Fantasy: The Realms of Man and Myth

“We are all woven together in a pattern we do not see.”

- Guy Gavriel Kay (The Summer Tree)

Threshold I: The Garden of the Giant

I was only a child when the Weaver began to pull my first thread into the pattern. Wilde’s garden was my doorway. The trial was sorrow—an ache I could not name, the wound of loss pressed into winter’s silence. Yet the gift was mercy: the return of blossoms, the balm of forgiveness. I did not know it then, but the loom had already marked me.

The book was small in my hands, the pages worn soft from turning. Its paper was thin as pressed leaves, edges curled from too much reading. I would pause sometimes to trace the faded ink with my fingertip, as if touch itself could anchor the story more deeply in me. It was one of many books scattered through our house, some stacked in my father’s study like silent guardians I was not yet meant to approach. But this one had slipped into my keeping, as though the Weaver placed it in my hands before I could climb to those higher shelves. I must have been no more than ten, but already I knew this story would undo me. Each time I read it, the tears came the same way—unexpectedly sharp, like rain breaking open a clear day.

In The Selfish Giant, the children slip through a hole in the wall to play in the garden. When the Giant forbids them, winter itself settles there, a season that will not lift. The first time I read it, I did not have words for “allegory” or “redemption.” All I knew was that the garden ached like a heart gone cold, and that the return of spring felt like mercy itself.

I carried that garden with me long after I closed the book. The laughter of children, the blossoms returning, the wound of loss, and the balm of forgiveness—all of it planted a seed I didn’t yet understand.

Looking back now, I see that I was reading more than a fairy tale. I was crossing my first threshold, stepping through Wilde’s gate into a world where beauty and sorrow lived side by side. It was my earliest glimpse of how story could be both mirror and map: a way to enter grief, and a way to walk through it.

Threshold II: The Moors of the Brontës

The Weaver drew another thread, this one darker, shot through with storm. By the time I reached junior high, Wilde’s fairy-tale gardens gave way to wind-torn moors. I discovered the Brontë sisters on the shelves of my father’s study, their spines lined up like gates I was half-afraid to open. My father once cautioned that some books were too weighty for me, bound to lives I had not yet lived. Yet the Weaver had already begun to call me forward, and the shelves themselves seemed to wait, heavy with inheritance. Once I did, I was consumed.

Jane Eyre became a companion in solitude, her plainness and fierce heart a mirror for the girl I believed myself to be. Wuthering Heights, with its wild storms and haunted passions, shook me like thunder rolling across the sky. I longed not only to read of such lives but to stand within them, to change their fates, to wrestle with the cruelty that bound them. There were nights I read until the lamp burned low, my heart pounding with Heathcliff’s rage or breaking with Jane’s defiance. The moors pressed in on me, vast and untamed, and I felt their loneliness echo my own. It was as if the land itself carried sorrow in its breath, a low, unending murmur that joined my own longing. These were not just novels; they were landscapes of longing where desire and despair braided together.

Looking back, I know the Brontës were teaching me what Wilde had only whispered: that beauty and sorrow do not live apart. They are bound like storm and sky, and the heart learns itself only by walking through both.

The trial was passion, vast and untamed, that threatened to sweep me away. The gift was recognition — that the heart could be fierce and enduring, even when caught between love and loss. Another thread tightened in the loom.

Threshold III: The Barricades of Hugo

The loom grew heavier. The Weaver set a darker thread, thick as iron, and I felt its weight in my hands. In my late teens and early twenties, I reached for books that felt heavier still—novels thick as bricks, as if weight itself promised meaning. Hugo’s Les Misérables was one of them. Nine months it took me to wrestle with its pages, and still I carried the barricades long after I had closed the book.

Jean Valjean’s chains, Cosette’s fragile hope, the cries of the students at the barricades — they pressed into me like shadows I could not shake. The cruelty of humankind was no longer an echo in fairy tales or the moors’ imagined storms. It was here, undeniable, carved into history and still bleeding into the present.

Reading Hugo was like standing in the middle of a crowded square where suffering was laid bare. There was no stepping aside, no softening. His words forced me to look, to recognize how injustice binds itself to power, how hope persists even when drowned in grief.

Besides Hugo, Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo offered another kind of trial: betrayal, imprisonment, vengeance. I read it with a mixture of horror and exhilaration, aware that the thirst for justice so easily turns to fire that consumes. Both novels left me sobered, changed. They etched into my map not only the cruelty of humankind, but the endurance of those who stood against it.

These books were not escapes. They were confrontations — thresholds that demanded I reckon with the world as it was, not as I wished it to be. The trial was cruelty, injustice, and the fire of vengeance that threatened to consume. The gift was endurance: a sharpened awareness of justice, and the compassion that grows when you choose to look and not turn away. Another thread pulled taut beneath the Weaver’s hand.

Threshold IV: The Loom of Fantasy

The Weaver turned the shuttle, and new colors appeared, brighter than the iron-dark threads before. Amidst the weight of Hugo and Dumas, I found another path opening — one that led not into streets and prisons, but across hidden doorways into other worlds. Fantasy became my refuge, my secret country.

I had already walked with Lucy through the wardrobe into Narnia, already followed Bilbo into dragon’s lairs and Frodo into shadowed lands. These stories offered escape, yes, but more than escape — they offered recognition. In the courage of hobbits, in the faith of children, I saw pieces of myself I longed to claim.

It was Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry that reached deepest. Five students pulled from Toronto into the “First of all Worlds,” each one changed, each one marked. I read The Summer Tree as if it were written for me. Alone in my room, David Lanz’s Cristofori’s Dream playing softly, I let the words carry me into Fionavar’s wide plains and shadowed halls. Sometimes tears spotted the pages, small salt stains blurring the print. Yet the words held, as though the plains themselves received them—an unseen land listening, waiting, as I crossed into its silence.

Kimberly Ford — white-haired, unflinching, seer and survivor — became the character I held to most. Her transformation, thrust upon her, was one I recognized. Pain and loss were not abstractions to me; they were threads I already carried. And like Kim, I was learning that resilience was not chosen, but lived into.

Each re-reading became a mirror of where I was in life: first as a young adult, raw with grief; then as a wife, finding steadiness; and again later, still seeking meaning. Kay’s loom became my loom, weaving me into his tapestry. When I looked back, I could almost see the pattern glimmering.

Fantasy was never just escape. It was initiation — a threshold into myth where I discovered that my own story was also one of endurance, belonging, and becoming.

The trial was loss, sudden and unbidden, and the burden of carrying it forward. The gift was resilience, the knowledge that belonging and endurance could be found even in sorrow. The loom shimmered with pattern now, glimmering with a design I was only beginning to glimpse.

Threshold V: The Mirror of Story

When I look back across the path, I see now what I could not then: each book was a thread the Weaver drew into place, each threshold a crossing that bound me tighter into the pattern. Wilde’s garden taught me that beauty and sorrow bloom together. The Brontës led me into storms of longing where love and loss contend. Hugo and Dumas forced me to look upon cruelty and reckon with justice. Tolkien and Lewis showed me that courage could belong to the smallest among us. And Kay’s tapestry — his loom of myth — revealed that pain and resilience could be threads of the same design.

I did not step through these worlds untouched. Each one left marks: whispers, shadows, gleams of light. They became my map, etched in stories, guiding me through the wilderness of grief, the hunger for belonging, the ache of endurance. I began to understand that fantasy was not escape from the real, but a way of entering it more deeply — through symbol, through myth, through wonder.

When I began writing my own stories, I drew upon the ones who had walked with me. Kimberly Ford’s clear-eyed strength, Arwen’s grace — they became echoes in my heroines, seers and healers who stand at thresholds of their own. In writing them, I was writing myself, tracing the same path I had followed as a reader.

The trials were many: sorrow, longing, cruelty, loss. But the gift was this: the loom had made me its own. Perhaps that is what story truly is — not a single tale, but a tapestry, threads of man and myth woven together. Each threshold is both ordeal and offering; each myth we enter becomes part of our own. And when we step back, we find that we are not merely reading the pattern — we are part of it. And in that vast pattern, I found that I, too, was a thread.

I remembered the shelves in my father’s study, their spines lined like gates I once feared to open. I see now that the Weaver’s hand was upon me even then, drawing not only from the books I claimed as mine, but from the legacy I inherited. His library became my loom, his love of myth the first strand woven into my own – a gift I still carry, each time I open a book.

“Every story is a map; every map, a mirror.”

Rebecca Hyde Gonzales