#athelor

[bookshelf-in-progress]

A Guide to the Stories Posted On This Blog in 2024

Retellings

After Midnight

Retelling of: Cinderella (science fiction)

Word Count: 577 words (unfinished)

Premise: A young girl on another world struggles to provide for her stepsisters.

The Beggar's Door

Retelling of: King Thrushbeard

Word Count: 855 words

Premise: After a princess refuses all her suitors, her father vows to marry her to the man of his choice--but forgets to account for an old tradition.

A Daughter's Gift

Retelling of: Beauty and the Beast

Word Count: 660 words

Premise: A young woman learns the truth behind her father's disappearance and his last gift to her.

For Love of the Princess

Retelling of: Sleeping Beauty

Word Count: 2,689 words

Premise: When a curse dooms a princess and all in her palace to sleep for a hundred years, her ladies-in-waiting and a young guard stay and face the curse with her.

A Garden of Wishes

Retelling of: The Twelve Dancing Princesses

Word Count: 8,459 words

Premise: A garden boy falls in love with a princess and works to solve the magical mystery surrounding her and her sisters.

Good Rich Earth

Retelling of: The Secret Garden

Word Count: 894 words

Premise: After a childhood spent on a military space station, Mary is sent to live on a devastated Earth and becomes obsessed with finding the secret garden planted by her guardian's late wife.

Jack and His Wife

Retelling of: Jack and the Beanstalk

Word Count: 967 words

Premise: Jack's wife follows him up the beanstalk, and learns he might not be the hapless fool she'd believed him to be.

Marks of Loyalty

Retelling of: Maid Maleen

Word Count: 4,404 words

Premise: After seven years of imprisonment in a tower, a woman struggles to survive in a war-torn land, and tries to learn what has become of the prince she loved.

The Nightingale Returns

Retelling of: The Nightingale

Word Count: 743 words

Premise: A former opera singer is summoned to the deathbed of the man who once loved and abandoned her.

The Other Option

Retelling of: Rumpelstiltskin

Word Count: 214 words

Premise: When a magical creature demands a woman's firstborn as payment for help, the woman decides to save herself.

Reflection

Retelling of: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Word Count: 2,317 words

Premise: An aging, appearance-obsessed queen tries to destroy the beautiful, innocent princess she views as her rival, but may end up destroying herself.

The Unseen Soldier

Retelling of: The Twelve Dancing Princesses

Word Count: 544 words

Premise: A former soldier struggles to find a way to break his curse of invisibility.

A Wise Pair of Fools

Retelling of: The Farmer's Clever Daughter

Word Count: 4,337 words

Premise: A peasant girl outwits and captures the heart of an arrogant, overeducated king.

Original Fantasy

The Return of Queen Emma

Word Count: 933 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Portal fantasy/magical realism

Premise: After ruling as queen of a fantasy world, a girl rejoices to return to an ordinary childhood on Earth.

Daughter of the House of Dreams

Word Count: 755 words

Completion Status: Standalone fragment

Genre: Secondary world fantasy

Premise: Going to the dream shop on Faraway Lane, you'll encounter some fantastical wonders.

Honors from the King

Word Count: 2,172 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Portal fantasy

Premise: After slaying a giant, a young girl plans to ask the king of a fantastical realm to help her get home to Earth, but learns the story is not as simple as she thought.

Queen of the Fairies

Word Count: 1,769 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Historical fantasy

Premise: In Victorian England, a young girl captures a flower fairy and meets a scientist who studies them.

A Feast in the Lanternwood

Word Count: 2,031 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Secondary world non-magical fantasy

Premise: An enemy soldier begs for food at a festival held by a peaceful forest community.

Heartsong

Word Count: 558 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Magical realism

Premise: A woman struggles to find her soulmate in a world where soulmates are identified through song.

Shadowstruck

Word Count: 871 words

Completion status: Incomplete, plans to continue

Genre: Secondary world fantasy

Premise: The death of a girl's mother reveals secrets about her life.

Shadowstruck, Part Two

Word Count: 783 words

Completion Status: Incomplete, plans to continue

Genre: Secondary world fantasy

Premise: While trying to escape the country, a girl receives unexpected help from a mysterious stranger.

Sylvia

Word Count: 398 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Space fantasy

Premise: A woman must decide whether to board a ship and sail to the moon to find the brother who left the family years ago.

The Waters of Time

Word Count: 1,164 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Secondary world fantasy

Premise: A mermaid librarian travels to the past to retrieve a stolen book and finds herself entangled in a web of intrigue.

The Memory Garden

Word Count: 1,091 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Original fairy tale

Premise: The gardens of a castle have a strange relationship with time after dark.

From the Other Side of the End of the World

Word Count: 4,196 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Secondary world fantasy/time travel

Premise: A young woman writes letters to her time-traveling sister who works as a nurse in a historical war zone, and starts a correspondence with one of her patients.

Stolen Moments

Word Count: 745 words

Completion Status: Complete

Genre: Original fairy tale

Premise: At a masquerade ball, a princess encounters the husband who betrayed her.

Instructions

Word Count: 196 words

Completion Status: Complete flash fiction

Genre: Secondary world non-magical fantasy

Premise: In a fantasy kingdom, a rider is sent out with an important message.

Original Science Fiction

Warning Signs

Word Count: 189 words

Completion Status: Complete

Premise: A man having lunch at a seaside cafe receives a strange warning from a time traveler.

Beyond the Legend

Word Count: 1,097 words

Completion Status: Complete, part of Arateph series

Premise: The long-lost prince of an alien world encounters an alternate-history film about his life.

Jules and Vern

Word Count: 456 words

Completion Status: Complete, part of Jules and Vern series

Premise: On a time-travel cruise, a poor academic encounters a world-weary heiress.

A Jules and Vern Christmas

Word Count: 1,543 words

Completion Status: Complete

Premise: A poor academic offers a gift that helps a jaded heiress to appreciate the Christmas season.

[bookshelf-in-progress]

There's a whole series of Athelor books in my head, but I'm not interested in writing them. I do wonder if there's potential to write a fantasy book formatted as fanfics for a non-existent series. Because the bits that do interest me are the internal character bits exploring what it's like to live in a timey-wimey Narnia pastiche.

Tessa fully believes that her cousin Emma got to reign as a queen in a fantasy world. What's it like to know someone who got to go on your dream fantasy adventure, but never get to see the place yourself?

What's it like for Thomas to come back home as a young child, after living to well past a hundred? Getting a second chance at life.

For that matter, how does Nora adjust to life as a normal person after living through epochs as an almost mythological figure, ruling as the queen of a fantasy world from the very moment of its creation?

What kind of timey-wimey adventures does Ben get to have, crossing paths with all his siblings at wildly different ages?

The world of Athelor is derivative enough that you could figure out the plots of the "main" books even though they don't actually exist. But I'm not sure if the structure could support a standalone collection.

[bookshelf-in-progress]

This is going to be a deep cut, but I was thinking about the story of the six siblings who get scattered across time in the fantasy world of Athelor, that I introduced in "Honors from the King", and I've got some more ideas about the hypothetical sixth book in the imaginary series, which follows Claire, the sibling who got sent to the latest period in the world's history (and whose story I knew very little about).

Claire and Ben both get sent to a point fairly late in the world's history. Athelor was once a great kingdom that has fallen into ruin. Huge parts are covered with wild forests. They wind up in one of these forests.

Pretty soon after arriving in Athelor, Ben disappears. He comes back a few minutes later, looking much worse for the wear, and he can't seem to remember things they were talking about minutes ago.

Claire learns he was whisked back to some dramatic moment in Athelor's history and lived through a whole adventure--what was moments for her was weeks for him.

Through him, she learns that their other siblings are also scattered across this world's history.

They continue to make their way through the forest as best they can, but Ben never manages to stay longer than a few hours before getting whisked away.

This is intensely frustrating for Claire. First off, because it's terrifying to be left alone. Second, because Ben can never remember what's going on--he always needs to be reminded of what was going on before he left. Third, because he keeps showing up out of order--he assumes Claire is further along in her journey than she is, or assumes she already knows certain things, because he told them to her future self.

Eventually, Claire is found by some soldiers and brought before their queen. The queen is very kind, recognizes Claire as a member of this great family that has had a huge impact on Athelorian history, and tells Claire that she's the only one who can save Athelor.

Centuries ago, the last great queen of Athelor fell into an enchanted sleep, and the kingdom was overrun by invaders and destroyed by other disasters. The kingdom has slowly rebuilt after the apocalypse, but there are prophecies that indicate only the sleeping queen can fully restore Athelor to her former glory. These same prophecies indicate that only a member of this family can find and wake the queen without being caught in the sleeping curse.

Claire has been hearing stories of her siblings' adventures from Ben, so this rings true, and makes her want her own heroic adventure. She is sent on a quest into the forest along with a band of loyal knights.

On the journey, Ben periodically pops in and joins them. The other soldiers hold him in awe as some legendary figure. Ben usually has some information from history that helps Claire to better understand what's going on.

Only when they are very near the end of the journey does Ben help Claire figure out the whole truth--the sleeping queen is her younger sister Mia, who reigned over the last years of the last golden age, and the current queen wants to kill her to eliminate the prophesied threat to her rule.

So in true magi-vs.-Herod fashion, Claire and Ben have to find a way to evade the very skilled, heavily-armed soldiers of the evil queen and wake Mia before the guards can find her.

The place where Mia "sleeps" is actually a place where (thanks to the timey-wimey elements of this world) time has stopped. Mia is not really sleeping, just frozen in a single moment, which explains why she can survive without dying of starvation or old age.

Ben's timey-wimey existence means he knows how to navigate this without getting frozen in time as well. (I suspect that Claire's traveling-from-another-world bit makes her immune as well. Which suggests that Mia went in on purpose, and the my-siblings-can-get-in-to-wake-me thing was a necessary condition before she agreed to this plan.)

They're able to wake Mia (who's now in her thirties, which disconcerts Claire and is just another Tuesday for Ben), and then have to figure out how to evade the soldiers and then find a way to depose the evil queen and reclaim Athelor.

[bookshelf-in-progress]

Even though the story itself is short, I did have some vague ideas for a series' worth of stories about the children in Honors From the King.

Eleanor, or Nora

Was roughly sixteen when she was whisked away to Athelor, and arrived at the moments of its creation.

She was declared its first queen, and although she's a historical figure, the first monarch of the kingdom, she's also a legendary figure whose story is much more mythological than that of her siblings.

She had very close ties to the land and the creatures within it; some say her touch could heal and bring life to the land.

Thanks to certain life-giving properties in the land so close to its creation, her lifespan was vastly extended. Estimates of her time spent in Athelor range from 350 to 1000 years--it's difficult to get an exact count thanks to the nature of time so close to creation, but the best estimates put it somewhere around 725 years. During that time, she traveled and came to know every part of Athelor's landscape intimately.

Although she served as a mother (or as her siblings would say, bossy big sister) to millions of people in her lifetime, she never wed, and thus began the tradition of Athelorian monarchs remaining unwed so as to devote all their attention to Athelor.

She was aware that her other siblings had been whisked away to Athelor. One of her most prized possessions was a magical book that came to her not long after her arrival. The pages were mostly blank, but every so often, a page or two of text or illustrations would come into focus, showing her a glimpse of Athelor's far-future history, specifically moments involving her younger siblings.

After returning home, this book came with her, now filled in with all her siblings stories, thus creating one of the most complete records of Athelorian history in existence.

Benedict, or Ben

Was about 15 when whisked away to Athelor.

Landed with Claire at a moment fairly late in Athelor's timeline, where they were pulled into some kind of treasure-hunting quest in a dark forest.

Within a week or so of his arrival, found himself whisked away to a much earlier era of Athelor's history, probably somewhere within Eleanor's reign.

He then found himself pulled involuntarily through time, sometimes staying only hours in one place, rarely any longer than a week. Sometimes, he was pulled into situations that required him to undertake some heroic action--slaying a monster, helping to end a war, etc.--and he quickly fell into legend as the mysterious Wanderer who would appear in times of need.

He often found himself near one of his siblings, to provide information, help, and moral support. He was the one who informed most of them about the rules of Athelorian time--that they would be returned home to a time only minutes after they left, with all their aging reversed, no matter how long they spent in Athelor.

Though he, from his personal perspective, most likely spent the least amount of time in Athelor among all his siblings (likely no longer than two years), he has experienced the broadest range of its history.

Jane

About fourteen years old when she arrived in Athelor, about seven hundred years before any of her other siblings except Eleanor.

Was taken in by kindly centaurs and elves on the Skyveil Plains.

Trained in combat and riding, became beloved member of community.

Took to traveling, became a bit of a wandering knight--defender of the weak, slayer of monsters, seeker of lost lands. Had a vibrant, joyful approach to life and adventure.

Discovered places that had not been seen by Athelorians since the days of Queen Eleanor.

Had a special bond with the talking beasts she encountered on her travels and has a special bond with them.

Claire

About thirteen when she arrived in Athelor.

Landed with Ben at a moment fairly late in Athelor's history, and undertook some kind of perilous treasure hunt quest in a dark forest.

Was unexpectedly left alone when Ben was whisked off to other points in time. Is very, very nervous about this.

Ben will randomly return at different points on her quest, but she's frustrated by the fact that he can never remember what's going on--things that happened only hours ago for her might have happened weeks or months ago from his perspective, so she has to repeat a lot of information.

(I had some kind of idea that events could transpire that take her down a dark path so she becomes a big, bad, world-threatening villain that her siblings have to team up to defeat, but as fun as that idea is, I don't think it's as fun as the possibilities that could come later from all seven of them teaming up).

Amelia, or Mia

Eleven years old when she arrived in Athelor.

Landed in a peaceful eleven village in the Southern Forest. Immediately taken in and taught by kindly elves.

After nine months, her village was attacked by a giant. Despite having no combat experience, she was forced to take up a sword she found and join in the defense. One lucky strike with a legendary sword brought down the giant.

Afterward, she met her younger brother Danny--now the middle-aged king of all Athelor. He adopted her, taught her, and eventually named her his heir.

About five years after her adoption, Danny was whisked away back home. She had some difficulty adjusting to life alone, but she got some support from a visiting Ben, and eventually became a beloved peacetime queen continuing Danny's work.

Daniel, or Danny

Ten years old when he arrived in Athelor. Helped out by some friendly trolls.

Met an extremely old Thomas within a couple weeks of his arrival, who was able to tell him about the Athelorian flow of time. Thomas was unable to take Danny in--due to extreme age and the fact that he was being sent home soon--but he brought him to the attention of the king, who took him in as a page and later squire to one of his knights.

Daniel proved himself well on various battlefields, and was eventually named the king's heir.

As soon as he became king, he started a project to build a great library--with a motive to learn more about his other siblings scattered through history.

After the successful end to the wars in the reign of his predecessor, his reign was one of peace, ushering in a cultural golden age unlike anything seen since the days of Queen Emma.

Thomas

Landed among the trolls of the Northern Mountains. Trained as a smith and became an unparalleled master craftsman.

Undertook dangerous quests in his youth to discover new materials, techniques, or long-lost legendary weapons.

In his age, retreated to the mountains to focus almost entirely on his work. He was a respected member of a community of craftsmen, but rarely sought the outside world--which instead came to him seeking his legendary skill.

Some say some of the materials he worked with retained some of the life-giving properties of the land in Queen Eleanor's time, and extended his life so that he lived to the age of 130 with a somewhat weakened, but still very active body and mind.

I have an idea that after they returned home, they were all able to integrate back into life pretty well, but they loved sharing stories of their time in Athelor and looking over Eleanor's book about it.

Then some malicious agents managed to steal the book, travel to Athelor on their own power to a point fairly early in its history, and try to use their knowledge of the future to reshape Athelor to their own ends.

They thought it seemed like a great plan. They didn't realize that doing so would put them up against the combined might of seven of the greatest figures within Athelorian history.

[bookshelf-in-progress]

8

8. if you had to write a sequel to a fic, you’d write one for…

I'd like to write some kind of follow-up to "Honors From the King", showing Mia dealing with being queen after Danny gets to go home to Earth and getting some help from a time-traveling Ben.

Actually, there are several snippets in this universe that would be fun to write across multiple time periods, if I could come up with moments that are vivid enough for flash fiction.

[bookshelf-in-progress]

@isfjmel-phleg

There'd be roughly one hypothetical book per sibling. Because of Ben's odd timeline, he'd mostly weave through other people's books, and be most prominent in Claire's (though maybe he could have an episodic book about some of the adventures he got up to that didn't relate to the other books' plots). Danny and Mia's stories would overlap, but Danny's story would cover his pre-Mia reign, and "Honors from the King" would serve as an early scene in Mia's story.

Part of me wants them to know Emma in the real world, but it makes their world seem smaller if she lives nearby. Perhaps they meet her by chance some years after they return home and recognize her as a fellow Athelorian.

Emma's reign was long before Danny's and came after Nora returned home, so the only sibling she possibly overlaps with is Jane--but jury's out on whether their timelines actually intersect. She definitely met Ben at least once--he helped out at that battle mentioned in her story.