River Greer's sister is dying, and she's just been mistaken for a runaway alien duchess and ferried across the universe to the legendary Thule. As time is running out, River has only one goal, to go home, and one ally: her double's husband.
A foreword about Thulish
Thulish is the language developed by ichorites during their thousand years’ exile from Thule to Earth, approximately between -700 BC and 360 AD. Because ichorites settled primarily in Britain and Frenchy Brittany, Thulish is a case-based, Indo-European language descended from proto-Celtic and Gaulish, enriched over time with Latin and English vocabulary. The latter is due to Thule’s long-standing habit of borrowing from the cultures and languages of “the other side” to enrich its own. Modern Thulish is also, to some extent, descended from proto-Thulish, a dead language spoken on Thule before the exile, and from which traces may still be found, either in etymological stems or phonetics.
The Thulish alphabet is derived from the Ogham alphabet, the earliest known means of writing Celtic languages (proto-Irish, more specifically). The faux newspaper headline you'll find in chapter 54 (https://camillamonk.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/OBAL-Art-Thulituti.jpg) uses two fonts I cobbled together for the occasion (along with a somewhat dramatic engraving.)
You can find a full lexicon of translated terms and dialogs, complete with their grammatical breakup, at the end of this book, as well as a Thulish declension helper on my website: https://camillamonk.com/thulish-language-guide/thulish-declensions-helper/ (What am I doing with my life??)
Uddī far’adoi, Thulē lawenotwag! Without further ado, Welcome to Thule!
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Chapter 1
“How strange to think that your sun was setting as mine rose that day.”
From the private correspondence of the Duke of Caid, on the 8th of Ladlugger, 1851 DSC
It’s not the first time I find myself racing through Toronto in the back of an ambulance, but the fear always carries a new, different tang. There’s no getting used to it, no controlling the frantic drum of my heart as I watch Sage’s listless form on the stretcher. I can barely make out her doll-like features under the mask covering her mouth and nose. One of the EMTs is rechecking her pulse while his partner resumes squeezing the silicone bag that’s forcing oxygen into her airways.
Sage’s lungs are giving up.
We knew it would happen eventually, that her breath would fail her like everything else. Like her digestive system that can no longer assimilate nutrients without a feeding tube connected to a stoma in her belly; like her bones, too brittle; her heart, never strong enough. This time it was bronchitis, back in October, that turned into pneumonia. Within a month, Sage’s already dwindling lung capacity plummeted below 40 percent. Now we have an oxygen concentrator humming twenty-four seven in the living room, connected to a seventy-foot tube snaking around our house. It funnels the air Sage desperately needs directly into her nostrils through a cannula.
But it’s not enough. It never is. She needs new lungs; she needs a whole new, healthy body that no one will give her because no one knows what she has. Most of the doctors told us it could be an atypical form of progeria; a few believe otherwise, since all genetic tests returned negative. One douchenozzle even accused my dad of having Munchausen by proxy.
“Stick with me,” I murmur, trailing shy fingers along the edge of the silver thermal blanket covering her. I’m afraid the slightest touch might bruise her.
I’m only four years older, but she’s always been so small, with her elfin limbs, jade-colored irises that we both inherited from Mom, and baby-soft hair that turned a stark white early in her childhood, when mine grew black as ink. I desperately want to believe she’ll fight and push through once more, but tonight there’s barely any fog on the underside of her oxygen mask. She won’t open her eyes, and her legs are so emaciated that her moose-print leggings no longer cling to her thighs.
I’m not ready. Sage’s clock is ticking too fast, and I don’t think I can live without the pain and joy of being together. I can’t accept that there will be no more discussions of trash-lit and astrophysics, no more walks along Woodbine Beach when it’s a good day and she feels strong enough to go out.
I don’t realize my eyes have grown hot until a gruff male voice spears through the haze of my grief.
“Miss?”
I blink to focus through the blare of the siren and the lights flashing all around us. We’re speeding up Eastern Avenue toward downtown.
“Miss, you’ve got a call. Could be your father.”
My gaze cuts from Sage to the phone buzzing in my hand. I texted Dad ten minutes ago because he wouldn’t pick up—late afternoon is the busiest time of the day at his shop. I swipe to take the call. The warm grit of his voice envelops me and quiets my fear. “Don’t worry, Possum. I’ll be there in twenty. Any change?”
“No. I found her passed out on the couch when I got home. She still had her cannula.” Small blessings. If Sage’s tube had slipped off while she was out . . . I don’t want to think about it. Not now.
Dad is on the same wavelength. He knows better than most how to make the best of a crap hand. “Okay, her cannula stayed on, she had oxygen: that’s all that matters,” he reasons. There’s some honking in the background; he mutters something about “fucking traffic cones” before he returns his attention to me. “You stay with her, and you wait for me. We’re gonna get through this, Possum.”
“We’re almost there,” the paramedic says as I end the call and we round the corner of Shuter and Victoria to pull into St. Mike’s ER drop-off, a gaping maw at the back of a looming, austere brick building. I jump off the second the ambulance doors open and follow Sage’s stretcher on autopilot, barely aware of the gusts of snow chilling me through my hoodie and jeans. I forgot my parka, my gloves, everything—it doesn’t matter.
Wheels clatter across the cold concrete. Glass doors hiss open and close shut, leading to a bright and warm lobby where a pair of nurses in purple scrubs hurry toward us to take over. The handoff is expedited in two minutes. The female EMT, barely older than me, drones through Sage’s symptoms while the triage nurse examines her.
They have questions for me too. My voice sounds brittle, robotic, as I rehash the same brief I’ve given a hundred times to a hundred doctors. Yes, she has a record here at St. Mike’s. Yes, she’s had syncopes before. Am I her primary caretaker? No, but yes. Officially it’s Dad, but I’m the one trying to major in biology at U of T and angling for med school, so I’ve pretty much been running that show since I was sixteen. I list all the meds she takes—so many of them, organized with military precision in the pink plastic crate we keep on the kitchen counter. An entire life spent fighting, summed up in three dry words: unidentified progeroid syndrome.
When they start carting her away, I instinctively move to follow, but a voice stops me.
“Miss Greer?”
A male nurse, one I hadn’t noticed popping up behind me as Sage disappeared down a hallway. He tips his head to the admission booth behind us where a bored clerk has just motioned for me to come over. “They’ll call you when you can see your sister, but for now, we need you to register her.”
I manage a stiff nod. “Yeah, I—I have her OHIP card with me.”
“Excellent.” A smile that reeks of canned sympathy pinches dimples in his cheeks. The syrupy kindness in his voice doesn’t reach his eyes; they are a frosty gray, like the ice on the lake on a cloudy morning.
On a different day, I might have wondered about his crisp British accent. My gaze might have lingered on his slim but powerful build or the sandy-blond waves framing his almost-too-handsome features. Tonight, however, he’s just a rando keeping me away from my sister. I force the annoyance out of my voice. I’m going to need all the help I can get. “Do you know where they’re taking her? The ICU?”
He’s about to reply when Dad’s voice booms across the lobby. “Possum!”
I don’t care that the dozen people waiting are watching me as I run toward a craggy biker with a silvery braid and Santa’s beard. “Dad!” I hug him hard, gripping his leather with both hands. You can take the biker three thousand miles away from his MC club, but you can’t really take the club out of the member. With his bouncer build and tattoos, Dad tends to draw stares wherever he goes.
And yet he’s one book you shouldn’t judge by its cover. He gravitated away from his club for good after we moved to Toronto over a decade ago. Dad had spent his entire adult life in California—Sage and I were born there—but after Grandma died and left him her house, he decided it was time for the Greers to reconnect with their Canadian roots . . . because free health care and cheap college tuitions. So he drove back home with us and his Harley in tow, opened a small tattoo parlor, and he’s been a model citizen ever since—if you overlook the shrooms he sometimes sells under the counter to a select clientele.
He made everything better for us. He always does. “They took Sage away,” I mumble into his Mötley Crüe shirt. “She was still breathing, but she was cyanosed, and she won’t wake up.”
He squeezes me tight and strokes my braid. “Did they say how long before we can see her?”
“No. I was about to finish with her registration; they still need to swipe her card.”
“Okay, you do that, and I’ll go ask around.”
I let go reluctantly and watch him stalk toward the blond guy who talked to me earlier. He’s still here; doesn’t he have stuff to do? I can’t help but spy on the two of them from the corner of my eye while I fill in the admissions form. Name: Greer, Sage. Address in Ontario: 1905 Queen Street East, phone number . . . hold on. The blond guy just motioned to a door down the hallway. Dad rushes back to me just as the clerk confirms that we’re done for now.
“He says they’re taking her to imaging, but they won’t let more than one family member in there.”
I bite back a sigh of frustration. “I’ll wait here, but text me if you can?”
He presses a gruff kiss to my hair. “Will do.” I think he meant to be reassuring, but the words came out strangled. I reach to stroke his cheek, skimming deep grooves and old sunspots. He doesn’t speak much about the past, about himself. But tonight, sorrow weighs on his features. His jaw works in silence for a few seconds before he rasps, “I can’t, Possum . . . I can’t lose one of my girls again.”
We never talk about it. We keep old pics on our sideboard, pics where there’s five of us, not three. But Dad isn’t great with words, and I’m not either, so the past remains buried. We never talk about that morning, seventeen years ago, when Mom went out with Floe to the grocery store and they never returned. Dad looked for them for months, then years. His brothers even helped, but it was as if Mom and Floe had vanished off the face of the earth. There was never any lead, no remains to help him grieve and understand. Only sudden, unbearable silence.
I barely remember the two of them. Even Floe, the mirrored half of me, is little more than a foggy outline in my memories. But that old wound won’t scar over even after all this time. I squeeze Dad’s chest. “Go. Sage needs you.”
“I won’t be long.” He lets go and walks away, but not without one last brush of his fingers along my braid, as if it were his good luck charm.
Then it’s just me, hugging myself in that lobby full of strangers, under the artificial glare of tube lights. I eye the seats closest to me. I’m drained, shivering all over, but I’m almost afraid to sit down. I need the energy, the momentum that keeps dark thoughts at bay. I hate waiting.
“Miss Greer.” My head snaps up. A broad-shouldered, mustached guy stands before me. White coat, badge—this one’s a doctor. Like the blond nurse, his husky voice bears the staccato of a British accent. “Would you like to see her?”
My body revs back into action. “Yes!”
“Then follow me, please.” He turns on his heel without another look or a single word of reassurance.
I let him lead me down an empty hallway, every step we take echoing too loudly in the sterile space. Behind each numbered door we pass, I wonder if Sage awaits, if she’s still breathing. When I can’t stand the silence any longer, I ask him, “How’s my sister?”
He stops in front of the steel doors of an elevator. “I’m taking you to her.”
“Is that all you can tell me?” I say as the elevator doors open and we step inside. I try to snuff out my rising temper as we find ourselves facing each other in this cramped space that reeks of detergent and rubbing alcohol. Nothing will be accomplished by biting off this douche’s head.
“Yes.”
Great. It’s when I glance at the numbers rolling on the elevator screen that a genuine sense of unease sets in my bones. Sublevel 1. “Why are we going down? Imaging is upstairs.”
But the morgue isn’t.
A surge of panic squeezes my lungs as the elevator bounces to a stop and the doors hiss open. A silent and dim hallway whose walls shiver from the erratic pulse of a busted tube light. A group of four men in dark three-piece suits awaits, surrounding an empty stretcher. My eyes scan their bowler hats, the chains of pocket watches fastened to their waistcoats. Something doesn’t compute. What is this, Peaky Blinders?
Battling a shiver of unease, I make to turn and leave. “Okay, look—”
The doctor grabs my forearm and pain registers, first from his crushing hold, then from the stab of a needle in my neck. Heat and numbness spill into my veins, carrying the terrifying realization that the stretcher is for me.
Chapter 2
Distorted orbs flash over my head. There’s the clatter of wheels, the low rumble of voices speaking a foreign language. I recognize nothing except the suffocating terror pounding under my temples and against my rib cage. The walls—are there any walls still?—feel warped. My body feels warped, twisting in every direction yet held in place by painfully tight straps around my ankles and wrists.
The white of the hallway becomes sudden darkness in which sleek, gleaming monsters undulate. The scent of gas, exhaust fumes. A remote part of my brain is able to coolly assess that they’ve taken me: we’re in the hospital’s garage, and the black monster whose mouth just engulfed me is a van.
The realization affords me a suspended second of absolute clarity: I’m being kidnapped. The rush of heat distorting my reality and speeding up my pulse could be ketamine. If the dose was too low to induce anesthesia, I can still fight this. Sucking in a struggling breath, I grapple at the frayed edges of my consciousness. I mustn’t close my eyes. I blink up at the bowler hat attached to the man now sitting by the stretcher.
His hand is a shapeless blot entering my field of vision. A soft touch on my forehead, a slither that coils my insides in mute horror. He’s stroking back a strand of hair on my forehead. His face seems to bleed into the shadows, but his voice . . . his voice is the only thing that feels real. “Don’t try to fight this. You’re going to fall asleep soon.”
I won’t. A rasp burns my throat, but no sound comes out, and I’m so, so scared. I need to keep my head above the water just a little longer. Dad is gonna realize I’m gone; he’ll look for me, call the cops. The van’s doors slam. The sound spears through my eyeballs, echoing in my skull long after the engine has started. I need to stay calm and remember everything. The smell of tobacco and cologne. Bowler Hat’s voice. His voice. As if a veil had been torn before my eyes, I realize that he spoke to me with the same oddly polished British accent as the nurse. He taps his Rs too. I don’t know why that matters so much until his dark profile blurs into a smooth, luminescent one, framed by long black tresses.
He sounds like Mom.
Dad has kept a few videos he took with his phone back when she was still with us. She can be seen giggling at the camera with her hand over her mouth, calling him “dearest Neil.” Dad told me he thinks she was British, but he never found out for sure. She didn’t want to talk about her life before the day she tiptoed into his favorite hangout—an angel lost in Frisco without a suitcase, as he put it. She never felt like letting him in, and he was desperate to keep her just a little longer before the dream misted off, so he never pressed.
I feel numb, and the restraints around my wrists no longer hurt. My vision is growing blurry, and I think the sob that just broke out is mine.
…
I’m cold. How long have I slept?
Each breath I take feels wet and icy. Something hurts my face, digs into my cheeks—they gagged me with a rag. The sheet of ice coating my chin is my own drool, pooling along the fabric. Panicked pants fill my nostrils with the scent of the woods. We’re outside. I can’t move my hands; a rope bites into my wrists and keeps them locked together. The van’s doors and the bowler hat eddy around me. I sense the tensile strength of my muscles return to me and jerk in response, but it’s no use. I go weightless, my heart pounding in my throat as two men take a firm hold of my arms while another grabs my legs.
“Ellom.” Bowler Hat’s voice. I have no idea what he just said, but it’s a command, I know that much.
Twigs crack under the weight of heavy feet as the three shadows who grabbed me readjust their hold. The drug is wearing off. I thrash desperately as they carry me deeper into this nightmare, into unknown woods. I focus on the moon above, huge and streaked by the charred bones of shuddering branches. Then there’s nothing over my head to obstruct the pure, cold glow. A bird call ricochets and dies in the darkness. We’re stopped at the center of a clearing.
Bowler Hat moves away to kneel on the forest ground, as if praying, and for a moment my terror gives way to confusion. The air . . . something is happening in the air. Every breath I suck in through my gag seems to thicken and prickle my skin from the inside out. I’m breathing in electricity, tasting iron. A sense of impending doom has me arching my spine to the breaking point against the punishing hold of my captors.
There’s a shivering pause, a pulse rattling my bones. Then the light, a bluish white, sizzling, rising from under the blanket of fallen leaves and broken twigs. The humus bed turns to shimmering dust, revealing the outline of a Celtic wheel carved into a huge stone plate.
I’m no longer fighting, just shaking and suffocating as the lines etched into the stone absorb the glow and turn incandescent. It’s LEDs. It has to be LEDs because otherwise it’s aliens, and that’s way worse. As the blazing wheel illuminates the ragged trunks around us, I’m swept over by a wave of all-consuming terror, and I remember to fight with all I have. I contort with a growl in a supreme effort to break free, but they’re dragging me toward the light.
I can’t see the wheel anymore. Everything is too bright, and the world is tilting upside down. My body feels loose, as if my bones and tendons are no longer holding me fully together and I’m slipping through the hands imprisoning me.
I’m going liquid. My heart, my organs, stretch like wax bubbles in a volcano lamp.
I’m free-falling, plummeting into the light.
Sage . . . Dad.
Chapter 3
I brace myself for an eternity of falling into the pristine void, but the weight of reality slams back to me almost instantly. The forest’s icy air has grown warm, almost stuffy, and my teeth hurt as if I’d just chewed on an entire roll of aluminum foil. I can’t see anything; light lingers in my retinas in bright spots that bloom and swirl everywhere I try to focus my gaze.
I shiver, stir, only to remember the bruising grip on my arms. Unknown fingers dig into my flesh, and a choke hold around my neck sends a bolt of agony down my spine. A broken scream rips its way out of my throat, muffled by the gag between my teeth. I try to wrench myself free once more, only to go perfectly still when I realize that under my feet, the ground is shuddering and clanking. I’m standing on my legs and we’re no longer in the woods. Did I pass out in the light? For how long? How far did they take me?
I blink away the last of my daze in between frantic pants. We’re standing on a narrow metal platform, suspended over a circular pit so vast and so deep it seems to fade into pure darkness. I dart terrified eyes at the endless walls enclosing us, speckled with tiny shards like diamonds encrusted in the stone. Oh . . . I’ve a feeling we’re not in Ontario anymore.
“Careful. That is one fall you would sorely regret,” a soft masculine voice warns from my blind side.
The bowler hat reenters my field of vision, allowing me a clear view of its owner for the first time. Wherever this place is, a dim bluish light now sculpts his dark coat and feline features as he stands right in front of me. Black eyes assess me, matching sardonic eyebrows like two strokes of tar. Bronze skin, a blade of a nose, dusted with freckles: a face that could be anywhere between twenty and thirty, void of any line, any scar. No visible trace of humanity.
