Welcome to Fey Opyan, a slumbering, dreaming world that talks in its sleep and wonders to itself, “Well, what’s all this then?”
FEY OPYAN — THE MYSTICAL CROWN OF GRALKAH
Nonsense universes. They are the stuff of Shakespeare’s donkey dreams, the drip of Dalí’s melting clocks, the delight in Bosh’s every garden, the beamishness of Lewis Carroll’s callooh callay — and if these universes happen to be fey in nature then they are also the sorts of places populated with stolen babies carried off in the night by hobgoblins through cracked mirrors and murky pools of water. Generally speaking, they make a bad name for themselves. But some of these universes redeem themselves when their sentient stars finally notice what is happening and put the boot down. They do this by filling up their worlds with even stranger nonsense, suffusing every river, forest and mountain with a kind of preternaturally absurdist sensory overload that wallops the object permanence out of every staring hobgoblin eye. This is the story of one such redeemable universe known as Fey Opyan and the planet Gra Gra Gralkah.
Gra Gra Gralkah (“Gralka” to her friends, if she knew she had any) is round like most planets but a raven skin maps over her surface with her beak buried in her belly like a sowbug rolling itself up. Gra Gra Gralkah is lost in dreaming. Of what does she dreams is this: people, monsters, and whole civilizations of uffish introverts wandering about within a crater on her back, all of them gazing up at the weird heavens and wondering why it all looks looks that way. Though these mortals are little more than fleas on Gralkah’s back, their presence is enough to keep her wondering as she dreams - but never enough to wake her. So everyone goes on gazing inward, upward, but rarely outward.
Millions of lifetimes ago Gralkah was like any other boring collection of dust and rocks in any universe: just a mere rocky planet of elements that amounted to nothing in particular until the star Saint Faint Iris sent a comet infused with fey magic to strike it and bring it to life. Gralkah’s feathered surface formed from the clay of the once-dead planet. Realizing she now existed, Gralkah said, “Hello! What’s all this? And why should I have to deal with it?” Irritated by being alive, she went right to sleep and she was dubbed the Dreaming Queen. The impact crater where the fey comet struck her filled up with ridiculous life and insufferable magic. The crater, which was accidentally named “Fey Opyan” after the universe (a funny story for another time) is a twenty thousand mile-in-diameter habitat of life where, with the aid of a magical form of evolution, life learned to prosper, to fill up with pixies and places of interest, adventures and adventurers.
Below: The Sleeping World Gra Gra Gralkah with Fey Opyan on her back (by Rikki Simons), Map of Fey Opyan (by Rikki Simons)
The Irascible March of the Semi-Corporeal
First there were the Sainted Treasure Makers, the avatars of stars and nebula. This included Saint Faint Iris’ brother, Saint Rabbitti Finch, who had no star body of his own, but whom Iris sent to walk the surface of the crater of Fey Opyan in secret to prepare the world for corporeal beings, both mortal, mortal adjacent, and mortally ignorant.
The fist semi-corporeal beings to pop up on Gralkah’s crater of Fey Opyan were the Old Grovekin, irritable giants of power who were made of the most Mimsy stuff of Gralkah’s Dreaming Id. But they grew tied of themselves and went to sleep forever somewhere outside of the world. The Unicorns were part of this group, but when their Old Grovekin brethren went away the Unicorns were left behind because everyone was tired of their arguments over whose grove was nicer. Yap, yap, yap, whinny, nay, yap, they went on for centuries about their groves. Eventually they split themselves into the Herds of the Cosmic Court and the Herds of the Feybound Grove. Looking to make them useful, Saint Faint Iris’ granted the Cosmic Unicorns with the power to protect souls from the moment of death to the moment of rebirth, while Saint Rabbitti Finch gave the Feybound Unicorns the ability to protect souls while the live. This at least shut them up for a while.
Then, when no one was looking, each of the islands of the Orb Weaver Archipelago within the crater of Fey Opyan spontaneously birthed an avatar to represent them. These avatars called themselves the Five Million Mushroom Gods and they took on strage forms and names like Mungerpatch, Twingle, and Whup (a trio of winged snake badgers from the island of Bleeker Mill Inlet), Varálgho Croak, the Troddenstool Mushroom God (who takes on the form of a chicken-frog sitting in a barrel full of water), Fratta the Broom Beater, Hidee the Deer Reader, Muttafuff the Bfuthf Speaker Speaker of Bfuthfs, and on and on. These small gods wait on their islands for people to trespass against them and demand weird tributes such as stolen thimbles and rocks spread with jam. In exchange for these gifts the Five Million Mushroom Gods promise to leave everyone alone. This is why it is wise, when landing on an island, to always bring the widely popular book Jam or Thistleroot? Scroothtooth’s Field Guide to the Million Mushroom Gods. One doesn’t want to give rocks and jam to a god who demands beer and oysters.
Below: A Mushroom God (by Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons), Another Mushroom God (by Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons), Croak the Mushroom God (by Rikki Simons), A Strange Pipe (by Rikki Simons), Matamata (by Rikki Simons), Saint Rabbitti Finch (by Rikki Simons)
Poor Old Mortalkind
Finally, eventually, inevitably there came the mortal races, because there always has to be someone to stand on the bottom rung...
Here we have the Yule Folk: Hobgoblins and pixies, pookas and other creatures aligned with either Mimsy or Outgrabe magic powers. Many of these creatures are as abundant and as mindless as flowers.
There is Humankind: Humans and their relations, the Elves, Dwarves, and the Gnomish clinging to their labyrinth city where they perfect their bureaucratic art of making mundane assessments and tangents on minutia derailing important discussions.
There are the allies of humanity: Mittelfauns hoarding belligerent books within their vast treetop universities, the Muttyn Trolls contented to shepherd their woolly families in peace but enraged when their tranquility is threatened, the centaur-like Vorpal Deer whose bloodlines were harried to the point of bewilderment by Unicorns, the brooding Mock Gryphons who guard and seek out explosive treasures…
Below: Horkhauser (by Gustave Doré. Weird that he knew to draw this in 1862), Loveless the Mittelfaun (by Rikki Simons), Mock Gryphon with a Raven's Face (by Rikki Simons), Mittelfauns (by Rikki Simons), Mittelfaun and Mount (by Rikki Simons), Muttyn Trolls (by Rikki Simons), Vorpal Deer (by Rikki Simons), Muttyn Troll with Mount (by Rikki Simons), an Elf of Fey Opyan (by Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons), Human Hanging Out with Frogs (by Rikki Simons), One of the Gnomish of Fey Opyan (by Rikki Simons)
