Genre Gauntlet: Alice in Wonderland Retelling

Veilbound

Back in 2023, I visited the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition at the British Library; a stunning deep-dive into the genre’s most iconic works. From The Hobbit to Labyrinth, it explored everything that defines fantasy: ancient tomes, magical objects, epic quests… and, of course, portals. So many portals.

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

As I wandered past enchanted maps, eerie props, and dreamlike manuscripts, something sparked. Not just admiration, but memory. I was reminded of a chapter in my own life. One marked by illness, confusion… and strangely vivid dreams.

That’s when an idea began to form:
What if the portal wasn’t a place, but a person?

The Seizure Dreams

I first became ill in 2017. It was a difficult, disorienting time; marked by sudden seizures that would strike without warning. They varied in length and intensity, but what unsettled me most were the dreams.

They weren’t vague or surreal. They were vivid, immersive, startlingly real.

I’d “wake up” in a dream convinced I was out with friends, sipping coffee and having long, natural conversations. Then I’d come to on the bathroom floor at work, or in bed at home and realize none of it had happened. Time had slipped past me. I’d missed entire chunks of life. It left me grieving a ghost-life I could still feel, even though it never truly happened.

By the time I visited the exhibition in 2023, I had recovered. But the memory of those episodes lingered and as I walked through rooms filled with fantasy’s most iconic portals, I couldn’t shake one thought:

What if those dreams weren’t just neurological storms?
What if they were rifts?

What if they tore open the veil between worlds?

What if Alice in Wonderland wasn’t whimsical, but dangerous, more Pan’s Labyrinth than teacups and riddles?

And what if the portal wasn’t a rabbit hole… but a person?

That’s when Veilbound was born.

💔 A haunting romance.
🕳 A twisted retelling of Alice in Wonderland.
⏳ A story where illness becomes the portal between fates.

Veilbound – Story Summary & Pitch

What if the illness you feared was the only way back to your soul’s lost love?

In the wilds of Dartmoor, Alice lives a quiet life until seizures begin. Her mind and body, drawing her into a dangerous, dreamlike world. This shadow realm a warped Wonderland tinged with the eerie beauty of Pan’s Labyrinth is ruled by a Fae prince, Thameth Dare (The Mad Hatter anagram). But Alice’s presence fractures his kingdom. Each seizure disrupts the magic, distorting the fairies, twisting the balance.

As the lines blur between illness and enchantment, Alice and Thameth uncover a buried truth: they were lovers once, in another life. Their selfish devotion to each other destroyed a world. Now cursed to live apart, they must face the cost of their past devotion before they can ever be reunited.

Caught between healing in the real world or surrendering to the Fae realm to stay with him, Alice must make an impossible choice: Love or life. Memory or reality.

To break the curse and reunite with the soul she once lost, Alice must learn the hardest lesson of all: True love should never cost you everything.

🌿 Dartmoor… or Dromorta?

The story is set between the moody, mystical moors of Dartmoor and a Fae realm that is literally an anagram of it. I’ve had a bit too much fun playing with names. I’d love your help choosing the final one:

Vote below and help shape the world!

✍️ Years Later, Still Haunted

Though I’ve been well for some time now, coming back to this story isn’t always easy. Writing something born from a deeply isolating time even years later can still feel exposing. Vulnerable.

But there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m ready to pick up the pen again. If this story, born in the space between fantasy and survival, still has something left to say.

Would you read Veilbound?
Should I keep going?

Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from you.

Sample from Veilbound:

Alice had been working in the gift shop since she was sixteen. At first, it was just a summer job. Something to fill the time between GCSEs and whatever came next. Then “next” never quite arrived. The job stuck. So did she. Ten years on, she was still here. Still scanning mugs that read I Got Lost on Dartmoor and All I Got Was This Bloody Mug, still folding maps no one ever folded back the right way.

The signage had changed. The fudge supplier had changed. Alice hadn’t.

She leaned against the shop’s wide front window now, staring out at the moor beyond. Rain stitched fine diagonal lines across the glass. Everything looked slightly tilted. Sheep hunched under the shadow of Hound Tor, which rose in the distance like a giant’s cracked knuckles. The landscape bled into the sky in blurred watercolour.

One raindrop in particular had caught her eye. It moved slow, deliberate, trailing down the glass with all the weight of meaning. Inside it, upside down, was the world. Trees hanging from sky. Gorse like smoke. A stone wall meandering sideways across what should have been ground.

If she stared long enough, she could almost believe it. That this was the real world, and the one behind her; fluorescent strip lights, discount postcards, was the dream.

“Alice?”

The owner’s voice drifted in from the back. Over the years, Alice had worked under three shopkeepers. They came and went. She stayed.

“Can you take Jasper out for a leg-stretch? Looks like he’s getting antsy.”

She glanced down. Jasper, the ancient spaniel-cross, was already nosing the door, tail swishing in slow arcs. His fur smelled permanently of wet wool and something faintly floral, probably lavender from the gift soaps he liked to sleep beside.

The air outside smelled of peat, mist, and granite.

They followed the gravel path behind the shop, where it quickly gave up pretending to be a path and surrendered to the moor. Here, the land rolled wide and open, patched with bracken and bruised with bogs. Wistman’s Wood sat in the valley below, a tangle of mossy oaks that looked older than memory. Alice had once tried to draw it. She gave up halfway through. It didn’t look real on paper either.

Jasper trotted ahead, following invisible trails only dogs believed in. The rain beaded on his back. Alice pulled her hood tighter. Off to the left, a clutch of ponies grazed near Crockern Tor; manes tangled, eyes half-lidded. The wind curled around her boots like a bored cat.

She’d walked this route more times than she could count. It had once been her escape. Lately, it felt more like orbit.

As they rounded a bend near Devil’s Elbow, the mist thickened. Shapes lost their edges. The world went soft at the seams.

That’s when it happened.

First, a flicker; something behind her eyes. Then a prickle. A tightening coil just under her ribs. Her heart knocked once, hard, like it had miscounted a beat. Then again.

A wrongness settled in.

It was like the beginning of a thought she couldn’t finish, familiar, but unreachable. Her fingers twitched. Her vision shimmered at the edges.

She stopped walking.

The wind faded. Sound folded in on itself.

She felt the moment her body slipped out from under her. Not physically, not yet — but she knew. She could feel it coming like a shadow crossing overhead.

Jasper barked once; sharp, worried.

Then everything gave way.

Her legs crumpled. Her knees struck the ground. She didn’t feel it. Her mouth filled with the taste of metal; copper, old blood, static. A fizzing started in her limbs, spreading in waves she couldn’t ride out.

And then nothing worked. Not her arms, not her voice, not even her breath. She was inside her body and outside it all at once, watching herself fall, unable to stop it.

Her thoughts detached, became light things, spinning, stuttering, vanishing. Everything else was noise; grey, underwater noise.

She wanted to say something. Anything.

But speech had been stripped away.

Then came the dark. Not a sleep, not a dream but a slipping. A weightless, floating collapse into something without edges.

And just before it swallowed her whole just before the world turned itself inside out, her mind returned to the raindrop again.

Alice wasn’t sure how long she’d been out cold for, but by the time she came to, Jasper was nowhere to be seen or heard. She slowly raised her head from the floor.

Grass tickled her cheek, not the coarse, wet turf she remembered, but something finer. Soft as hair. She sat up, blinking. Her coat clung to her, damp and heavy, but the air didn’t feel cold anymore. It felt... still. As though the world was holding its breath.

The moor was gone.

Or rather, it wasn’t. It was almost Dartmoor. But not.

The land rolled out in familiar swells, tors in the distance, bracken underfoot but the colours were wrong. Too deep. The sky above was a sickled shade of blue-black, tinged with violet and pulsing with faint, root-like veins of light. The tors weren’t grey granite anymore, but blackened, slick, as though burned. And the trees, God, the trees.

Where Wistman’s Wood should have been; a grove of bone-white oaks stood twisted and warped, each branch ending in a shape that looked far too much like fingers. They creaked in the windless air, even though nothing moved.

Alice staggered upright, her legs uncertain. She scanned the horizon, her eyes snagging on shapes that didn’t quite make sense, a hill that seemed to lean toward her, a rock that shimmered when she looked away.

“Jasper?” she called, voice rough. Nothing answered. Not even an echo.

And that was the strangest thing of all.

There was no sound. No birds. No wind. Not even the usual drone of insects. It was a silence so thick it had a shape pressed in against her skin like velvet gone sour.

She took a hesitant step forward. The grass gave underfoot like sponge. In the near distance, a river carved a gleaming path through the moor, but the water shimmered black, like oil. Across its surface, something moved slow, deliberate and vanished beneath with a soundless ripple.

The world around her was recognisable, but off like a song remembered slightly out of tune. There was no sky as she knew it. No sun. And yet everything was lit, the way the inside of a dream is lit: not from above, but from nowhere. From everywhere.

She turned a slow circle.

There were hoofprints in the soil. Small. Cloven. And not made by any pony she knew. They led from the place she’d fallen and vanished into a thin copse of trees that shouldn’t have been there at all. Each trunk was pale, and pulsed faintly beneath the bark like something alive had grown inside them and wanted out.

A low whisper passed through the trees.

Alice spun. “Hello?”

No answer. But she felt it now a presence. Not behind her. Not around her. Underneath her.

The ground hummed.

She knelt again, half-expecting the seizure to return. To pull her back to something solid. But the earth here smelled wrong, sweet and fungal and old, like mushrooms growing in a crypt.

A slow breath escaped her lungs. Her heart was hammering, trying to pretend she was still home. But she wasn’t. She was still on the moor. Still in Dartmoor. But… not.

The first sound to return was the crackle.

Not of fire but of movement. Twigs, dry leaves, something brittle being crushed underfoot.

Alice turned slowly. The trees behind her, the pale, finger-boned things had multiplied. Or moved. It was hard to tell. But they weren’t empty now.

Figures emerged.

They were human-shaped, roughly. But they wore the moor itself like skin, tangled bramble limbs, moss for hair, faces built from bark and peat. One had stones where its eyes should be. Another’s hands ended in thorns. They didn’t walk so much as creep, shifting low to the ground, shoulders twitching with unnatural rhythm.

One of them opened its mouth. Nothing came out. Not a growl. Not a breath. But every hair on Alice’s arms lifted. She ran.

The landscape blurred stones slick and lichen-slick, gullies opening beneath her feet. Branches clawed at her sleeves. The air pulsed. The sky deepened to a sickle-black dome. She didn’t know where she was going just away. From the things that didn’t speak. From the ones made of wilderness and silence.

Behind her, the creatures moved fast. Too fast. Their limbs cracked and reformed as they ran, growing and reshaping with every stride. She could feel them gaining. She leapt a stream, skidded down a slope. Her breath was sharp metal. Her heart was somewhere near her throat.

Then her feet left the ground.

She yelped, legs kicking midair. Her coat bunched at the shoulders, pulled taut. A hand had grabbed her collar. She twisted in the air, looking up and her breath caught in her throat. The world below twisted, blurred. The thorn-creatures shrank into the landscape, nothing more than crawling roots and shadows. Wind tore past her ears. But there were no wings. No roar of air displacement. Just a silence so complete it roared in her head. She twisted mid-air, trying to see what held her. She caught only fragments.

A shape above her. Broad. Dark. Not a face not clearly but the sharp suggestion of one, framed in shadow. Feathers glinted, black and sleek. Not attached to wings exactly more like they were part of him, trailing from his coat, or maybe his skin. And his eyes just a flash silver as moonlight on a river, glancing down at her.

She wanted to scream. Or speak. Or move. But her body was numb, suspended somewhere between air and dream. Her hand reached up instinctively, trying to push away, to steady herself.

Her fingers grazed the edge of his sleeve then brushed his skin. And the world disappeared.

She reached up, panicked, trying to break free not understanding, only reacting. Her fingers closed around his wrist. And the world blinked.

Hospital light. Sharp, sterile, utterly mundane. Alice gasped, the sound raw in her throat and bolted upright. The bed beneath her was hard. Scratchy sheets. An IV in her hand. The steady, rhythmic beep of a heart monitor.

“Alice!”

Her mother’s voice cracked as she leaned forward, grabbing her hand. Her dad hovered behind her, paler than usual, eyes wide and bloodshot. “You’re alright, love. You’re okay,” her mum said, smoothing her hair with trembling fingers.

Alice stared at her.

Then past her.

White walls. A curtain. Rain against a real glass window. It was gone. The moor, the bramble-folk, the silver-eyed man. But her fingers still tingled where she had touched him.

📣 A Little Update on Format

Starting next month, I’ll be changing how I share my work here on Substack. Until now, I’ve been posting both my creative piece and my craft reflections together. But going forward, I’ll be splitting them into two separate posts each month, one focused on the creative piece, and one on the behind-the-scenes process.

This way, each part gets its own space to breathe, and you can engage with them at your own pace. You’ll always know what’s coming:

• 🖋️ Creative Piece on the 1st

• 🧠 Craft Notes on the 16th

I hope this gives you a clearer window into both the writing and the process behind the writing. As always, thank you for being here; I love sharing this journey with you.