Rubezhal is a Heart's Realm in the Dreaming.
Overview[]
Hidden just under the surface of the Dreaming, in tunnels and caverns and enchanted hollows beneath the hills, the dominion of Rubezhal is nearly a world in itself. The faeries built many of their most ornate realms here among the roots of the Dream and the mountains, realms woven with gems and precious metals and lit by cleverly wrought interior suns and moons.
Everything in Rubezhal that wants to be beautiful is beautiful in its way, from the ruby gardens of the royal Kuberas to the fragile jet towers in the the charnel city of Doonesh-Katarrh. Whatever does not want to be beautiful is likewise free to run the limits of the grotesque.
If the riches of Rubezhal cannot be counted, neither can the pleasures of the undercountry. Under the green light of the interior moons, the Kuberas perform revels which the Earthbound can barely remember or dream of: banquets if impossible complexity amid surroundings of obscene luxury. As with all things faerie, this luxury is the joy and the doom of Rubezhal, for even pleasure is not a comfort in itself. Numbed by the timeless round of couplings and other masquerades, the Rubezhali grow sleepy and drawn. Above, hung in the bare rock, the moons shine on, disquieting in the unchangingness of their phases.
Legendary Framework[]
In the earliest days, before the fomorians and Arcadia, the Undercountry lay rich with treasure. The oldest children of the Dreaming lived here, and it was their magic alone that hollowed out the great caverns where they built their inner cities, secret under their cloak of stone.
After the Mwa instigated the Arcadian uprising against the Fomorian Courts, they opened the vaults of Rubezhal to the faeries to provide them with weapons of great subtlety. Among these items, the most famous ones include the Cup of Vine, which caused roots and vines to entangle the fomorian armies, first wrapping around their feet, then their legs, and finally their necks, strangling them. Others, such as the Locket of Fiona and the Combs of Shahrani, bewitched the fomorians, snaring them in their own foul lusts or turning them into stone. Some traces of those bewitched armies remain even today in the less-traveled caverns, imprisoned in those unwholesome places like Doonesh-Katarrh and Oogesh, where sensible people do not go.
After the fomorians were banished and Arcadia was founded, the hidden palaces of the Undercountry returned to their old round of revels. Eventually, only a few of the old Fiona remained in the gem gardens and copper-roofed spires, with most of the remainder of the realm fallen under the rule of the Kuberas. The Kuberas were one of those peoples of the Dreaming who had allied with the sidhe during the Fomorian Wars. However, like many of the allies, they had never concerned themselves too intently with Arcadia, and instead preferred to dwell in their own earthly and Dream dominions of ease and increase.
So it was that the Undercountry lapses into a dormant, wintry state during the Golden Age of Arcadia and lost itself in its own idle games of pleasure. The towers and feasting-halls still blaze with their deep green balefires, shining like smoldering emeralds upon the remaining connoisseurs.
References[]
- CTD. Dreams and Nightmares, pp. 77-78.