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By Root 1076 0

’re folks with stories to tell. They aren’t. They were and continue to be adamantly secretive. But this brings us to another weird phenomenon they discovered after arriving here. It may be that when you introduce a number of very magical creatures into a decidedly unmagical environment, some of that magic seeps out, spreading by osmosis into the mundane natives (us) whom they, often pejoratively, call mundys. Perhaps the spilled magic grants the mundys some rudimentary, but unconscious, awareness of their new neighbors. Whatever the explanation, shortly after Fables arrived, mundys all over the world began telling stories about them; stories no one knew were based on actual people and everyone assumed were simply creative and occasionally clever works of fiction. These stories sometimes became distorted, as they were passed from person to person, and those that were finally written down often contained many errors of fact. But for the most part they were accurate enough that our mysterious Fable immigrants eventually realized they were being talked about. They were the subjects of many popular fairy tales — and some did indeed arrive here from the land of faeries. Their private histories were inscribed and revealed in the form of folktales, nursery rhymes, epic poems and doggerel ditties, haunting ballads, ribald songs and, of course, fables.

A thousand different mundy authors scribbled every variation on the story of Beauty and the Beast, for example; how a wicked witch cursed a nobleman with a dire enchantment, but its power was finally broken by a woman’s true love. But no mundy wrote what happened next; how years after they’d married to live happily ever after, all sorts of disturbingly unhappy things befell them, until they arrived here. Now Beauty has an office job as Fabletown’s deputy mayor, and her husband Beast serves as the underground community’s sheriff. You’ve heard many tales of the dashing and heroic Prince Charming, but did you know that he’s been thrice divorced and now runs Fabletown as its mayor? Elsewhere in Fabletown Cinderella runs a shoe store, the Sleeping Beauty is living off her investments, while trying not to prick her finger again, a certain famous bridge troll works as a security guard, and many a (formerly) wicked witch now resides on the thirteenth floor of the Woodland Building, which, among other things, is the community’s informal city hall.

These strange and wondrous people, leaking raw and enchanted histories wheresoever they went, became known to us through conjured stories of their past adventures in abandoned lands, while their continued lives in this world remained hidden from us.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that the refugees, coming together from so many scattered lands and diverse cultures, wanting to select some collective name under which they could become a unified people, would settle on the one quality they all seemed to share in common — their tendency to become the subjects of so many stories in our mundy world. At first they tried calling themselves The Story People, but when that inevitably got shortened to Stories, it seemed a tad confusing, seeing as how both books and buildings already contained stories, and adding a third definition to so basic a word seemed overly burdensome. They tried The Folklore People for a while, but gave it up too, when it first became Folk, which was already in widespread use among the mundys, and then Lores, which never quite fell trippingly from the tongue. For similar reasons Ballads and Rhymes were also tried and discarded, leaving them ultimately with The Fabled People, which became simply Fables, which turned out to fit just fine, after a reasonable period of getting used to it.

Fables, the personification of story and song, live among us in New York and we for the most part are none the wiser. Except that some Fables don’t live in the city, because they can’t.

Far to the north of Manhattan and the other boroughs, deep into the wider, wilder reaches of Upstate New York, there is a vast area of largely undeveloped land known as