Zelie plays the Judge Holden of this Blood Meridian. Almost everyone (except Aurora and a couple others) is thoughtlessly selfish in this world, but they're selfish in a child's way, a stage 1 on Kohlberg's moral complexity scale. Not so for Zelie. She's the political genius, scheming to take things just to prove to herself she can have them, playing one friend against another, then tossing them aside. She and Aurora alone are sharp enough to fathom their fellow pixies' feelings and motives, only Zelie doesn't care.

The watercolor artwork here is painfully beautiful, and the book (despite its relative brevity) is best read on three separate sittings — one for each season — to take in the rise and wane of the miniature empires, and the enduring grudge of its characters.

You'll have to find out how Zelie and Aurora's rivalry play out when Drawn & Quarterly releases "Beautiful Darkness" on 2/11.