The ‘Astral’ World: Rae: No Escape

When the magicians came it was thanks to nothing more than luck that Rae escaped. They had come unexpectedly, and the more she thought about it the more certain she became that someone was giving away the locations of the portals which would lead the magicians straight to the safe houses. She knew she wasn’t safe, either from the people she had once thought of as allies or her enemies. All she could do was keep running, because she knew, at the very least, the magicians would be hunting her. In her mind she had a vague idea how she was going to stay safe, but it meant finding a portal so she could travel to the other world.

No one knew it was called. That was something the magicians had kept hidden from them, because names had power. With the name of the world in their hands they’d be one step closer to making magic something that anyone could use. At least that was what Rae had always been told their aim was. It wasn’t right for the magicians to be the only ones who could use magic, apparently, but she was beginning to wonder how they even knew the other world existed. History wasn’t something they’d been taught when they chose to go to the school, so if she wanted to learn about the two worlds there was only one place she could go.

The only problem was the magicians. On the other world there were houses that belonged to the magicians and that was where they went to steal things that might help them. Unfortunately the magicians knew what they were after, so put useless duplicates in the places of anything useful. That was another thing that made Rae think that someone was telling the magicians when they were going and what they were after. It didn’t make sense for them to simply make the right guesses every time. Although there was the possibility that they had someone who could see the future. None of the thieves knew enough about the magic the magicians had to know for sure what they could and couldn’t do.

What Rae needed to do was enter the world from a different portal and hope that she found a house that she’d never been to before. That way she could pretend that she’d simply stumbled across the world. She’d already been lucky enough to escape when the rest of the thieves in her safe house had either been killed or captured, so all she could do was hope that she’d be just as lucky when she found the portal she was looking for. Of course there was every chance that the magicians shared what they knew about the thieves, because they did occasionally work together, but she had to try. It really was her only option, especially as she wanted to warn the other thieves that there might be someone within their organisation working against them. They probably wouldn’t believe her, but at least she would have tried, and that was better than not trying at all.

The ‘Astral’ World: Kenner: Becoming a Thief

Written for LJ user thnidu’s random number prompt.

The day her brother chose to leave them all behind to become a magician was the same day Kenner decided to become a thief. It wasn’t because she wanted to, but so she could find him again, even though she wasn’t sure what she’d do to him if she ever did. A part of her was so angry with him that she would have happily killed him. No one else knew what had happened. Her parents thought he’d gone missing and she knew she could never explain what had happened. She’d tried to find the words multiple times, to tell everyone that he’d chosen to leave, until she realised it wouldn’t make anything better. He’d still be on another world.

Sixteen was old enough to join the thieves. Kenner had found out about them by luck, after searching for hours online to find anything out about where he might have gone, and would have gone as soon as she found the website. She just didn’t want to cause her parents any more pain, so she started planning how she could get to the thieves’ school after she passed her final exams. It was harder than she wanted it to be, because they wanted to keep her close after losing one of their two children, but she knew what she needed to do. Of course back then she hadn’t known how difficult it was going to be to find him, how large the magician’s world was, or anything about the world he’d travelled to, and she’d still believed then that she would see him again.

After Kenner had passed every one of her exams, her grades better than she expected them to be considering all the upheaval, and the work she’d been doing to find out about the other world, all she could do was hope. There had been colleges she’d thought about going to before that were further afield than she would have liked then, but none of them had been right if she was going to attempt to enter the thieves’ school. She didn’t even know how to get into the school, because there was very little information about it anywhere, and yet she was still determined to try. No matter what she wanted to find him. Some of the anger did fade, she began to miss him, so she was tempted to hug him before killing him. In the end she convinced her parents that she should go to a college that was close enough to the thieves’ school that she could attempt to find it.

During one visit to the college Kenner was certain she felt something akin to what she’d felt coming off the magician in waves. She did her best to lose her parents, so she had a chance to search in more depth, eventually convincing them that she wasn’t going to disappear if they went to town to get coffee. It had been a lie when she said it. When she somehow found her way inside the wards, and she had no idea how she did it, she did disappear, but thankfully she managed to convince the man who insisted he was going to her teacher that she needed to talk to her parents first. He went with her.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Many Worlds of K. A. Jones

Welcome!

It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m K. A. Jones, a crowdfunded writer with a love of creating fantasy worlds, and this is the place to start if you’re new to my work. Here I’ll introduce you to all of my collections, my way of crowdfunding (because all crowdfunders work a little differently), and hopefully make things much easier for you than they would be if I hadn’t written this post.

Currently I write fiction for fourteen different collections. Some I write more for than others, because they’re favourites with certain readers, but it’s easy to get me to write more for your favourite collections. I have regular prompt sessions, as well as a prompt page for prompts outside of sessions; you can sponsor a collection so I’ll post more fiction;  you can rent a setting, adopt a character, or create your own ebook, and have fiction emailed to you. The majority of them are fantasy, because I enjoy world building, but my main focus is always the characters I’m writing. That’s a part of the reason I enjoy writing AUs and crossovers.

Most of my collections have been a work in progress for nearly a decade now. There was a time, before I started crowdfunding, when I thought my work wasn’t good enough. It’s possible I still would now if I didn’t have readers who tell me that they enjoy what they’re reading, but I started crowdfunding without knowing if I would succeed or fail, and that was terrifying. I have no idea now how I convinced myself – I’m just thankful I did. People do read my work, although I have no idea how many, and I’m glad I took the plunge.

The oldest collection I write fiction for is the Donor House collection. I started writing the first story for this collection when I was still at school, in a way that could almost be seen as writing serial fiction, because I used to write a bit each night and then my friends used to read it the next day. That was when I realised how much I enjoyed having an audience. Now my focus is the Donor House, which is set locally to me, although I do also write for the world outside the house too. In time I want to begin writing for the two other houses that are in the UK and I would love to have a couple of houses in other countries. At the moment I’m writing fiction from all over the timeline, including from before the house was created, and my aim for this collection in the next year is to introduce all the main characters in the first Donor House that would be there in 2008.

As with all of my collections the Donor House has changed a lot since I first started writing for it. When I first started writing the stories I had this image of a house that had been in use for centuries, but it turned out that I started writing right at the beginning of the timeline. I would love to write about the House in the future, and the vampires I’ve slowly been introducing, because I started this collection to explore the different ways the vampires deal with being what they are. The House itself was started as somewhere vampires who were having trouble being vampires could hopefully find a home, as well as somewhere vampires could begin integrating with humans. Writing about the characters in the House is something I really enjoy and as it’s also a favourite with others I guess I’m not the only one who enjoys this collection.

If you’re new to this collection I suggest you start here.

My next oldest collection, and the one that has changed dramatically since it was first thought up, is the Thear collection. Originally it started as a story about a number of girls who were sent to the planet Thear because there weren’t enough females there for all the males. There were arranged marriages and it was all very different to the collection it’s become, although I am also posting some AUs that show where I began with Thear. Now it’s about the three races who live on Thear – the Dorma, the Uisdro and the Tein-Igni. One thing I plan on doing relatively soon is going back to the beginning of the story and finding out why these three races ended up living together on the same island. I know at one point they got on well, working together to make a home for themselves, but things changed and that’s something else I want to explore.

Thear is easily my most religious world. Everyone here believes in at least one of the deities of Thear, although there are problems here caused by their religion, which is one of the things I’m exploring. As Thearan deities were also once worshipped on Earth this collection has a very close link with the Deities’ World collection.

Strangely the Deities’ World collection is one of my newer collections. I started working on it because Callidora, the daughter of Hades and Persephone, wanted me to start writing about her. The collection has grown as more deities have started pushing me to tell their stories, including Lucifer. I plan on writing about all of the Thearean deities, continuing to write about Callie, exploring the world a little more, and it seems likely I’ll end up writing about Archimedes (Callie’s older brother).

It’s also possible that the Deities’ World collection may start connecting with the Pagan collection. Paganism has always been something I wanted to write about, because I’m a pagan (although I’ll admit that I’m not a very good one), so I’ve been working on fiction for this collection for a long time. Anna, one of the main characters, has changed a lot during that time, and she’s now a girl with amnesia trying to work out where she fits in now that she can’t remember her family or old friends. She is one of the characters I want to throw into as many situations as possible to see how she reacts.

New to these collections? Start here with Thear; here with the Deities’ World; and here with the Pagan collection.

One of the things I love doing is writing characters with magic and seeing how it affects them. Three collections I’m writing fiction for have different magical systems: the Aurora’s World collection; the Heliopath’s World collection; and the Brotherhood collection. (I’m planning on changing the names of Aurora’s World and Heliopath’s World, because they were working names created using characters I was focusing on in the collections.)

The Brotherhood Collection is another one I’ve been working on for almost a decade. Originally it started out as a werewolf story, then it become about two different groups with magic fighting each other, and now I’m using a mix of both ideas, along with the Millennium Bug. The basic storyline is that children born after the year 2000 can have magical abilities and the Brotherhood want to collect them. Shapeshifting is one of the first abilities to maifest, which often has an adverse affect on the children with that power. Later on there are two distinct groups – the Brotherhood and Unity – who aim to teach the children how to use their abilities, but go about it in entirely different ways.

The Aurora’s World collection is relatively new. I started it because I wanted to write about magic being illegal and it ended up becoming the home of one of my most involved magical systems, where the magic a character has is related to when they were born. Every power they have, how it manifests, and when are all affected by the exact moment of birth. I’ve been working on it slowly, because making it’s not a simple way of doing things, but it is fun. Recently I’ve started exploring the other kingdoms and this has led to the introduction of the magic thieves. They steal power from those who don’t know how to use it, some collect magical powers, and their hideout was created using magic. Learning about them has been really interesting, so they’re definitely something I plan on exploring further.

The Heliopath’s World collection is also relatively new, but has gone through a lot of changes during that time. Originally it was a dream world, where characters lived two separate lives on in two places and the story I wrote was about what happens when those two lives collide. Now it’s become about addictive magic, which is something I’m still working on, but every spell a character uses leaves them with some form of withdrawal symptom and the harshness of that symptom depends on the strength of the magic. The other thing I’m exploring is about what happens when a group of magicians all live in one town and forget about what is happening in the world around them.

New to these collections? Start here with Aurora’s World; here with Heliopath’s World; and here with The Brotherhood.

A group of collections that are connected are the Fae World collection, the ‘Astral’ World collection, and the World Walkers collection. I’m still trying to work out if I should integrate the ‘Astral’ World stories into the Fae World collection, because I’m pretty certain that both the worlds were created when the fae were experimenting.

The Fae World collection is actually set in a number of different worlds, including Earth, due to the destruction of the fae’s home world. An overuse of the world’s magic led to the problem, because the fae had no way of returning the magic they used to the world’s core and didn’t want to stop using magic. Stories follow what happened to the griffins, a natural race whose home was the world the fae destroyed; the Dragons, a race created by the fae; the Shifters, who split between going with the Dragons and the fae; the merpeople, who went with the fae; and the twinned worlds, where Lena lives.

The ‘Astral’ World collection is about two different groups of people: the magicians, who have magic and live on Kalinia; and the thieves, who don’t have magic, want it, and spend the majority of their time trying to get it. but can only travel to Kalinia for short periods of time. I’m not certain I started with the right characters or in the right place in the timeline, but I do plan on exploring the creation of the thieves, how the magicians ended up on Kalinia, and exactly what the magic can do.

The World Walkers collection is about another group of the fae, the Thirteen Families, who buried their heads in the sand before realising they had no choice but to flee their home world. In order to stop the same thing from happening to their new world, Athare, they chose to create a web of worlds in the hope they can collect magic using that web. Currently I’m exploring a number of worlds, getting to know some of the races the fae created, and learning about all the different magics the races were given. No one really knows what’s going to happen in the future, especially not the fae, and the name of this collection comes from one of the most unexpected things to happen – the evolution of the World Walkers. The fae aimed to be in control of everything, but magic often makes decisions for them.

New to these collections? Start here with the World Walkers collection; here with the ‘Astral’ World collection; travel to the twinned worlds; meet the griffins; meet the merpeople; meet the Dragons; or meet the fae.

The Afterlife collection is one of my newer collections and I was originally planning on focusing on Caitlyn’s studies as she learnt to be a spirit guide. Instead Richard, who was originally a minor character, ended up becoming Death and taking over. I started working on this not long after someone close to me died, because it does help to write about the afterlife, and I’m glad I did. Somehow it’s become another reader favourite, so I often get prompts for this collection, and I plan on working on a lot more bonus material, as I’m writing about my view of the afterlife.

If you’re new to this collection start here.

The Magi collection is an older one and another that went through a number of changes. Thomar is the character who’s changed the most, because in his first incarnation he was not a nice person, but slowly he seems to have become one of my favourite characters and one I want to write about more. With this collection I seem to be beginning in the middle of the storyline once again, between when the Magi were kept as slaves by the Carne (Thomar is one of the Carne) and when they slowly begin to rebuild their relationship. The Magi are healers and known around the world for their abilities, but due to their past they refuse to help the Carne, until one Magi girl puts aside her feelings and does what she thinks should be done.

I plan on exploring the history of this world a lot more than I have done, especially the history of the Magi, as well as the other races and the magics of the world. This is one that doesn’t see to have become a favourite, although I love it, so it’s been on the backburner a little while I work on other things.

Start here with this collection.

My final two collections are both set on Earth, but they are alternate universe Earths. One is Kim’s Earth, where a population surge changed the world, and the other is a world where there is still an Inquisition.

Kim’s Earth is one that I want to work on more than I have. The idea is one I’ve had for a while – a man-made apocolypse, where the majority of people remaining are under sixteen. My apocolypse was an injection, created to stop Earth’s population from increasing for five years, that ended up killing everyone that had it. Of course there are conspiracy theories about whether the drug was tested well enough before the injection and some people take them seriously, including Kim’s father. She is one of the few people over the age of sixteen alive and ends up taking on the job of looking after a group of children, because they all look up to her. I plan on exploring this world a lot more, as there are other groups that I want to write about and I want to write about the future that they all have.

The Inquisition collection has a very basic premise – the Inquisition never ended. What would life be like if there was still an Inquisition, although this Inquisition is a little different. As I haven’t worked on this collection as much I’m not certain on some of the details, but it’s one I want to make more time for this year.

Start here with Kim’s Earth and here with the Inquisition.

I also write AUs and crossovers, because I love exploring different decisions my characters could have made, how they might have lived if they’d been born on a different world, what their story might have been if they were a different gender. If you’re interested in seeing more of any of these remember the prompts page, you can use the write more button that I have on the bottom of all my posts (every click equals 500 words), or you can commission me to write the story you’re craving.

If a story has already been written it’s going to be up for sponsorship. Every donation of £3 or more will gain the donor a perk and if you have no idea what you want to sponsor then you can ask for your donation to go into the general fund. If you’re low on money but would love to purchase some extra words then collect credits – every comment you make could get you one step closer to what you want.

AU ‘Astral’ World: Amber’s Choices (2)

Amber was less than four running steps away from the portal when she felt a whisper of magic attempt to curl itself around her ankle. Grimacing, she did the only thing she did to stop it from wrapping around her foot, and used a blast of her remaining magic to push it away. There was no way of knowing where it might end up, because magic mixing with magic could be dangerous, but she wasn’t going to let Christophe catch her. She couldn’t stop herself from breathing a sigh of relief as she stepped through the portal, even though she knew there was still a lot to do if she was going to keep the others safe.

Christophe knowing where they were going to be did mean they had a traitor somewhere in the organisation and that was something that would have to be dealt with. Thankfully the portal room was empty when Amber ran through it, following closely behind Ruby, but once they left that behind the signs of the battle that had happened were obvious. No one had known what was going to happen, so they hadn’t been prepared for a battle. Amber wanted to feel angry with them, because they should always be prepared for anything, and found herself feeling sad instead. She had no idea what she would have done in the same circumstances. It was possible she could have been one of those bodies.

“We need to grab the registers and then get out of here,” Ruby said, her voice loud in the quiet of the hallway.

Nodding, Amber sent the very last of her magic into her wand, hoping that the battle would be over soon. She wouldn’t be much use and she knew that Christophe wasn’t going to be far behind. They entered Jaya’s study and Amber ducked to avoid some magic that had gone astray. As Ruby headed straight for the desk Amber couldn’t help looking at the magicians who had joined with Christophe in order to attack them. None of them were a surprise: O’Connell and Harker were both Christophe’s housemates; Pietr, Jasper, and the other one, Amber couldn’t remember his name, had always hated the thieves; and Lissa… well, Lissa had once, many years before, been a thief, but Amber was the only one who knew that.

For a moment Amber’s eyes met with Lissa’s. They looked at each other and Amber wished she could read minds, because she would have loved to have known what Lissa was thinking right then. A slight change in Lissa’s expression told Amber that Christophe was behind her, so she moved to one side, allowing another blast of stray magic to pass her and, hopefully, hit him. Raising an eyebrow Lissa smiled at Amber, making Amber wonder once more what the magician was thinking, before she forced herself to focus on what was happening around her. Christophe was still behind her, a group of magicians stood between her and the girls she worked with, and Ruby was still searching for the registers.

‘Astral’ World: Rynne: Mirror Travel

Written for a Crowdfunding Creative Jam prompt: secret passwords.

The safest way to get around Kalinia was mirror travel. Every magician had a mirror in one of their rooms and all of the mirrors had different passwords. Sometimes a magician would attempt to work out the password for someone they didn’t like, to attempt an assassination, but that rarely worked. In the communal hallway there might be another mirror, this one set for more general travel, because the magicians knew better to than to enter the studies of their enemies through the door. Doors were too easy to booby trap. Rynne didn’t know anything about the mirrors, or even that the world she’d travelled to hundreds of times was called Kalinia, until she was taken, if that was the right word, by one of the magicians.

Well, Rynne had known they existed, but like all of the thieves she assumed that they were nothing more than mirrors. There was so much they didn’t know about the magic the magicians used, and the magic they were trying to gain, that she was beginning to think that the only way they could learn about it all was if they were in Kalinia. For the first time she knew the history of the two worlds, why the thieves existed, why the magicians allowed the thieves to take what they did, and just how much of a mess the whole thing really was. A part of her wanted to wait until one of the thieves she knew entered the house she lived in and tell them, but she knew they wouldn’t believe her. They’d just think she’d been brainwashed.

On her first journey through the mirror Rynne had been surprised at how smooth the journey was. In seconds she’d arrived at the White house, which had a Kalinian name that she wasn’t permitted to learn, and was stood in front of a group of people she’d been taught to hate. It was uncomfortable to say the least. She was tempted to turn around, go back through the mirror, and wait until her magician returned, but she knew she was going to have to learn to deal with the other magicians eventually and it was never going to get any easier.

That was easily the hardest thing Rynne had done since she made the choice that her life was more important to her than the thieves. Standing there, with all of them looking at her, and knowing that she hadn’t really known anything about them before, and more importantly hadn’t cared because they were just magicians. Maybe she wasn’t going to like them all, but they deserved to be given a chance because they were people too. It made her angry to think that she’d been taught, the same way all the thieves were taught, that the magicians were evil, when really the first thief had someone’s jealous brother. He’d put so much effort in to getting to Kalinia, creating a group of people who would do the hard work for her, and they hadn’t managed to fulfil his greatest desire. Power still resided in the hands of the magicians.

November is…

…the Fae World collection month. This is the post to use if you want to prompt for any stories, tell me what bonus material you’d like to see, or anything else you’d like.

This month I want to attempt to post once a day. I may also be posting World Walkers stories, which could easily be included in this collection, Donor House stories, which couldn’t, and possibly some ‘Astral’ World stories, because the doors that originally led to the world known as the ‘astral’ were created by the fae (who created doors everywhere).