“It was then, as I stared at the empty hearth, hungry and cold, that I began to wonder if I would die here.”

From the first chapter, Fawcett sets the foreboding atmosphere to the novel. Emily’s unnerved mood and her premonition that she might die in Ljosland foreshadows the sinister turn the plot will eventually take. This also establishes her field note frame narration. The purpose of her writing is to either document her findings for her encyclopedia or to record the truth if she dies during her project.

“‘They’re not all true, though,’ he said with a frown. ‘Can’t be. All storytellers embellish. You should listen to my grandmother when she gets going—she’ll have us hanging on every word, yes, but a visitor from the next village will say they don’t know the tale, though it’s the same one their own amma tells at her hearth.’”

This passage presents an interesting way of not only engaging with The Power of Stories, but as Emily discovers throughout the novel, the way she tells her own throughout her journal entries. The claim that “all storytellers embellish” implies that Emily herself might be an unreliable narrator, especially due to her connection with the Folk, who are undeniably the best embellishers of all.

“Ljosland is a labyrinth of mountains, you’ll understand, as well as fjords and glaciers and every other sharp-edged formation most hostile to Man. Between the peaks, the landscape was crushed down into what I supposed were valleys, chased and boulder-strewn.”

Fawcett describes every faerie in relation to the natural world. Different faerie species are also described in relation to the geography of their home region. Given that the environment of Ljosland is so hostile and unforgiving, this passage hints at the viciousness of the faeries who call the region home.