Stranger Skies
Divinity. Mortality. War.
Silva, Queen of Wolves, Lady of the True Woods, seeks her only friend Etan, who, along with other deities of the Council of Divinity, has disappeared. Her search traps her on a world where the wolves have lost faith in her; she falls from grace, becoming a mortal woman whose remaining powers could brand her a witch.
Hot on the scent, Silva refuses to give up her hunt, even as mortal life threatens to tear her apart and the smoke of war hangs heavy on the horizon. Should she regain her godhood and save her faithless followers? Or should she resign herself to mortality, and find what brief happiness human love can give?
Through the chaos of political upheaval and the turmoil in her own heart, Silva can’t escape a persistent feeling: her fall was not an accident.
***
Stranger Skies is first in a portal fantasy series with romance subplots. This is a closed-door series with zero spice. 🥛
Gender & Pronoun Notes
The Borderlands Saga is a series with genderqueer, agender, tri-gender, or otherwise non-binary characters who play roles sufficiently big to require a guide to figure out their pronouns. Without some explanation, non-binary gender pronouns can be confusing. (Binary pronouns are he/she; him/her.) To eliminate confusion, here are some notes.
Some characters in the first part of the book use non-binary gender (or gender-neutral) pronouns. (After the first part, I revert to the familiar binary pronouns for most of the book.)
Those characters in this book who have non-binary pronouns come from a planet with five genders. Thoebe’s genders are man, woman, agender, tri-gender, and genderqueer. However, man and woman do not use he and she.
The two characters from this planet are male and genderqueer, so I’ll give you those two sets of pronouns. The sets are categorized as follows.*
Subject: They looked at the forest.
Object: The forest looked at them.
Possessive Adjective: It was their forest.
Possessive Pronoun: The forest was theirs.
Reflexive: They kept the forest for themselves.
Male pronouns
S: ze (Ze looked at the forest…., etc.)
O: zim
PA: ziis
PP: ziis
R: zimself
Plural: zimin
Genderqueer pronouns
S: jhe
O: jhen
PA: jhes
PP: jhes
R: jhenself
Plural: jhe-en
*I have taken this form of categorization from this quite extensive, though no longer existent, database of gender neutral pronouns, by John Williams. I have also copied the sample sentence structure from said database, and, in doing research for appropriate pronouns and Thoebe’s five-gender system, made use of the lists in the database as well as of my own imagination.
Calendrical Notes
The Duchy of Min divides up the 360-day year into 15 months of 24 days each. New Year’s Day is celebrated at the beginning of autumn; each season is about 90 days long. Each day is 14 hours but one hour on Osecou is about 1.65 hours on Earth; thus, the days are about the same length as Earth days. Minae count the years from the date of landing on the island; the story starts on 24th Cufaito in the year 709.
The months are as follows, with any key solar holidays in parentheses.
1. Shyshik (Goavimus/New Year’s Day/First of Autumn)
2. Airoreiph (Daer/Autumnal Equinox)
3. Ibog
4. Sephai (Loasil/First of Winter)
5. Cufaito
6. Sur (Toash/Winter Solstice/Shortest Day)
7. Beilok
8. Ishei (Oroaralra/First of Spring)
9. Waiwod
10. Phamei (Thoans/Vernal Equinox)
11. Ashqi
12. Cige (Ininneli/First of Summer)
13. Oidu
14. Rew (Adivus/Summer Solstice/Shortest Night)
15. Nocu (Lenma; End of Year Celebration)
There is also a lunar calendar of holidays; they fall in different places each year. The two key holidays in this story are Shoron and Saeas Night. Shoron is the closest full moon to the Shortest Day, or Winter Solstice, and Saeas Night is the first new moon after Shortest Day.
Chapters done from the point of view of native Minae will have the dates at the beginning. The rest of the chapters will not.