The Fair Folk

The Perilous Realm is the world of Story, and so it is no surprise that the Fair Folk are known in many stories throughout the realm by many different names.

The Fae. The Xian. The Sidhe. The Nunnehi. The Tylwyth Teg. The Aziza...

One could say that each storyworld sees and knows the forms and faces of the Shee in its own way. Each is one facet of the truth about these wise and mysterious beings, a truth which is wider and deeper than any one story can contain. The Fair Folk can appear tall and lordly. They are also “the wee folk.” They can be menacing and terrifying to behold. They can look so much like you and me that we would never suspect we had just met one of them. They can become thin and insubstantial enough to hide between the covers of a book. They can be nothing more than a voice telling an old tale by the fire.

In the novels of The Perilous Realm trilogy, the Fair Folk are sometimes referred to as the Tain Shee.

No one knows how long the Tain Shee lived in Eleel and the lands around it before the Great Unweaving. After the capture of their city and the destruction of their homeland, the Tain Shee fled and went into hiding from the Night King, and in time they became known as the Shee n’ashoon, or the Hidden Folk. (The name shee n’ashoon literally means “the shoeless people” and refers to their ability to pass unseen and unheard and leave no tracks).

What is also unclear is whether the Fair Folk are immortal. It seems that they once were, in the timeless time at the beginning of the Realm, but that mortality entered their world along with Story itself. They may live far longer than human beings, but even the Fair Folk must die and return to the Weaving, along with everything else.

The Hidden Folk travel in what is known to some as the Green Court, a moving city of tents and pavilions that is glimpsed at rare times by wanderers in wild, unpeopled lands and on the shores of lonely seas.

In the coming struggle to prevent the Night King from devouring all of Story, the Hidden Folk may be forced to reveal themselves at last to their ancient enemy, and march into his Shadow Realm. But the Stewards are no more and so this time the Shee will have to march alone against the Night King.

 Painting: Riders of the Sidhe by John Duncan.

Imaginary Art

Every year the Art Gallery of Alberta presents a new exhibit “for children and their grown-ups” in the gallery space known as the BMO World of Creativity (what my family used to call “the kids room” at the gallery). This year, a brilliant young Edmonton designer named Gabe Wong was given the challenge of creating a new interactive, hands-on exhibit. His ambitious idea was to invent the art of an imaginary culture.

The results are stunning. As the AGA website puts it, “enter a place where geometric shapes and primary colours form the language, legends, and landscape of a new, imaginary culture. Move throughout the space to create performative compositions with sound and movement, construct mythological creatures in paper, decode cryptographic messages and develop new stories based on the immersive experience of method and madness!”

One of the walls in the exhibit contains a hidden message created out of shapes that are the alphabet of this imaginary culture. Kids (and grown-ups) can decode the message to get a very short story. Gabe and I had worked together on another project and so he asked me to write the story that would go up on the cryptography wall. The challenge was that I was only going to get about 40 words to work with! After much struggle I came up with a handful of ideas and Gabe chose one. I’m not going to tell you what the story is. You’ll have to visit the exhibit and puzzle it out yourself. When I visited the exhibit with my son, I realized I’d forgotten most of the story, so we ended up having to decode it anyhow.

The Nightwanderer and the Raven

Moth is an archer of the Shee. He is known to some as the Nightwanderer. His companion is the raven Morrigan. She has the ability to speak in a guttural language of croaks, squawks and tongue-clicks that only Moth can understand.

Moth and Morrigan have not always been shadowy wanderers. Long ago, before the Great Unweaving, they lived with their people, the Tain Shee, in the city of Eleel off the coast of the Western Sea. Their names then were Arthan and Seelah.

Their father, Lirr, was a shipbuilder and mariner of the Shee. Their mother was Lysse, a weaver. After his children were born, Lirr gave up his seafaring, but he soon grew restless and tired of home life. Eventually he built a new ship and sailed away in it. Neither he nor his his crew of the Shee’s finest mariners were ever seen again.

Arthan and Seelah grew up with their mother. It was from Lysse that Seelah learned the craft of weaving, though she quickly surpassed her mother in skill. As a boy Arthan was wild and reckless. Like his father he was given to long journeys by himself, though he shunned the sea and always turned his steps inland, to explore other places within the Realm itself. He had many adventures during his travels, but his curiosity and impulsiveness got him into trouble often.

It's said that Arthan found paths that brought him into our world, and even more dangerous places. Once he was trapped by a vain and vindictive sorcerer-queen who bound him with a powerful spell and kept him as a servant. He was forced to do her bidding, stealing treasures and trinkets she fancied, and working mischief and mayhem on those she disliked (it is possible that something of this time in Moth’s life has reached our world in garbled fashion, in the stories of mischievous sprites and elves, as in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Once Arthan finally escaped the queen’s clutches, he forever after had a loathing for sorcery of any kind, and an even stronger desire to remain free and unbound by anyone or anything, even the laws and customs of his own people.

Lysse was troubled by her son’s long absences, fearing he might leave one day and never return, as her husband had. She persuaded Thur, the Shee’s greatest metalsmith, to take Arthan as an apprentice. The boy chafed against the smith’s stern, demanding authority and master and apprentice quarreled often. But Arthan did learn the metalworking trade. Perhaps from a desire to outdo his master, Arthan applied himself to the craft with such diligence that in time the Shee were asking for his handiwork, not Thur’s.

For her part, Seelah remained at home with their mother, learning and growing in skill as a weaver. She missed her brother when he left on his long solitary wanderings, and wished to go with him, but the craft she was dedicated to demanded almost all of her time. Her woven cloths and tapestries became widely known and praised among the Shee, and once a young prince of the Shee named Lotan came to her house, to request the cloth for a fine traveling cloak. He visited her every day while she worked on the cloak, and by the time it was ready, Seelah and Lotan had fallen in love. Arthan heard of this and made a rare visit to his mother’s house to meet Lotan. The meeting did not go well. Arthan learned that Lotan dabbled in spellcraft, and he took a dislike to the prince that was quickly reciprocated. Seelah was saddened that her beloved and her brother, both so proud and headstrong, could not overcome their mutual dislike for her sake, and their own.

At that time, rumor came to the lands of the Shee that distant lands were falling under a terrible shadow. Entire worlds of the Realm were fading and disappearing. And then the Steward Oreyn came to Eleel.

The Stewards (or the Innathi, as the Shee called them) visited Eleel from time to time and their visits were always times of great joy and celebration, but on this occasion Oreyn brought grave news. The troubling rumors were true. A dark power known as the Night King had risen and was devouring  storylands, turning all he conquered into a bleak and nightmarish shadow version of the Realm. The Stewards were gathering all of their friends and allies to meet and stop this threat.

The Shee joined the alliance, and Lotan rode to battle, promising Seelah he would return in victory and they would be married. Arthan wished to go, too, but his skills as a smith were needed for the forging of armor and weapons, which the Shee had had little use for until this time.

The war was long, and from time to time messengers would return to Eleel with news of the battles and how the alliance fared. There were many tales of heroic deeds and sacrifice from the war, and Seelah began to weave these stories into a great tapestry.

And what happened then, and how Arthan and Seelah became Moth the Nightwanderer and the raven Morrigan, is told in The Shadow of Malabron.

Illustration by T Wharton

Will Lightfoot

Will Lightfoot is a boy from our world. He has dark wavy hair, brown eyes, and stands about five foot four. His birthday is August 6^th and his full name is William Joseph Lightfoot. He is the son of Jack and Rose Lightfoot. Jack is a welder and mechanic. Rose was a gardener and a fine storyteller. Will has a younger sister named Jess (short for Jessica).

Will’s interests (at least before meeting Rowen of Blue Hill) included soccer, video games, and drawing.

When Will was 11 his mother became ill and spent a number of weeks in hospital before passing away. Rose was of Native American ancestry and when Will was younger his mother told him stories based on the tales and legends of her people. Most of these stories involved a boy hero named Light-of-Foot, or Lightfoot, who roamed the prairies and mountains with his pony Great Heart, having all kinds of adventures. After his mother’s death Will lost interest in books and stories.

Three years after Rose’s death, Jack Lightfoot got a job offer in another city in the west. He decided to take the job and move his family because Will and Jess were not coping well with the loss of their mother. Jess has stopped speaking in anything more than a whisper, and Will had become sullen, withdrawn and was almost always angry. Jack hoped new surroundings might help his children.

The family spent several days crossing the country in their rickety camper van. Along the way they stopped at a campsite where Will stole his father’s beloved old motorcycle. He ended up crashing it and found himself in a strange world called the Perilous Realm…

Illustration by T Wharton

Rowen of Blue Hill

Readers have asked for more information about Rowen.

When we first meet her in The Shadow of Malabron, Rowen is nearly fourteen years old. She has pale red hair, dark green eyes, and stands about five feet tall.

Rowen lives in the city of Fable with her grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake the toymaker (and loremaster). The toymaker’s housekeeper, Edweth Little, has also looked after Rowen since she was a small child.

Nicholas Pendrake was married to a weaver and storyteller named Maya Siddarha, from a storyland far to the east of the Bourne called Jataka. They had one child, Gildred.

Gildred Pendrake grew up to become a knight of the Errantry, and was well-known in Fable for her courage, kind heart, and skill as a horsewoman. She married a man named Thomas James Rymer. He was a writer and artist from our world who stumbled into the Perilous Realm and sought Nicholas Pendrake’s help in getting back home (much as Will Lightfoot did many years later). In Fable, Thomas met Gildred and they fell in love, and had a child of their own, Rowen.

Thomas Rymer never returned to his own world. He and his wife and child went to live a quiet life at a farm north of the Bourne called Blue Hill (it was at this spot that Thomas had first entered the Realm). Since Gildred and Thomas were of two different worlds, they decided their child’s family name should be neither her father’s or her mother’s, and so they called her Rowen of Blue Hill, for the place where the two worlds had first met.

Nicholas and Maya Pendrake visited Blue Hill often to see their beloved grandchild. Maya often stayed at the farm for longer periods, after Pendrake’s duties as loremaster called him back to Fable. Maya looked after Rowen during those times when her parents were busy working the fields and tending to the animals on the farm.

When Rowen was two years old, a band of mordog and other Nightbane invaded the Bourne from the north. They burned and ransacked many farms and villages before the Errantry finally drove them from the land.

One of the farms the Nightbane attacked was Blue Hill. A smaller party of mordog came to the farm at dusk. The family dog gave one warning bark before a Nightbane arrow silenced it forever. Gildred was the warrior and so she went to meet the enemy while Thomas ran with Rowen into the woods behind the cottage. Thomas might have escaped with his daughter but he set her down in the concealment of a hollow under a fallen log and ran back to help his wife. They were both killed. Moth and Morrigan of the Tain Shee had been tracking the Nightbane -- they were too late to save Gildred and Thomas, but they found Rowen in the woods and brought her to Pendrake, who arrived not long after them with a contingent of Errantry knights. Pendrake took his granddaughter home with him to the toyshop in Fable.

Both Nicholas and Maya suspected that the attack had not been truly random. They feared that their granddaughter, a child of two worlds, had disturbed the threads of the Realm in such a way that dark powers had become aware of her and wished her harm. And so Maya decided to journey into the Weaving, the mysterious world-within-the- world from which all the threads of Story come. Her goal was to recover the lost, ancient wisdom of the Stewards, knowledge that might protect and help her beloved granddaughter.

Maya never returned from the Weaving, and so Rowen grew up under the care of her grandfather and Edweth the housekeeper. She turned out to be much like her mother in character: feisty, bold, and clever. Rowen loved her grandfather’s stories about her mother, and her greatest wish was to become a famous knight of the Errantry, just like Gildred.

Rowen loved to explore the fields and woods around Fable, and did so often without her grandfather’s permission. He still worried about the dark powers who wished Rowen harm, and so he tried to prevent her from going off alone, but Rowen was very inventive when it came to evading the rules of the house. It was on one of these unauthorized excursions that Rowen encountered a boy in danger, a boy from the strange world her father Thomas had also come from. 

The boy’s name was Will Lightfoot, and he was as startled to meet Rowen as she was to meet him….

“Rowen isn’t just some damsel in distress, like the Empress in The Neverending Story. She doesn’t sit idle while Will comes to her rescue. Rowen is more of a modern heroine, a character who should be a feminist icon in literature for young adults.”

Scott Hayes

St Albert Gazette

Illustration by T Wharton