precise color of either the headboard or the coverlet in the murky gloom of my candle, only that the blankets appeared stained. Not dirty, but as if a shadow of some past trauma had been indelibly etched into the fabric. Familiar paranoia bubbled up and whispered into my ear that it was probably blood. Not that the headboard was doing anything to dispel that image. It was carved into a sculpture of some snarling beast with six eyes and two rows of razor-sharp teeth. I took a step closer to it, noting that the teeth appeared wet, as if with saliva. Nonsense. Come on, Harry. This is ridiculous, even for you.

I shook myself and scanned the room for this wardrobe I was supposed to find. "This really is the dumbest thing she could possibly have me do," I muttered to the darkness.

Aha. There it was, deeper into the room, to the left of the ugly bed. I cleared the distance in a couple of long strides and put my hand on the handle and pulled. It was full of bones. Some of them may have been human. I was not nearly disturbed enough by this, now that I think about it. This should have been my clue to run from the room. What did I do? Start digging for that damn Mantle, of course.

I began tossing bones out onto the floor behind me. Yes, with my bare hands. What else was I going to do? The bones were piled up over five feet high and wall-to-wall inside the wardrobe. I'd gotten down maybe two feet when I heard a scraping sound behind me followed by what sounded very much like a very large animal huffing air through its nostrils. Less than two feet behind me.

Naturally my first instinct was to freeze, act as little like food as possible, and reach carefully for my basting rod and shield bracelet. Guess what I didn't have. Joy.

I very slowly straightened and turned to face whatever was huffing and puffing all down my neck. The bed had twisted around, so that the hideous snarling face that was looking over the mattress was facing me, the "mattress" appeared somewhat rounded now and revealed to be the back of the creature.

Years of getting caught unawares has instilled in me a certain amount of confidence in my ability to handle any situation with poise, dignity, and some crucial flare of awesomeness. I swallowed around a boulder-sized lump of fear and forced my voice to shake slightly less than the San Andreas Fault.

"Nice kitty."

Oh yeah. Dignity is my middle-freaking-name.

The thing opened its maw wide enough to eat me in two bites without straining and let out a screeching roar that sounded like tearing metal. Suddenly my plan of not acting like food became much more difficult to stick to, but I managed. Barely.

I raised my left hand, reaching for that icy power deep within me and with an application of will summoned a shield in a quarter dome of frost. I carefully kept my attention on the spell as I used my boot to kick the rest of the bones out of the wardrobe onto the floor. I risked a glance down as they tumbled. No mantle. Figures. The bones made a racket, drawing the attention of the bed-monster. Really? That's the best you got? Bed-monster? Sheesh.

My foe became agitated, snuffling the pile of bones at its feet with a growl, picking up a few to crunch in its mouth. While the attention of some of its eyes was diverted, I gingerly tiptoed through the pile of bones to put the door to my back and began taking slow, cautious steps towards it. I made it to the parlor and was just starting to feel like I was actually going to pull this off when the beast's eyes all snapped back up to me, bones sticking out of its mouth. I froze. The thought of being eaten knocked away my death grip on my shield and it failed. The thing's lips curled back in a snarl, it hunched its shoulders, lowered its head, and charged.

I maintained the pattern of poise and dignity that I'd been exuding since the bed came to life and decided to have Dresden steaks for dinner. In simple terms, I screamed, turned, and ran.

Yeah. I didn't look like food at all.

My hand was turning the knob when it caught up to me, chomping down on my shirttail and tugging. By sheer virtue of being the most scared for my life I won the struggle, slipped through the door and slammed it shut behind me, my shirt still in the thing's mouth. It yanked as if trying to pull me back through the crack of the door until my shirt ripped and I tumbled to the floor in the hallway.

I just laid there on my back, collecting my thoughts, until my Godmother was standing over me, smiling. I caught my breath and spoke first. "Thanks for the warning."

"You are welcome," she answered without a hint of sarcasm. "The mantle was not in that room."

I shook my head. "No."

"There are still fifteen possibilities for you to explore." She was not nearly concerned enough about my safety. On the bright side, at least our relationship is stable.

I nodded. "And each one of them has a surprise for me?"

"If by 'surprise' you mean a guardian, then yes."

I pulled myself to my feet. "Guardian? What is it guarding, pray tell?"

Lea's smile widened, pointed teeth making her look like the Cheshire cat. "The contents of the wardrobe, of course."

I raised my right hand, palm to Lea, begging her not to continue. "I really don't want to know the significance of the bones."

She nodded, eyes sparkling. "Very well. Should you continue your quest now, Knight?"

I sighed, fished the key out of my pocket, thankful I hadn't dropped it, and moved on to the next door.

To be continued at some indeterminant time in the future unless I hear that it stinks worse than I initially thought. Constructive critiques always welcome! :-)