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The Oddmire: Book One: Changeling by William Ritter
Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers
Release Date: July 16th, 2019
Format: egalley*
My Rating: ★★★★
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Magic is fading from the Wild Wood. To renew it, goblins must perform an ancient ritual involving the rarest of their kind—a newborn changeling. But when the fateful night arrives to trade a human baby for a goblin one, something goes terribly wrong. After laying the changeling in a human infant’s crib, the goblin Kull is briefly distracted from his task. By the time he turns back, the changeling has already perfectly mimicked the human child. Too perfectly: Kull cannot tell them apart. Not knowing which to bring back, he leaves both babies behind.
Tinn and Cole are raised as human twins, neither knowing what secrets may be buried deep inside one of them. Then when they are twelve years old, a mysterious message arrives, calling the brothers to be heroes and protectors of magic. The boys must leave behind their sleepy town of Endsborough and risk their lives in the Wild Wood, crossing the perilous Oddmire swamp and journeying through the Deep Dark to reach the goblin horde and discover who they truly are.
EXCERPT
A VERY LONG TIME AGO, HUMANS AND FAIRIES
and elves and dolphins
and all of the other intelligent beings of the world got sick of one another—which was understandable, as
intelligent beings
were all pretty much rubbish
in those days.
After much arguing, they
decided to split up the
world and build
a sort of magical wall
between the two halves. On the human side of the barrier, life would be governed by logic and reason
and the laws of nature. It would be an honest world of soil and
struggle. The other side would be ruled by forces
more ancient than any earthly science,
a world of magic and madness
and raw potential. Humans called
their side the Earth,
and magical beings
called their side the Annwyn (all except for the
gnomes, who called it Pippin-Gilliewhipple—which
is one of many
reasons that, to this day, nobody
from either side
much cares for gnomes).
For many
centuries, the wall stood—a sort of veil between two worlds, invisible but everywhere. Neither side could see
or touch the other,
and in time
many creatures forgot
there was another
world at all.
This remained the state of things until rogue groups brought their simmer- ing strife
to an unruly boil and a new war
broke out. As it turned out, intelligent beings
were still fairly
rubbish if not properly supervised. The resulting battle
blasted a great, gaping hole right through the invisible
barrier.
When the dust had settled,
some felt the hole in the wall
should be patched
back up, and others
felt the barrier should
come down entirely. In all the hubbub,
nobody noticed as the thing that
had been inside the
wall—the thing
that may have been the
very soul of
the wall—escaped. Nobody
was watching as the
thing that had spent countless centuries
listening at the cracks and growing
hungrier and hungrier
slipped past the rubble
and across the bloody
battlefield. Nobody saw it slide quietly into the forest.
The Thing
clutched at shadows as it moved
between the trees, drawing
the darkness around itself
like a rid- ing cloak. It had never known sunlight,
or birdsong, or honey-sweet breezes, or even the
sound of its own name. If
the Thing even had ever had a name, it had never had anyone
to speak it.
The Thing
whipped past
mossy boulders, through tow- ering trees, and over the muggy,
murky Oddmire.
When it reached the very heart
of the Wild Wood, it finally slowed
and came to rest. The trees grew
more densely there, and the
air was still. Even the sound of the birds died away. The shadows here were thick and heavy, and the Thing
gathered them up, greedily.
The Thing
knew shadows. In that sunless, starless place between worlds,
there had been shadows so absolute they had no form. The Thing’s
whole world had been a shadow—its whole life had been one great shadow, and within it, the Thing had felt impossibly small.
But the shadows in this new place
were different. They would do as it bid them. They
were powerful, those shadows of stones and boulders
and tall pine trees,
and the pieces torn from them felt comfortable as they knit
together across the Thing’s
back. The Thing felt strong.
Beneath its swelling cloak of darkness, the Thing began to take on new shapes. Bigger shapes. Terrible shapes. Still,
there was one shadow that caught the Thing like a thorn: its own. The creature’s meager slip of a shadow followed it, clung to it, taunted
it with its own true, trifling form.
The creature plunged its talons into the forest
floor, and for a time, the
only sound was
the scratching of unseen claws digging
into the soil. When the hole was deep enough,
the Thing turned
its talons in on itself. It tore and it ripped
until finally, reverently, it lowered its own severed shadow
into the cold earth
and buried the humble scrap beneath the dirt. All around it,
pools of darkness blossomed as if
the entire forest floor
were a fresh, clean napkin
laid over a seeping ink stain.
The darkness grew.
The Thing
drew itself up to its full height,
and then it drew
itself up a little
higher, and higher still. Countless stolen shadows rippled along its cloak like waves of grain
shimmering in a breeze. The
Thing would
be whatever it pleased now. It was never going back.
The
darkness spreading across the forest floor solidified into angry coils and knots as it grew. Wicked thorns
burst from its surface. For just a moment, there was silence and
the forest was still.
And then the darkness began
to creep.
