The Pegassus is silly, really. It’s not as graceful as the real Pegasus, not as cute as a winged gerbil. It can fly, but it will never be taken for a bird or a messenger of the gods. And the sounds it produces, well, they will never inspire the poets, though they might inspire the satirists. Not even in the legends is there space for such a silly creature – it has no place amongst the shining heroes and wretched villains of the past. Not that it gets along very well with either kind; the Pegassus doesn’t like to be told what to do, especially when obedience means running face-first into pointy danger for the glory of its rider.

The Pegassus isn’t uncultured. It loves the harp and the flute, the sound of song and poetry performed – as such things should be – on an open field. It even likes the occasional theatrical performance, though if prefers the classics to the moderns. Yet the Pegassus does not live solely for art. It finds equal joy in hay, or carrots, or biscuits. It does not underestimate the pleasure of shade and cold water on a hot day, and knows very well that not being covered in flies is something to be grateful about. And while it will never claim to be living life for the purpose of discovering the higher truths, it does like to sit under the stars with its friends and ruminate about our place in the universe.

The Pegassus has had a hard life. It’s worked on the fields, carried refugees, hauled supplies. Some say it’s lazy, but just because it’s not as suicidally stupid as a horse that doesn’t mean it doesn’t know what’s right. It just happens to have a very good idea of what isn’t. The Pegassus is many things, but it is not a slave.

Perhaps no-one will ever write an epic about the Pegassus. No-one will praise it as they praised the magnificent creatures of the Golden Age. But unlike them, unlike the varnished shields of the heroes and the glorious manes of their steeds, the Pegassus endures. Its braying laughter will be heard in the hills when all the names of all the heroes will have been forgotten.

—

This entry in the Oneiropolis Compendium was made possible by Linda Hess, who laughs a lot but not like a donkey.

You too can support the Compendium by keeping its creators from starving.

There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the village of Olwynion. It had once been well-known for its wheelwrights, but that was so long ago that few now remembered. Apart from that one nearly-forgotten fact, nothing in the history of the village would be of interest to a writer or an historian.

The village lay cradled by mountains in a small valley on the Isle of the Moon. There was a small river, and about a mile to the south there was a lake where children went to swim in the summer. Most of the villagers were farmers or shepherds; there was a slightly mad poet who lived on the hill, but many villages have such poets.

Life in Olwynion was quiet, but not without its pleasures. The seasons were gentle; the mountains protected the valley from the cold winds of winter. Farming was hard work, but the soil was rich and the crops were good.

Some longed to leave, thirsting for risk and adventure, for a life that contained more than just the village and the seasons.

Some left. Some did not. Many, but not all, eventually returned. It’s hard to forget the hills and forests of one’s childhood, no matter how hard one tries.

Those who stayed rarely cared about politics and the issues of the world outside the valley. There were fields to attend to, marriages to be planned, legends to be told to grandchildren sitting by the fire. There was life: real life, village life. Who could possibly care about foreigners waffling on and on about systems of trade and other such nonsense?

Then, one day, the villagers heard that Olwynion was in debt. They didn’t know what this meant; it’s not like they had borrowed anything. So they dismissed it as yet more foreign nonsense.

Not much later, people started arriving in Olwynion. Stern, stuck-up people who tsk-tsked at the smelly villagers and talked down their noses at them. They berated the farmers for their inability to cut spending. Irritated, the farmers pointed out that they didn’t owe anyone anything, but the snooty foreigners disagreed.

More people started coming, some of them soldiers. Orders were given to change the ways of the village. Modernization, they called it. The villagers didn’t think it made much sense, but they’d never been in a situation like this before. Soldiers in Olwynion? Next thing there’d be a dragon! And anyway, they were just farmers. Maybe the snooty foreigners with their magic words and their arcane numbers knew something that the people of Olwynion did not.

Slowly but surely, life in the village became impossible. Before long there were no more marriages to plan, or grandchildren to tell stories to. People started moving away, abandoning the fields their families had worked for generations. The tsk-tsking people predicted that the fall in unemployment caused by the exodus would reinvigorate the village, but somehow this did not come to pass.

Within less than a year, the village was empty. Just like that, from one season to the next, without any real warning, the life of Olwynion was drained away.

If the story ended here, it would be one to cause nothing but despair. But remember: the hills and forests of one’s childhood are not easily forgotten. And so the people of Olwynion, the wheelwrights’ village, spread across the Isle of the Moon, and wherever they went a little bit of the village went with them. And thus they brought to their new homes something special that had been born in that once-unremarkable village, something that was the first step towards freedom: doubt.

—

This entry in the Oneiropolis Compendium was made possible by Andrew McCoy, director of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.

You too can support the Compendium by keeping its creators from starving.

Once upon a time there was a cave full of sweaty, tired monkeys. Most of these monkeys sat at noisy machines, repeatedly pressing small buttons. A few others scribbled on pieces of paper or quietly mumbled to each other. They did all this when the sun was in the sky; when it went down, they usually returned to their dens, though not always.

Sometimes these monkeys were not happy. Sometimes they shouted at each other. Sometimes they pressed the wrong buttons and their machines made funny sounds. Sometimes, when they were walking back to their dens late at night, they looked up at the moon and wondered why they were doing all this.

A long time later the same moon was shining on the home of a tiny lynx-kitten called Epiphany (lynxes have strange names like that). Epiphany was still too young to go hunting, but she liked to explore the area around her home, and one day when exploring she found a strange machine. It had a little slot where you could slide in some other strange things made of plastic and metal, like little boxes – and then when you pressed a button it turned on and you could play games! What a very strange machine this was.

Epiphany had found the machine on a big heap of weird objects that someone had left in the forest. She was seeing more and more of these around, and she often wondered what they were. This was the first time she had found something useful in one of them. She took the machine and the little boxes and went back home.

Later that night she started playing one of the games that she had found on the heap. It was all about being an adventurer stranded on a mysterious island with a huge egg on it. A huge egg! She had never seen anything like that. It was a game all about exploring and finding secrets and helping people, about being brave and clever and good. And you could have a boomerang! She’d never even heard of a boomerang before, but it was great. You threw it and then it came back to you!

She spent hours running around that island, exploring caves, cutting grass, collecting seashells, and saving up to buy a bow. She came closer and closer to solving the mystery of the big egg on the mountain. It was very exciting.

But then the machine stopped working.

Epiphany tried everything to get it working again. She so badly wanted to see the end of that game, and there were more little boxes with games in them to try out. Maybe they would all be this good! But the machine simply wouldn’t work. Once the screen turned on, but it was all grey and faint, and then it never turned on again. When her mother returned from hunting at dawn, she found Epiphany curled up around the strange machine and crying.

After a few days had passed and every attempt at reviving the machine had proven fruitless, Epiphany decided that if she couldn’t complete the adventure on the machine, she would complete it in real life. She would grow up to be a hero, to help people and fight evil. With a boomerang.

And so she did.

One day, many years later, she was travelling through the Lands of Dream, and quite by accident she came across the very same island from that game. The egg was even bigger than she had thought it would be. Oh, to find out what it was! She quickly ran up the mountain.

In front of the egg there sat a monkey.

“What are you doing here, monkey?” she asked him.
“I spent my whole life scribbling and making little boxes out of plastic and metal,” the monkey said. “But now I look back and all I did was sit in a cave with other monkeys, and I don’t know if it was worth it.”
So Epiphany told him her story, how she was here because somewhere in a smelly cave some monkeys had made a little box out of plastic and metal, and in doing so had inspired her and changed the course of her life. This made the monkey happy, and it went off to do some more scribbling. Epiphany could finally face the mystery of the egg.

Turns out it contained a windfish. Like chicken and tuna in one. It was delicious.

—

This entry in the Oneiropolis Compendium was made possible by Kim Blake.

You too can support the Compendium by keeping its creators from starving.