Lured to the Lake, Laika Wallace's second novel, is now available to read FOR FREE!
Come back soon for for information about Outer Space, the Powers timeline, and the Masonry timeline, other settings in his work.
Here you can find information about the 4 main settings that appear in Laika Wallace's writing.
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SILENT WOODS
Silent Woods is one of many names given to a secret, magical realm that exists alongside every planet and moon. Its main purpose is to act as a time capsule for lost life, providing a snapshot of extinct life and ancient landscapes that you can fully immerse yourself in with varying degrees of risk.
The Woods are endlessly massive, spanning every moment of history and crisscrossing over itself and the “real” or Outside world in a confusing web that can get newcomers and locals alike lost. It can house mountain ranges as high as the sky, sunken ship graveyards far below the ocean, cities lost to time, rolling plains and dense forests. While it contains things from the (very, very far to very, very recent) past, it somehow is not a trick of time travel but instead a time capsule.
The Woods are not easy to find, and once you’ve found them, they can be difficult to leave as well. Since they function as a sanctuary for the planet’s life, they do a very good job of protecting it, and can make themselves impossible to reach for those who have bad intentions, even if one were to follow every instruction left by someone who successfully entered. Entrances and exits can change and move seemingly randomly, spitting people out sometimes thousands of miles away from what would have been a journey of a single step.
The Woods on Earth take on a special quality, too, that makes encounters like that more frequent and more dangerous: it is not only the extinct species and old landscapes that are present there. Stories of all kinds influence what happens in the woods, from folklore to fiction to a child’s belief in magic. Fantastic creatures like dragons and unicorns roam the Woods, and whether that means they were once like any other animal on Earth or if they were purely generated by the power of the Woods is up to debate.
There are places in the Woods where elves and orcs trade in the lush blue meadows around snow capped mountains teeming with snow vultures and dire wolves, where cities of polished marble and gleaming petrified wood surround a sprawling underwater cemetery, and where an arc of stones so large they’ve grown their own ecosystems hang like a solar system over a valley of giants.
But these places are hidden deep, deep within the Woods, under the utmost protection. The average person from the Outside will find bits and pieces of the Woods’ influence in their life, when missing objects turn up unexpectedly, a familiar walk brings you to a whole new place that you struggle to find again, or when you see a cat that isn’t quite a cat escaping into the sewers of your suburb before you can pull out your camera.
It is widely debated among knowledgable scholars whether or not some of this phenomena stems from connections to other planets' Silent Woods realms, or, controversially, other timelines.
The source of this special quality is not unique to Earth, but brings a lot of attention from otherworldly sources…
THE CELESTIAL BELT
The Celestial Belt is made of the same dreamlike, ethereal material that makes up Silent Woods. It spans all of space, connecting the grounded pockets in every celestial body's Silent Woods and creating a strange, nebulous place that, with the same magic that preserves lost and mythical places, creates and houses entities known to planetary inhabitants as deities and similar mythological figures. As cultures shift and evolve, so does the landscape of the Belt, creating new beasts and new kingdoms to represent the worlds below.
Like Silent Woods, there are portals in the Outside world that lead to different places in the Celestial Belt, but there are also portals within Silent Woods itself. Particularly viable portals remain open nearly constantly, spouting anomalies, sucking in anything that gets too close, and causing reality-bending chaos. Most portals, though, need to be activated somehow to be used. Portals to the Belt are often found in the form of objects, buildings, or the odd natural formation rather than the shifting pathways and hidden doors that tend to lead to Silent Woods. Things like haunted houses and ouija boards are common, but there is also a city bus that appears when summoned to take passengers to any of the kingdoms of the Belt.
While there are as many kingdoms in the Belt as there are iterations of religion and mythology, small and large, there are fifteen with great influence that frequently meddle with Earth: the Seven Kingdoms of Sin, the Seven Kingdoms of Virtue, and the smaller final kingdom at the center, which functions like a common area and call centre for the other fourteen. The harsh, spiny geometric landscapes and buildings of the Sin Kingdoms clash with the dreamy, confusingly beautiful realms of marble and pearl that make up the Virtue Kingdoms, and in the small fifteenth kingdom, they crash together like a chessboard.
The creatures that inhabit these kingdoms, colloquially called angels and demons, influence the people of Earth to commit their respective sin or virtue in order to replenish their magic, which they use like food to keep their bodies running, as well as currency to allow them to cast spells and do other tricks. The Sins and Virtues themselves are the highest ranking members of their kingdoms, and command the demons and angels below them; or, they should, but they're often too caught up in their own lives and desires. After all, each Sin and Virtue is hand picked from Earth by Satan, the acting ruler of the fifteenth kingdom, for their outstanding traits and transformed into the beastly rulers of the Belt. No demon or angel can ascend to this idolized position, though it's been so many thousands of years nobody remembers why.
Influencing isn't the only job of a demon or angel, though. There are also Haunters, which are like ghosts; Teachers, which impart specific wisdom related to their sin or virtue; and Collectors, which convince people to become demons or angels and grant them their new holy body so they may process magic.
It is the Celestial Belt that gives the Woods of Earth their intense creative power. The barriers there, between Silent Woods and the Belt, are thinner than in most places. Earth, though, is not the only celestial body to have this gift...
OUTER SPACE
Outer Space stories follow the lives and worlds of people from planets and moons aside from Earth.
POWERS
Powers stories exist separately from the other stories by Laika Wallace.
MASONRY
Masonry stories exist separately from the other stories by Laika Wallace.