One of the struggles I have is introducing my fantasy world of Eximirene and just how to do it. Another struggle I have is with the fantasy genre itself. I’m tired of the doorstop bulkiness of modern titles and publishing companies demanding that I invest time, energy, and love into yet another high fantasy world…
You know, maybe I should just cut to the chase. This is a short story I cobbled together while trying to study the form itself, still dizzy from a Patrick F. McManus binge followed by a Ken Underhill chaser, and rereading some of the writings I actually still like from my Brainpie experiment. Mash it all together, wipe away the blood, pray that a distinct character voice has formed, and you get Briodonus “Brio” Cansondamore, law school dropout turned contracted thief.
Since he’s from Earth but has an intimate familiarity with Eximirene, he makes the perfect guide. No 100 first pages of worldbuilding while desperately channeling Tolkien. No quests to save the world. Just part of a memoir written several years after notable events.
Enjoy.
By all outward appearances, Claire seemed perfectly reasonable, which should have clued me in that a major character flaw was about to be revealed within the first fifteen minutes of our meeting.
But she was a delight. She was posh without the nasal sneer, svelte and blonde, and possessed a worldliness that hadn’t yet curdled into jadedness of the modern urbanite. She was also a bundle of frayed nerves sucking down the first tankard of duranga wine. Always the best first impression.
Hers was the typical story of the average Plainrealmer who found themselves in a strange, new world they had never heard of. Took a wrong turn into the essence left over from a malfunctioning ley line hub’s stream, brushed up against a teleporting mage rushing out of the dimension… the stories are too many and varied to list here, but Claire never provided those specific details of her unique tale.
After gawking in abject terror at the lack of electrical lamp posts, citizens dressed in Edwardian-esque garb, and perceptible ghosts flitting about the streets of Old Shorewin—adorably called the Haunted District by locals—she was led by the elbow into a pub and given the aforementioned fortifying duranga wine.
By luck, she was sat next to me. I had been passing the time watching the shade of an ornery bully perched atop the chair he’d thrown in a rage decades ago—now cursed and permanently nailed eight feet up the wall—and enduring the attentions of a delightful yet overly affectionate madame who remained convinced that her chilly embrace could warm a living man. Compared to them, the nervous blonde quietly working her way through a tankard of duranga wine hardly warranted notice. Still, through the scattered fragments of her conversation with the bartender and another pubgoer, I was able to piece together the broad strokes of her story.
Claire soon learned that her predicament was hardly unprecedented. She wasn’t he first Plainrealmer to stumble into Eximirene, nor—as I strongly suspect she had secretly hoped—a chosen one summoned to save the world from some cosmically enormous evil that only a plucky outsider and the power of friendship could vanquish. The sort of self-important delusion one develops after a steady diet of trite fantasy paperbacks and Hollywood cinema.
In fact, she could nip down to the nearest hub station, explain her situation, endure a gentle if mildly insulting interrogation to ensure she wasn’t fibbing for a free ride, and she’d be granted said free ride back to the last place she’d been on Earth. Give or take a few miles, of course—ley line intersections are notoriously random.
When she began lamenting her lack of destiny and asking how often Plainrealmers came into Eximirene, I couldn’t help but pipe up.
“I was born in Chicago,” I said. “My family’s split time between there and here.”
“So you’re familiar with this place… Eck-zim-er-een?”
I leaned on the bar with the confidence of a contracted employee who has successfully avoided proper full-time employment for three years. “More familiar than the lines on my palm. What do you want to know?”
Her pale eyebrows bobbed up and down over her blue eyes as she fumbled for questions to ask me, the best expert on the topic of the Realm she’d find at that moment. Then the desperate, upward angling of eyebrows when she realized she was in over her head.
“Well, let’s think of the common questions newcomers ask,” I offered. “Why’s everyone speaking English?”
“Oh, yes!” She perked up. “I hadn’t quite processed that until now.”
“Well,” I began, “some generations ago, the King summoned a spirit to get a forecast on his reign. The spirit advised that Eximirene would eventually join a union with a great, young nation from the Plainrealm. So, to prepare, learning American English became mandatory in schools across the Realm. But just as everyone—“
“Wait. American English?”
“Yeah. The spirit said a great, young nation, not a decrepit, fading one.”
She fell silent, her British sensitivities properly wounded.
I continued. “So, just as the populace got the hang of the vernacular, World War One broke out. The King put the grand self-invitation ceremony on hold for a few years. Then he geared up again, only for World War Two to throw a wrench into the works. The Crown hasn’t made a formal attempt at a diplomatic mixer since.”
Of course, I chose to omit the highly pertinent detail that the spirit had been speaking in poetic metaphor. The King’s grandson, Albyn, would eventually meet and marry Elspeth, a girl from Washington State. A bland, stock romance story, which is exactly why nobody needs or wants to hear it.
Claire stroked the rim of her tankard, attempting to regain her footing. “Right. Well. Is there anything else I should be informed of during my temporary exile?”
“There’s a lot to know. How long do you plan on staying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I would like to see this realm, this Eximirene.” She sounded more confident in saying the name. “It would be nice to see some magick at play.”
I began to imagine a future life for her. Perhaps she would join the countless visitors to the Realm and become an adventurer, open a shop, or luck out and marry into one of the old noble families—provided she could tolerate being wealthier than her husband.
“I can say that you’re not getting that Harry Potter stuff. People here don’t toss spells around to do the dishes or engage in flashy, mid-air brawls. Magick costs energy and mental power. Eximireans possess a modicum of civic responsibility and common sense.”
Her eyebrows creased from the ache of offense.
Somewhere between my impromptu lecture on the differences between elemental and practical magick—the latter being my specific area of expertise—we stumbled upon the treacherous terrain of Eximirean weights and measures. We use the “church bell system” for time management, temperature is determined by the level of undress the populace is willing to undergo, and distance is governed by the Core Nine.
“I’m sorry.” She blinked. “The what?”
“Everything is measured in nines. Or threes, if you feel a perverse urge to do division.”
The gears in her mind were spinning. I could smell smoke leaking from her ears.
“But that is entirely illogical!”
“It makes perfect sense to the locals,” I countered. “Nine is a deeply spiritual number around these parts. It relates to the Walker Among Stars and the nine hierarchies of spirits.”
“You can’t just design a system based on some arbitrary number because an incorporeal being decreed it!”
“The Walker didn’t. We just decided—“
But Claire had hit her breaking point. She launched into a passionate, deeply pretentious diatribe about the objective, universal magnificence of the metric system. A dazzling display of the School of Eurocentric Superiority Thought, to say the least.
Within minutes, the entire tavern was engaged. Napkins were scrawled upon with furious, charcoal slashes. Tankards were smacked down with damaging force. Lineages were insulted. Intelligences were dragged through the mud. Even a few local specters floated up from the basement to complain about the ruckus, only to immediately take a hardline stance on the measurement of a standard acre. At some point, the ornery bully I’d been observing decided that death was no excuse for remaining uninvolved. Somehow acquiring just enough substance to make himself everyone else’s problem, he broke his chair free from the wall and hurled it into the crowd, which did little to improve the tone of the discussion.
Thereafter, Claire stomped out the door, shouting upper-class, highly articulated insults about the collective mental incapacity of an entire dimension, and buggered off to claim her free ticket home.
I quietly confiscated her second, entirely untouched duranga wine, and thanked the higher spirits that I had just dodged a metaphorical bullet, if not an entire firing squad. A woman like that would have spent the rest of our acquaintance arguing that blue jeans were a mismatch for her preconceived “fantasy world”, or that the green flames in the street lamps were a violation of municipal safety codes. I daresay she would have spent the rest of her life trying to redesign an entire civilization through her petty personal crusades.
I never saw her again, which was probably for the best. Claire was charming from the outset, but she was sorely lacking in precious common sense. Still, I occasionally wonder whether she regretted leaving.
After all, she only needed to add one more digit.