An ordinary “about us” page would not suit an atlas of stories. So we described Fablaria the way we describe sagas, as an entry from our own encyclopedia: three short chapters, living links, and one blurred secret at the end.
Fablaria (from the Latin fabula, “a story, a tale”) is an atlas of the great fantasy sagas: careful chapter-by-chapter summaries, a living map of wanderings and an encyclopedia of the world, bound together by a single reader's bookmark. What sets it apart from its kindred genres (wikis and study guides) is one unique trait: it never gives away what happens next.
Every encyclopedia entry has its own history. This one begins with a hero known to every lover of long cycles: two years ago, the Reader set his favourite saga aside after the fourth volume, firmly resolved to return any day now. He has just returned. The names sound familiar, but no one can say whose they are. Someone betrayed someone near the end, only who, and whom? Over the world of the novel has settled the Mist of Forgetting.
So the Reader does what any of us would do: he opens a wiki. And in the second paragraph of the first entry he stumbles upon, he learns who dies in the saga's finale.
“But all I wanted was to check that dwarf's name.”
He is left with two ways out, both bad: reread several thousand pages from the beginning, or read on with his curiosity snuffed out for good. This story truly happened, and the Reader was Fablaria's founder. Thus began the search for a third way out.
If readers return to the great sagas across whole years, someone ought to keep an atlas of them: like the atlases of mountains or of the night sky, only for worlds that do not exist. The atlas describes the world in exactly the order the reader discovers it: a full summary of every chapter, biographies that grow along with the heroes, and a living map on which the wanderers' routes lengthen with every chapter you read.
This chapter also marks the debut of the site's most important character: Spoiler Shield New character: a guardian who knows your bookmark and checks every sentence before you see it. A biography breaks off exactly at your chapter. The search will not blurt out who survives. The timeline ends where you do. Anything further, only at your express request.
The third way out had to be born somewhere. That place is the scriptorium: the workshop where the atlas is made, and where the candle is the last to go out. Here every chapter of a saga passes through a slow reading, pencil in hand; here every paragraph, biography and pin on the map receives the number of the chapter it comes from. It is thanks to those numbers that the Spoiler Shield always knows how much of the world may be shown to you, and you alone.
One law is sacred here: the story belongs to its author. The atlas passes no judgement, adds nothing of its own, and reaches not a sentence beyond the chapter it is describing. It speaks with one voice (not a thousand quarrelling quills), and checks every fact twice. And when a reader sends word of a mistake, the fix goes in with priority: usually before two dawns have passed.
Every Fablaria entry ends exactly at the reader's bookmark. This entry is no exception.
Everything in Fablaria is original commentary and companion work, like reviews, guides or literary studies. We do not copy the text of the novels, we publish no excerpts beyond the right of quotation, and with every series we name its author and publisher. If Fablaria does its job well, it always ends the same way: you buy the next volume. Are you an author or a publisher with questions? Write to us: we answer quickly.
Encyclopedias are all very well, but the best way to know an atlas is to open it.
There are people behind this entry. We answer quickly.