Murias
Murias is a place that shouldn't exist and knows it. It's a small Northern California town tucked into a valley between ancient redwoods and the Pacific, protected by a ward that makes anyone approaching it feel lost, panicked, and desperate to turn around — and the only way in is a rutted track that looks like a forgotten logging road swallowed by ferns and pine needles.
It doesn't show up on Google Maps. It's been scrubbed from satellite imagery. If you don't already know where it is, you will never find it. But once you're through the ward, it opens up like a secret. A bright valley nestled among towering sequoias, a meadow full of Roosevelt elk shifters the size of Clydesdales grazing on wildflowers, and a hint of steel-blue ocean between the bluffs to the west.
The town itself is pure Norman Rockwell by way of the Mos Eisley cantina — a lamppost-lined main drag crowded with vintage storefronts, a church steeple, a bakery, a brick pub with stained-glass windows, a cannabis dispensary crammed between a diner and a bookstore, and a candy shop that looks like an edible gingerbread house.
But on the sidewalks, centaurs walk out of grocery stores carrying paper bags, a polar bear so enormous people flatten against buildings to let it pass, trolls and ogres stroll next to gossamer-winged sprites, and the receptionist at the coroner's office is a Gorgon with a mouthful of fangs whose snakes coil around her head like a French twist.
It's Mayberry, if Mayberry's population included half of humanity's mythology. Beyond the town, it gets wilder and more elemental. There are druid cabins hidden deep in the old-growth forest, fire pits with human remains in the ashes, and murder-crows perched on rusty tripods staring you down with unsettling intelligence.
The coastline is stunning and brutal — craggy cliffs plunging into churning dark water, rip currents strong enough to kill, Agate Beach scattered with smooth, fire-orange stones and driftwood, and a cold briny mist that cuts through your jacket like needles. Fern Canyon is a fifty-foot gorge draped in dripping ferns and moss that feels genuinely prehistoric, like something time forgot about.
The Butterfat Palaces — ornate Victorian mansions built by old dairy money — sit on green hilltops overlooking the ocean like cheerful painted jewels. It's beautiful and sinister in equal measure. A place where you can eat a bear claw from the local bakery in the morning and pull a death vision from a vivisected corpse in a blood-soaked shack by afternoon.
Murias is the Mythical world's front door, dressed up like a quaint small town, and it absolutely does not care if you're ready for what's inside.
