Place · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

The high elf castle

The Sugar Cube: a white Borg cube of bleached, acorn-carved wood that breathes, in the extreme southeast corner against a bluff — four pencil towers entered from the third floor, a drained moat, troll caves beneath with a secret entrance, seven public storeys, cat tunnels, a third-floor control room of soul crystals, five ballrooms (two for attendants on the first floor, the hunters' on the second, the crawlers' on the fourth, the queen's on the seventh) under a moving mosaic of Scolopendra strangling an inverted white oak, a prize counter and a locked stairwell in the basement. Zerzura'd to the ninth floor; its footprint becomes the pit of the boss fight.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 15 — The kids' menu
• Chapter 20 — Viva la revolución
• Chapter 28 — Premature Questjaculation
• Chapter 54 — The blood bar
• Chapter 55 — Save the toraline
• Chapter 56 — Zerzura
• Chapter 58 — The last stall in the women's bathroom
• Chapter 63 — Enchanted Hammer of Fast Forward
• Chapter 66 — The Sugar Cube
• Chapter 67 — Slate Butterflies
• Chapter 70 — Anaconda
• Chapter 73 — Wonderwall, again
• Chapter 75 — Sic 'em
• Chapter 76 — Cage Fight Extreme
• Chapter 77 — The mask

Arc

'Protected by a mysterious artifact', per the guards' card (ch. 51); the brambles' endpoint (ch. 54); a Bauhaus sugar cube on Edgar's map (ch. 56); three stairwells, one locked (ch. 63). Then in person: the attendant entrance and four ballrooms (ch. 64), soul crystals on the third floor (ch. 65), acorn-carved wood that breathes, a drained moat, troll caves, a dome of Scolopendra (ch. 66), towers taken from above (ch. 70, ch. 72), a third floor blown out (ch. 73), a floor that opens on the Nothing (ch. 74), and a footprint that becomes a pit domed with thorns (ch. 76, ch. 77).