The Nameless Realm

 There was once a place of sanctuary that was barely there. It was nothing, nowhere, nameless—and it lay waiting. It was the sorrowed ones who discovered the secret path that gave the place a where. The misfits, the rebels, the cared-for-less—all the beings of the world that did not belong to it. It was in a star-filled path, one that drew the unfortunates to it like a beacon across space and time to a realm that should not have existed.

            The first to travel were ancient in their own right—the small fairies, too tiny to take their place amongst the cruel Fae, who treated them as nothing more than insects to be harvested for small powers. Too much blood, too many little bodies broken, and in their grief, they made their way to a nowhere place they began to call home. This nothing place wrapped around them as though they belonged to it, a gift like a sweet kiss across a wearied brow from some great Power.

            Next came the gnomes, then the centaurs, the eccentric elves and the bent folk. Soon the world had pushed out so many of those for whom it had grown too small—ever pressing, ever ushering in some new grief for unfitting ways until such beings simply disappeared. They were not missed. Nor did they miss the too-small world. And not a one knew how it was that they had come to find the Nameless Realm.

            Thus, this nowhere place grew into life, offering it as any other, with city streets, shops with bartering, crops and mines, hosts of goods. And homes. But there was something else, something born from shared sorrow and a wide-reaching, desperate desire for calm and acceptance and rest.

There was peace.

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