snug

A small cottage-like shelter for travelers. Can only be found by those who carry a waylight, a lantern which, when lit and carried near a snug, causes the snug’s own lantern (above the door) to light, thus revealing the location of the snug. When one enters the snug, it is always found to be ready for a guest: a fire is burning cheerfully, a pot of soup is bubbling, the featherbeds are turned down for sleeping. And yet the traveler will find no one else there.

It is said that the Stewards created these hidden shelters long ago, during the Great Unweaving, as places of safety and rest for those going on perilous journeys through the dangerous, war-torn lands of the Realm.

shrowde

A shrowde is a living creature that looks, to the unsuspecting eye, like a ragged white sheet or cloak. Beings of the Shadow realm that cannot bear direct sunlight will sometimes go about concealed within a shrowde. According to some chroniclers, the "wearer" and the shrowde form a relationship of mutual dependence. The being that wears the shrowde as a cloak comes to depend on its protection and concealment, and the shrowde feeds off the thoughts and emotions of the one that wears it. Whether a shrowde has thoughts and feelings of its own is unclear, but it will act as an independent being if separated from its wearer.


A shrowde can move about on its own, much in the way that a sheet will be tossed and blown about by the wind. Shrowdes can thus glide through the air, or flow over the ground, and in these ways the shrowde will sometimes act as a scout or spy for its wearer. (Some scholars of the Perilous Realm believe that sightings of shrowdes are the source of our world's depiction of ghosts as figures draped in white).


At the will of its wearer, a shrowde can also envelop others. Those few who have been "swallowed" by a shrowde and lived to tell the tale report that they experienced a sense of being lost within a vast, murky expanse, as if the shrowde is somehow larger on the inside than it looks to be from the outside.

everenth

***




He handed Will a small leather flask.
“Drink this,” he said. “It is called everenth. It will restore
some of your strength and help you resist, if Lotan appears to
you again.”
Will took a tentative sip. The drink tasted slightly bitter,
like unsweetened tea, but almost immediately he felt a warmth
flowing into him.

--from The Shadow of Malabron, Chapter XVII, page 217

The drink that Moth gives Will is called everenth. It is a herbal drink brewed of extracts from several plants collected by the Shee n'ashoon, but especially from the hard black berries of the evergreen shrub called everenth, for which then drink is named. Everenth grows only in the windy highlands of Lyrr, far to the northwest of the Bourne.

As Moth says, one of everenth's qualities is to restore strength, although this is somewhat misleading. In our world we drink coffee or tea because we think it gives us energy, when in fact the energy is already there inside us, in potential -- the drink merely allows our bodies to access it. More than anything else, everenth is a drink that clears the heart and mind, allowing you to find that energy within, that you thought was lost but was always there.

the Untold

***

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

***

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.

***