A term you'll meet in literary genre.
Fantasy is the genre of the frankly impossible — stories built on magic, invented worlds, mythical creatures, and forces that the real world's laws don't allow. Unlike science fiction, it doesn't ask you to believe the marvels could happen; it asks you to accept that, here, they simply do.
Much fantasy unfolds in a "secondary world" — a fully imagined reality with its own geography, history, and rules. J. R. R. Tolkien, who theorised the form, called the maker of such a world a "sub-creator," and insisted the invented world must be internally consistent enough to earn the reader's "secondary belief."
Paradoxically, good fantasy is highly disciplined. Magic that can do anything creates no tension, so the strongest fantasy gives its impossible elements firm limits and costs. The constraints are what make the stakes real — a spell matters only if it might fail or exact a price.
The rough line: science fiction extrapolates from the possible (it gestures at explanation — technology, evolution, physics), while fantasy embraces the impossible (its marvels are magical, not explained). The two blur constantly, and many great works sit deliberately on the border.
Fantasy draws deeply on myth, folklore, and archetype, which is part of its power — it speaks in the oldest narrative patterns we have. By stepping fully outside the real, it can stage moral and emotional truths in their purest, most elemental form.
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