the Untold

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Many who live in the Perilous Realm, the world of Story, call our world "Elsewhere" or "the Untold." Just as we people of the "real" world have only a dim, woefully incomplete understanding of the vast universe of Story, the folk of Story have difficulty understanding our world. That is why they give it names which imply that it is "somewhere else." A vague, mysterious place without stories.

Jeremiah Redquill is a writer, scholar and mapmaker who once lived in our world (in Peace River, Alberta, to be exact) but now makes his home in the city of Fable. For years now he has been working on an atlas of the Perilous Realm, a task which he himself admits can never be completed.

When Redquill first arrived in the Realm, he couldn't understand why folk here used the term "Untold" for our world. It didn't make sense to him, since we have lots of stories. The real world is constantly being "told."

After he spent some time in the Realm, though, Redquill gained a new perspective on the place he had come from. In the real world we surround ourselves with stories because deep down inside we sense that we don't really have a story. Our lives don't have a nice, neat, complete, finished shape. Things change. We change. Nothing every really ends, the way it does in a story. Something always goes on, something gets left out, something new comes along. Our world will always remain unfinished, "untold." And so we long for the world of Story, which we believe is unchanging. Our storytellers and writers visit the Realm and they bring stories back to us and we listen eagerly. We want our lives to be like stories. With a happily ever after, of course.

But Redquill also discovered that the world of Story is changing all the time, too. Stories don't stay the same, either. Every time he visited a particular storyland, he found that it was not quite the same as the last time he had been there. So for Redquill, the world of Story is also "untold." It will never be complete, never finished. There will always be new stories.

But he keeps working on his atlas.

***

The Kantar

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The Perilous Realm is the realm of stories. All the stories we know, and many we don't know yet, are woven here. They grow and change and sometimes mingle with one another to create new stories. Like an endless tapestry woven on an infinite loom, these stories weave and are woven and weave themselves anew.

The Story of all stories is called the Kantar. Every storyteller dips into the Kantar, like taking a cup of water from an inexhaustible well. To take a tale from the Kantar is not to diminish it but to allow it to grow and continue.

Some storytellers know more of the Kantar than others, but no one can know it all. Some say that the first line of the Kantar is this:

"In the darkness the spirit awoke, and danced."

But no one knows for sure, because it may be that the Kantar has no beginning. And it may never have an end.

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