Hello one and hello all. It is my pleasure to be able to greet you in this way once again. This is a very special novel for me as it is where the “Forward Plot” of Twelve Monoliths as I’ll call it really starts to take shape.
I’ve not been secretive about this fact, but the first three Twelve Monoliths books each separately establish a backstory of characters that we’ll be following in the “Forward Plot”. Since it is a lot to ask to have a lot of this information on hand, I have recently started to establish methods of recapping important information at the start of my books so everyone can be on some sort of even ground going in.
Before we get into that though, I want to thank everyone who has ever believed in my writing, and you, dear reader, for taking a chance on my stories.
Writing is a magic that is both dwindling and also as accessible as it has ever been–the ability to transmit ideas, beliefs, characters and stories across great physical distances with ink on a page or pixels on a screen. It astounds me to no end the limitless potential that writing has across our livable history.
I started drafting this novel originally with the hope of crafting something akin to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I wanted to build on the foundations I had constructed with the beginning of the Twelve Monoliths series–my white whale at the time. I can still remember sitting in the lunch room at the job I worked back then in 2016 when I was drafting up notes for the various puzzle rooms used in Good People Die. I had known back then that this series would attempt to be 12 novels long, but I had no idea what shape the story would take beyond the plotting I had done for that very first book in this series–much less what effect it would have had on my first series, the Radical-9 Saga.
Now, with having 6 of the Twelve Monoliths books published, I can say that this series is my magnum opus, but hopefully not my only of that sort. I am continuing to learn, to grow, and to write. As I gleam back over this story, I am most excited to bring out the fullest version of this story to show the duality of Allison Fae and LUCAS Gray’s stories.
With my little preamble out of the way, let’s go over the relevant information for the characters we’ll be seeing moving forward! (Some facets of this recap will be present in the Prologue, so to avoid redundancy I will not go over them here.)
Allison Fae
This is the protagonist who leads this novel for the first half of the book, but here she is much older. She originates from the second Twelve Monoliths book, The Corpse of ICARUS. In that story, Ally is a new student at Nassau Middle School–transferring yet again because she’s been moved from foster family to foster family. Currently she is with the Faes. She’s been in the system for as long as she can remember, and this fact weighs on her heavily.
Later on in the novel, it is revealed Ally is suffering from immense depression and suicidal ideation–committing to herself that if this doesn’t work out with the Faes, she would kill herself to prevent hope from being shattered yet again.
She’s offset by an imaginary friend she’s also had for as long as she can remember, Jace Starr. Jace is a prospective character from writings Ally has attempted but never followed through on. He’s a voice of support through her trials and tribulations.
At school, Ally manages to befriend some of the outcasts in her grade, conjoined twins Rosemary and Josephine Higgins and Volleyball player Lillian Jones.
She fosters a bit of a crush on Lilly, and throughout the course of the novel comes to terms with being bisexual.
However, things take a drastic turn when one cold morning reveals that one of the twins was bashed over the head–killed while at school. Before the panic and hysteria can fill the classroom where her body was discovered, the school is magically shut off from the rest of the world–preserving the crime scene and all surrounding areas.
This was done by a mysterious being known as a Creature of the Night named Issachar. (More on Creatures of the Night will be recapped in the Prologue.)
Issachar is confused about the murder, and tasks the school children to find out why Josephine was killed–to suss out the truth and bring out true justice.
With that, suspicion flows freely among Ally’s classmates.
It is revealed that Lilly was the one responsible for Josephine’s death, and that it was an accident caused by a failed murder attempt on Ashley Evans, the school bully. Lilly has a history with Ashley, as both are gifted with psychic abilities. Lilly’s involve powers of concealment, which have hid Ashley’s body who she has managed to kill during the investigation to right the wrong of the failed attempt.
Ally is horrified to learn that her friend–her crush–was the responsible party for her other friend’s death, and it is with the help of Issachar that Ally realizes that she also has latent psychic abilities. She gets a glimpse of some memories that were locked away within her–she has met Issachar before–her birth father is one of the Creatures of the Night named Ormus, hence the origin of her powers because she is tied to them.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
From this, Issachar reveals that he set up the investigation so he could confirm Lilly’s motives for murdering her friend, as he did not understand them. He then takes Lilly’s body over as a human vessel and flees from the school, returning them back to their reality to deal with the aftermath of the crime.
From this, Ally suffers a near mental break.
The Faes, kindhearted people, bring Ally to therapy, but she’s been so broken by the recent revelations that she only has one thing on her mind.
Find Issachar. Find Lilly.
Throughout this novel we catch up with Allison Fae 22 years later, but there will be points when we flash back to events just after the end of The Corpse of ICARUS to make the connective story feel fuller.
For more information on Allison’s story, character, and arc, please check out The Corpse of ICARUS.
LUCAS Gray
This is the protagonist who takes up the back half of this novel, and he originates from the first Twelve Monoliths book, Good People Die.
LUCAS is an android whose first name is an acronym standing for Luxmund User Computer Algorithm Shifter. More details on this acronym can be found in the latter half of Good People Die.
He was created by Abel Gray after having suffered through a terrible death game called the Roulette Game in the submarine research facility called SubCon. These events were orchestrated by a Creature of the Night named Sakonna to gather a large amount of energy from the continued and repeated deaths of six players set on a time loop. When the last player died within the SubCon facility, time would revert them back into a new cycle to play the game again, try new possibilities, and kill them to add to the continuous pile of energy.
This was to enact the event known as The Collapse using what is called the Flash Forward Phenomenon. More details on the Flash Forward Phenomenon can be found in the later events of Good People Die.
After the hundredth cycle, the players were able to survive the game and escape from the SubCon facility–all except Abel Gray. HE chose to stay behind and repurpose the facility’s technology over the course of fifty years (they were originally starting the game in 1990) to create the Android LUCAS, outfitted with an artificial intelligence trained on the security footage of all one hundred cycles. Throughout the training, Abel had programmed LUCAS to view the events through his own eyes, so he believed he was originally Abel throughout the events. Upon finishing the archived footage, LUCAS came into the universe as his own separate being in the year 2044. Abel tasked him with seeking out the Creatures of the Night to stop their goals at any cost necessary.
LUCAS is funneled up to the surface as Abel sets the SubCon facility to self destruct, taking himself with it.
LUCAS breaks ground on the eastern coasts 22 years after The Collapse, and comes across a strange bearded individual in the desert who calls himself Gavin Daniels.
In this novel, LUCAS will investigate the local area to the best of his abilities to put an end to the exploits of the Creatures of the Night.
For more information on LUCAS’ story, character, and arc, please check out Good People Die.
William Wallace
William Wallace is a strange case, as he is not a main protagonist in this novel. He originates from the third Twelve Monoliths book, Child 423. For as long as he can remember, he’s been transported into the minds of people moments, sometimes minutes, before they die. The more exposure to this phenomenon he has, the more he realizes he can influence and control the people he’s experiencing. He attempts for a long time to try to save the people who are in these traumatic moments. Sometimes he’s successful, other times he isn’t.
By the time he’s in his mid-thirties he’s entered the minds of 422 people, and he’s sick of it at this point. His own life has had to be put to the wayside as he’s always ripped away from it to help these other people.
This next time, though, he’s not going to play the part of the hero. He was going to speed-run them to their death so he could get back to living his life.
The time comes when William is sent to a fifth grade student named Daniel Aldoun who is taking a bath in his small, cramped apartment. Immediately William goes to work to break Danny’s legs and drown himself in the tub. He waits to go back to his own body, but nothing happens.
In a strike of terror, William realizes that this situation is different. He’s stuck in Danny’s body–the boy himself having died for him when he drowned.
Realizing this is William’s chance for a do-over of his shitty life, he takes it and becomes Danny.
He continues life after recovery–a small price to pay to not be sent into other people’s brains any longer, and returns to school as small mysteries begin to pile up, such as a Reddit post about some strange author who was writing a book that matched his life as William Wallace to the T.
Events coalesce at the school’s field trip to the underwater amusement park, the Cressfall Resort when William comes into contact with the author of the Reddit post–the Creature of the Night named Amnael. Amnael reveals he’s latched himself to William’s soul and used his consciousness to gather enough data on the human race so he could recover. However, William, furious at having his life reduced to nothing for some sick monster’s ploy, utilizes the fragment of Amnael’s being within him to overpower the Creature of the Night, managing to trap the being within one of his classmates’ Elly Parker. He usurps control over the Creature of the Night and leaves the Amusement Park–the Collapse happening before his eyes as the world around him is changed for good.
Good, he thinks. He can start to build a new empire off of the old.
Like I said before, William Wallace will not be appearing in this novel as a main character, but he will be working in the background toward his new ambitions with his newfound freedom and power. Maybe we’ll see the results of these exploits in due course?
For more information on William’s story, character, and arc, please check out Child 423.