Introduction

Blow bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying.
Blow bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Horns of Elfland"

Once upon a time (isn't that the way humans always start a story?) there was magic in the world, or so your bards and storytellers of old have always claimed: elvin lords in dark forests and sumptuous halls beneath the hills, dragons curled in mountain caverns sleeping upon hoarded gold, Nereids in woodland streams, mermen in the cold, gray sea.

Then there was none.

The tales differ as to why this happened (and I am not at liberty to confirm or deny them). Some say it was industrialization and the use of iron that drove the elvin folk away, some say the spread of Christianity; some say they "flitted" to a more hospitable world; some say magic did not die but merely lay sleeping with King Arthur in Avalon, waiting for a new age to begin. Whatever the cause, magic vanished -- and mysteriously and completely.

Then one day it came back again. We came back again.

And that's when the shit really hit the fan.

Now, as every schoolchild knows, Elfland has reappeared and lies just beyond the Border that separates it from the World. Between the two lands is the Borderlands, and at the edge of the Borderlands sits that infamous city Bordertown, where elves trade with humans and control passage through the single gate that leads from world to world.

Humans, of course, are not allowed into Elfland, just as we've not exactly been welcome with open arms into your world. Yet here on the Border, where our magic and your technology work equally sporadically and unpredictably, elves and humans mingle in an uneasy truce. You have to be crazy to live here, crazier still to travel in the open Borderlands, where magic runs amok. But if you're willing to chance it (and many do, seeking easy money or the artistic muse or magic or thrills or out of sheer perversity), then come along. Here is one story of the past -- when everything Changed -- and three stories of the present, now that Bordertown has grown out of and beyond the ruins of the old city, with a culture quite unlike anything else this side of the Border or beyond. And the future? Who can say? In a world where the horns of Elfland blow clearly, anything is possible....

Farrel Din
Bordertown

[ Borderland | The Borderlands ]