Topsy — The Little Gnome from Quasmaara
Some characters enter a story by blowing down a door. Others arrive with an army, a prophecy, or some suitably catastrophic event guaranteed to earn them at least a few pages of attention.
Topsy does not.
Topsy enters the story more or less asking not to be shot with a cannon.
His real name is Yamayel Antuar Yanesh, but since pronouncing it correctly already requires a certain linguistic talent—and possibly a very specific tongue configuration—everyone simply calls him Topsy.
He comes from Quasmaara, a remote region of the Three Kingdoms inhabited by the Awlish and shaped by customs, traditions, and beliefs that might vaguely remind someone from Earth of India. Assuming, of course, that India were populated by tiny gnomes with red eyes, tattooed faces, and a comfortable familiarity with concepts such as reincarnation, Karma, and several other subjects best avoided without a proper instruction manual.
Topsy is tiny.
Not merely small in the way a gnome can be small, but small even by gnome standards. This gives him a slightly rocking walk that resembles a penguin attempting to cross a frozen lake while wearing shoes two sizes too large.
He wears a large silk turban, and his face is decorated with delicate tattoos resembling tiny flames.
Overall, he has the elegant, exotic, and faintly improbable appearance that makes him instantly recognizable even in a crowd of people much taller than he is—which means practically any crowd.
But Topsy’s most distinctive feature is not the way he looks. It is the way he talks.
The language of the Three Kingdoms is clearly not his specialty, and Topsy approaches it with the same enthusiasm as someone assembling Swedish furniture after deciding the instructions are entirely unnecessary.
Verbs, articles, singulars, and plurals appear whenever they feel like it, according to a grammar system entirely his own.
It does, however, have one enormous advantage over correct grammar:
it works.
Eventually, everyone understands exactly what he means, even if it occasionally takes a few seconds to separate the message from the way it was delivered.
His first encounter with Johnas Blackrain makes the problem immediately clear.
Topsy studies the old man’s wrinkled face with great concentration and concludes that Earth must be celebrating Wakatukatesh, the Day of Supreme Happiness.
According to Awlish tradition, it is a holiday during which children carry around an effigy of a funny-looking old man until sunset.
Johnas, whose personality is not exactly suited to being mistaken for a piece of folkloric festival decoration, receives this explanation with the particular inner serenity that has made him famous among the thirty-two employees of Blackrain Estate.
Topsy, naturally, has absolutely no idea that he has just insulted him.
And that is exactly where the character starts to work.
He is not trying to be funny.
He does not crack jokes to draw attention to himself, nor does he possess that irritating self-awareness of someone who knows perfectly well that he is supposed to be the comic relief.
Topsy is simply Topsy.
He interprets everything he sees through his own culture, speaks according to his own rules, uses proverbs that often seem to have suffered some kind of accident during translation, and approaches everyone with an almost ceremonial politeness that makes everything he says even more absurd.
But underneath that apparent lightness is something far less simple.
Topsy is not part of the Seven Magnificent Dwarfs mission.
No one selected him.
And, most importantly, he does not seem particularly interested in becoming a hero.
He simply found himself caught in the middle of events, carrying with him a story the others know nothing about—and a few things that, at least at first, would be a serious mistake to judge by appearances alone.
Including the curious medallion he carries, bearing the image of a dragon.
But that is another matter.
For now, all you need to know is this:
if you ever happen to meet a tiny gnome wearing a turban, with two red eyes and a way of speaking capable of giving any grammar teacher a migraine, do not correct him.
Just say hello.
And above all, make sure it isn’t Wakatukatesh.
The world of The Seven Magnificent Dwarfs begins here:
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