An Excerpt from “On Creation and Destruction of Extra-Material Realms”

Discovered in Cleenseau in early January, 1720

In the home of Arnaud Ausson, a prominent Isinguer merchant, you find amongst his papers an book of reviews and critical reactions to a famous Drankorian play, A Fool’s Fortune. This play is lost, or at least, Arnaud Ausson doesn’t have a copy of the play, and the book of reviews and reactions is itself ancient, dating from the end of the Drankorian Empire around 1000 DR.

The physical copy Arnaud Ausson has, however, was copied from (what he says was a Drankorian original) in the city of Isingue in DR 1492. It is a beautiful book, with an elaborate leather cover and numerous flourishes on the pages, and a note in the front:

To my dearest Alessia, on her birthday:

Your sparkling wit remains unparalleled, and is a daily delight. I hope this tome will give you ideas.

Your loving wife,
Sara

Arnaud is particularly fond of this book, as his wife’s name is also Alessia (although no relation), and it is a rare artifact from Isingue, which was consumed by a magical plague during the Great War.

On reading the book, there is quite a lot of hard to follow passages, and it seems that the translation is relatively bad, and numerous words were left in Drankorian. A later hand scratched out many of these, and replaced them with often equally poor translations. This makes the whole book a bit tedious to read.

The most interesting part is an excerpt criticizing the play from a “realism” standpoint, which quotes another book (On Creation and Destruction of the Immaterial Realms). In the excerpt below, the words in italic were written in another hand, and often replaced an unreadable Drankorian word.

A Fool’s Fortune lacks hilarity because it depicts each fairy’s realm as a source of conflict between the various high fairies. We are told in On Creation and Destruction of the Immaterial Realms:

Each magical kingdom is the domain of its master and subject to the magic of its ruler. Cloudspinner, in the field of her golden footsteps, exudes beauty, and Gloomshaper, in his realm of revenge and heartbreak, evokes melancholy and anxiety, but both work with the same raw materials. Gloomshaper is an informative example. Elves of Orenlas tell us that he was banished from Twilight’s Grace for wreaking havoc among humans, and a new kingdom was built around him to show his bitterness and jealousy. It’s called Duskmire and it shows us how the fairy kingdoms become their rulers.

While fiction certainly takes liberties with the truth, in this case it would be better to structure Estelis’ journey in the fairy realms, as a shootout between the mighty. After all, most of us in public know better!