Fantastic Realms

### The Fantastic Realms encountered by Basil Elton

Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point Light lighthouse, encountered several realms within the Fantastic Realms region. Among those he discovered are

#### The Land of Zar

Where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. Zar has at its centre its capital city, Zak.

#### The Land of Thalarion

A city-state centering on the City of a Thousand Wonders, home to all the mysteries that men have striven in vain to fathom. Thalarion is one of the largest cities in the Dreamlands, known as the "City of a Thousand Wonders".
 Its walls are grim and grey, with a great carven gate called Akariel,
and the spires of its temples reach to the sky so that none might behold
 their peaks. The dreamer Basil Elton
 described the city as "fascinating yet repellent". It is implied that
any human who enters dies or is transformed somehow, and in the city are
 said to "walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men". The
city is ruled by an entity known as the eidolon Lathi.

#### Xura

The land of pleasures unattained. Sensual veils billow here like clouds and indistinct forms of beauty suggest themselves in shadowy displays through the veils;

#### Sona-Nyl

Sona-Nyl is a state in Fantastic Realms,
 "blessed land of fancy", where is "neither time nor space, neither
suffering nor death". It is full of green pastures, flowering gardens,
beautiful castles and temples. Its harbour is guarded by twin headlands
of crystal that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch.

A land similar in effect to Celephais, in that there is no suffering or death, no aging or disease. And no children, as a consequence;

#### Cathuria

The Land of Hope. It lies beyond the Dreamlands equivalent of the Pillars of Hercules, the basalt Pillars of the West leading to the West of the Dreamlands. The mighty and fog shrouded River Yann roars into a bottomless pit that passes through the Underworld and into some deeper unknown world beyond the Pillars of the West. Cathuria is in the midst of this cataract, a sky city like Serannian but one that is almost unattainable through any form of travel.

### The Fantastic Realms from the Mind of Man

All the tabletop roleplaying games and computer games, and now even cell phone games, that have engaged the attention of the people of Earth in the Waking World have their maps and locations here

in this region of the Dreamlands. Some are "open" landscapes, with no clearly defined borders, simply walled off by billowing colored smoke or fog. Others are "closed" landscapes, almost impossible for 'non-natives' to enter except by finding a specific path through the Forbidden region of the Southern Dreamlands.

In the dead centre of the geographical area of the Fantastic Realms lies the Fantastic Alps, a range of snowbound mountains. And in the dead centre of this mountain area is a pass and a valley named Braunstein, where it all began.

Fantastic Realms are adjacent to Bookworlds, much older and more stable and established landscapes that take their life from the worlds described in books. The appearance of Bookworlds tends in most cases to closely follow the first known illustrations of the world described quite closely. Wonderland is one of the oldest of the Vintage Age Bookworlds.

### The Stages

The Stages are written works that emerge in the form of film, old fashioned television, streaming services, webisodes, and all other forms of cinematic or audio-video entertainment AND "true to life" "documentaries". This burgeoning enormous area of the Dreamlands is shielded from the rest of the Dreamlands and other realms by massive mountains, wreathed in poisonous fog and drizzling venom mists. Within this barrier are hundreds of thousands of individual realms. Most of them are not large, but a few of them are continent sized. A tiny number of them are larger than a solar system.