Twisted Paths

The face of the visible world is much more malleable and permeable than it would appear. People generally stop at what they see, but the warp and the weft of the world conceals a great deal more than the eye can grasp. With the right touch, ways can be opened on an endless choice of worlds and with the right intentions doors lead to whatever supplies or goods are required. Gone the need to travel. Gone the need to work. Not surprisingly, the people of the Other World knew all about working the face of the world. The Fairies, as the dwarves disparagingly called them, were experts in such doors and windows. And Angel, for all his twelve years, was one of the most accomplished and creative of his people at working the face of the world. He had inherited something of his father’s gift in the matter. Not that he’d ever known his father, the former king of the Other World. The man had disappeared, presumed dead, just before his only son was born.

Tammie lived in a very different world, in a country called Donnavic that was ruled by a cast of women warriors. It was a sad place in which singing and dancing and humour of all sorts had long been banished. What’s more, the threat of war hung over Donnavic as their neighbours from Krania, a people ruled by men, gathered their army at the boarder. In Donnavic, men had a very secondary role and most of them were poor and wretched. Fathers had no say in the education of their daughters and Tammie knew nothing of the one-time consort that had probably been her father. As the eldest daughter of the Queen, Tammie was expected to become a Maiden Warrior. Nothing could have been further from her mind than unarmed combat and military strategy. The moment she was out of her mother’s sight in her own rooms, she’d toss aside her army fatigues and don the most splendid dresses from her extensive collection, twirling around her bedroom to imagined music.

In addition to their royal lineage and the fact that they were the same age, perhaps the most significant trait Tammie and Angel had in common was a fascination for fantasy, although that fascination manifested itself in quite different ways. Shut up in her rooms in the Castle, Tammie’s dreams were full of music and balls and wonderful dresses when they didn’t take the form of nightmares peopled by raging Maiden Warrior sent at her mother’s behest. Being able to move between the worlds, Angel was more of an inventor and an explorer, although much of his time was taken up watching worlds rather than actually travelling in them.

So much for the fantasy of comfort. Many things were going to conspire to trouble their delightful fantasy worlds, not the least of which were the Queen mothers whose narrow visions of the future of their children hung like a constant threat over them. And then there was the absence of their fathers that laid the foundations for the confusion and uncertainty that would plague them as they struggled to meet the challenges of adult life cast on them far too early.

Twisted Paths is the first book of Beyond the Face of the World by Alan McCluskey.