The High Council is one of the reasons the Grimm Fairy Tales universe starts feeling so much bigger than Sela and the people she encounters with her book. There are entire realm…

The High Council is one of the reasons the Grimm Fairy Tales universe starts feeling so much bigger than Sela and the people she encounters with her book. There are entire realms involved, and those realms have leaders, responsibilities, and disagreements about what should happen when something threatens all of them. That changes the situation pretty dramatically. Sela can help someone through a personal crisis, but deciding what to do with something that could endanger several worlds is a completely different responsibility. When she gets pulled into the council's business, she's being asked to make decisions alongside people who already know about a world she's still trying to understand. The early council brings together the interests of the different realms. Blake is the knight from Wonderland. Hakan is a chief from Neverland. Thane represents Oz, and Sela is brought in to represent Earth. Nissa also has an important role in these Myst stories, helping Sela understand the world and its portals. Seeing those names together also helps explain why the different realms can't just be treated as interchangeable fantasy settings. Each one has its own people and its own problems, even when they're dealing with the same enemy. Blake is especially important here because his involvement continues after the council itself has been devastated. He's someone who can sit in that discussion about the future of the realms and then go out and fight. His archery and enchanted arrows matter when the fighting starts, but his determination to rebuild matters too. You can survive a battle and still lose the organization that was supposed to keep everyone working together. Nissa's ability to open portals gives her a very different kind of importance. Travel between realms is a huge part of this conflict. Whoever can move people across those boundaries has something the Dark One wants. That makes a fairy's powers a target, and it puts Nissa in danger for reasons that go well beyond whether she can win a fight herself. One of the clearest examples of the council's problems is the disagreement over the Casket of Provenance. Blake wants it destroyed so it can't fall into the wrong hands. Thane is concerned about what destroying it could do. Sela is asked for her position before she's really had time to process the situation. Those are very different responses to the same danger, and none of them makes the actual decision easy. Then the attack around issue 50 tears that council apart. The threat they've been discussing reaches them directly. Nissa is captured and corrupted, and her portal ability becomes something the Dark One can exploit. Sela having to kill her to close that route is a horrible consequence of the larger struggle. A person who helped explain this world to her becomes someone she has to stop. By the time Sela and Bolder are traveling with Blake in Myst, the council is something that needs to be put back together. Blake is still carrying that responsibility while Sela is trying to save Erik. Their reasons for continuing aren't identical, but they bring them through the same dangerous places and into the same fights. The rebuilding effort becomes a story of its own with Blake and Bolder searching across the realms for replacements. That's a pretty big undertaking when the people opposing them are also moving ahead with their plans. Orcus is pursuing the return of the Dark Queen while they're trying to restore the council. The damage doesn't give anyone a timeout to sort things out. It helps to keep the council separate from a field team like the Realm Knights. There can be overlap in the people involved, but the council has the problem of getting different realms to cooperate and deciding what they're trying to protect. Its members can fight, yet their seats at that table come with obligations that extend far beyond the next opponent. And when that table falls apart, the people still out there fighting have another problem on top of the war itself.