Targeted Age Group:: 25+

When a new magic dominion appears on the world map, Lila, blogger and traveler at heart, can’t help but add it to her travel bucket list. Especially that it is not a mere utility dominion like transit route or proving ground. Such things do not impress you anymore if you are a creator and have your own little dimension that you treat like a portable store. But an island wandering on the ocean, where grow magic plants that no one has ever heard of and where live people who for centuries have hidden their existence from the rest of the world? There is nothing left but to wait until diplomats sign the proper documents and the authorities of the mysterious island, which internauts call Atlantis, issue an entry permit.

Lila hits the road feeling like a pioneer and explorer of unknown lands. So what if first she has to endure all the inconveniences of magical means of transportation? At least she saved on tickets.

Traveler suspects there are things the Atlanteans do not want to show their guests. What she does not know is that their secrets are not only about Atlantis.

And she certainly does not expect that the guide who shows her around the island will stir desires she has long forgotten.

Link To Rainy Magic, Windy Roads On Amazon Kindle Unlimited

What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
Too many fantasy books without a satisfying romance plot.

How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
They appeared one day and refused to leave me alone.

Book Excerpt/Sample
Lila lit the sun and increased the number of water molecules in the atmosphere. Then she raised the temperature and moved the warm air masses to mix them with cooler ones. When tall grass swayed heavily against the black sky, Lila muttered under her breath and adjusted the speed of the wind. If she let it rave here, it would soon become a tornado, and that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs.
It’d taken her two years to learn to stabilize this small ecosystem. There were plants here she’d chosen and planted herself and the structure she was immensely proud of.
This structure was a DIY wastewater treatment plant.
Lila loved traveling, though it wasn’t only about admiring landscapes and having adventures. Beautiful views and interesting experiences required sacrifices — Lila had come to terms with that fact a long time ago. She could endure crowded bus rides, camp in the wilderness and hike for hours. It was not so much that she didn’t need luxury but that she could not afford it too often. However, everything had its limits, and Lila had lost her composure more than once. Mostly when she desperately needed a bathroom and there was none nearby.
This wasn’t a big problem in cities. There were always some restaurants or shopping centers around. But Lila, who valued the beauty of nature above all else, often wandered in mountains, nature reserves, and national parks — finding a public restroom in those places was a challenge in itself. She enjoyed outdoor activities, but her need to be close to nature was not that strong. If someone asked her what the greatest achievement of civilization was, she would say: “a toilet.” One you could sit on. And with plumbing. A hole in the floor or a porta-potty did not count.
One day someone had asked her in the comments if she could share some tips, like smart ways of packing a backpack or useful travel accessories. There were many similar articles on the web, but she enjoyed reading them too. Even though she already knew most tips other travelers shared, she discovered something worth putting into practice almost every time. Duct tape, for example. With duct tape, one could patch a hole in a backpack or seal shoes on a rainy day, and she wouldn’t have come up with that idea if not for the other blogger’s post. Other readers also had taken the subject up, so she’d decided to write about it in her next blog post.
A few days later, she’d published her own list of travel tips, which included packing a clothesline with clips and a lunchbox with a thermostone inside, but she couldn’t stop thinking about travel needs. She remembered all those situations when she’d had to choose between carrying a heavy backpack and taking a smaller bottle of water with hope that she could buy another one later (hint: she could not), or when she’d dived into her bag only to discover she’d left something at home. Or when she’d wanted nothing but to take a shower, and it turned out the bathroom in a low-budget hotel needed more cleaning care than she. At times like this, she dreamed about teleportation. If she could teleport, she could go home anytime she wanted. Unfortunately, teleportation belonged to the realm of dreams.
Creation magic, however, did not.
At the time, Lila already had a private dimension which she’d created by tearing apart a fragment of reality and hollowing out a room through interdimensional matter. It was her training ground, a secret place where she could experiment with her powers. The only things in the space were lightcrystals on the wall, an inflatable chair, and a carpet Lila had put on the floor because she felt uncomfortable seeing cavernous blackness under her feet. When she’d come up with an idea to turn that dimension into a mobile magical cupboard, the problem was as follows: magic dominion, which was her microworld essentially, had to be attached to a particular place; otherwise, it could get lost in spacetime. Back then, the Doorway had been anchored in her closet. Because traveling with a closet wasn’t an option, she needed another solution. She needed a portable item.
She’d chosen a silver world-map locket. It was a gift from her father, and she liked it so much that she wore it almost every day. Perfect. She’d made the Doorway as small as a pinpoint, peeled it off the closet and put it in the locket. After that, she’d started searching the internet for information on how to build a sewage system.
This was how she’d come across an article about natural wastewater treatment which occurred in the soil with the help of specific microorganisms and plants. In other words, a sewage plant could look like a garden. Lila had been impressed, though she’d had a lot to learn. An assembly diagram didn’t seem complicated, but the author of the article didn’t assume that someone would want to terraform a magic dominion.
Lila had performed the magic and extended her dominion with two rooms, studied the soil types and their chemical composition, collected the samples, analyzed the assembly diagram carefully, gathered the necessary items, and, once again, she’d gotten to magic. In a few months, a black floor of the biggest room had been replaced by several feet of soil, and in the middle of the false sky appeared a large transparent lightcrystal. Lila called it the sun, though its light didn’t stimulate plant growth — the light violet crystals placed on the black metal poles did. Around the garden, right next to the smooth black walls, ran a stone path, and under the shelter in the corner stood a white container of considerable size, inside which the microorganisms did the magic of nature. In case something broke down, Lila had left the container and the pipes above the ground. As for the plants, she’d chosen grasses for the sake of simplicity. After many hours of work on her dominion, she’d cried at the sight of assembly diagrams and hardware stores, had nightmares about chemistry and headaches from doing magic intensively, but eventually, she’d succeeded. She had a mobile store with a bathroom. She’d never regretted the effort she put into its creation.
When Lila finished stabilizing the climate in the garden, she touched violet lightcrystals with magic and made their molecules vibrate. One by one, they started emitting light. She got out of the hammock, which she’d hung up in the corner on the hooks carved out of interdimensional matter, and moved toward the exit. She climbed three steps near the white container and used magic once more, this time to turn off the lightcrystal which was hanging on the ceiling like a star in the night sky. When the garden got flooded with the violet lamplight, she turned around and walked along the corridor. On the way, she passed the pipes coming out of the doorless bathroom. For this room, she’d also decided to keep it simple and bought equipment that worked without electricity and running water, like a camping shower or a flush toilet with a container she could pour water into. If she couldn’t bring the water from the outside world, she could always use creation magic. She could transform the interdimensional matter into the water the same way she’d created a bathtub as a part of the exercise. It’d taken her a couple of weeks to finish it, but she really appreciated the financial side of this project. She saved some money, after all.
The main room was bigger than at the beginning. The armchair still stood on the brown carpet, but now there was a rack and four wooden chests on both sides of the carpet. Inside the first trunk, there were spare clothes, and inside other ones were food with a long shelf life, tools, and things like a tent, a sleeping bag, or a spare backpack. On the shelves of the rack, Lila kept the items she wanted to have at hand without having to dig through the trunks. A medical kit, a roll of duct tape, scissors, a notebook, pens, a flashlight, batteries, a few small lightcrystals, a sewing kit, a clothesline, a box with SIM cards from different countries, and so on. If she didn’t need her laptop or camera, she left them here too.
In the corner, next to the Doorway, there were multiple bottles of water and a cooler. On the opposite side stood a coat hanger and a shoe rack. In the other corners, Lila usually kept souvenirs. They were empty now because she’d recently packed all the gifts and sent them by mail.
Lila went across the room, turning off all the lightcrystals on the walls except the one closest to the Doorway. The Doorway was now so small that it could be found only by someone who knew what to look for. Lila enlarged it to a size of an adult and went through it, straight to the hotel in Fukuoka. She made the Doorway small again, took the locket lying on the edge of the bed, closed it, and put it around her neck. After that, she leaned over the bed and drew the curtain, letting the daylight in.
The room she’d rented was quite small but clean and bright. There was only a narrow bed, a tiny desk, and a chair, but everything looked new including the carpet and the paint on the walls. Plus, the room was on the sixth floor and the city view wasn’t bad. Considering that the price was just a bit more expensive than accommodation in a hostel, this hotel was a gem. It never ceased to amaze her how much one could increase the level of traveling comfort, even with a tight budget, if only one had enough patience and planned things ahead. Of course, there were places where great deals could be found without planning, but in the case of more expensive countries like Japan, Lila avoided counting on luck.
She looked at the clock showing ten minutes to eleven. She had only two things planned for today: work and a dinner with acquaintances who had offered to show her around this weekend. After many days of sightseeing, she gladly welcomed the day when there was no need to go further than the other side of the street, and the only reason for doing that was the food. It was good to take a break from traveling sometimes. Waking up without an alarm clock was also a nice change.
Lila sat down at the desk and turned on her laptop. She removed a memory card from her camera and connected it to the computer. Waiting for the photos to be copied onto the disk, she ate a rice ball bought in a nearby convenience store, contemplating unintelligible writing on a bottle of green tea. Finally, browsing through her travel notebook, she selected photos she could post on her blog. Once she created an outline of the article, she started writing. A few hours later, she entered her blog admin panel address and didn’t recognize the website. After a moment she recalled Dominika saying something about transferring data to a new platform this week.
Dominika was Lila’s best friend. They’d known each other since junior high. Although at first glance they were as different as day and night, they both knew well that they really were not. When Lila had come up with the idea of starting a blog, Dominika had offered her help. Lila was entirely grateful, though she understood she could not avoid all technical issues.
Lila entered her login and password and waited for the page to reload. Clicking here and there to get familiar with the new system, she frowned more and more with each passing moment. Creating a new post differed significantly from what she was used to, and the number of available options was far greater. Sometimes she wasn’t sure what to click. Some field names looked suspicious like they were programming terms. And that empty table…
Lila opened a new tab in the browser and entered her blog address. She noticed at once that there weren’t any articles on the site. She glanced at the clock, calculated the time difference between Japan and Poland, and grabbed the phone. Dominika picked up on the third ring.
“Yo,” she said cheerfully.
“Hey, Nika.” Lila was trying to keep calm. “I saw a new CMS.”
“And how do you like it?” Dominika was bursting with enthusiasm. “Cool, isn’t it?”
“The posts are gone,” Lila blurted out. “Have you not transferred the data? Did you make a backup?”
“What? I did…” Dominika was typing quickly on her keyboard. After a short break, she did more typing. “Oh.”
Lila didn’t like that interjection.
“Dear customer, a technical problem occurred,” Dominika communicated politely. “Thank you for your patience. We will address this issue as soon as possible. Immediately, even. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for staying with us. We will call you back once the problem is solved. Instantly, in the same minute. Goodbye… I mean, until later. Sooner rather than later—”
Before her friend hung up, Lila exclaimed, “Wait! This CMS is strange!”
“I’ve sent you a link to a manual,” Dominika said in a friendly tone. “Have you read it?”
“Wait a minute.” Lila opened an unread e-mail in her inbox, clicked on the mentioned link, and skimmed the manual. “It’s so long… You said it was similar but way cooler. What was actually wrong with the previous system?”
“Everything,” Dominika replied with a hint of aggression in her voice.
“It was you who chose that technology.”
“I was young and inexperienced. I followed the trends. I believed the majority knew better. But no more. Now I know that things could be simpler. And done faster.”
“It was simple and fast. Now it is strange. Can’t we go back to the previous CMS?”
“No. More. Programming. In. That. Thing,” Dominika drawled. And she added, “Fear of data loss clouds your judgment. If you put your heart into it, you’ll like it.”
“So, shouldn’t I be afraid of data loss?” Lila asked hopefully.
“Of course not. It’s just a stupid error I’ll fix in a moment. But if you tell me to delve into the code of that, that…” Dominika was looking for the right word. Eventually, she decided not to be crude. “…that thing, you’ll put my sanity at risk. Are you ready to take responsibility for that?”
Lila sighed. “Do you promise the new one is really cool?”
“I swear,” Dominika said eagerly. “If you have a problem with something, just let me know. I’ll make a tutorial video for you.”
Suddenly, Lila heard a computer notification sound over the phone. And another one. And a few more.
“What’s up?” Dominika muttered.
Lila heard her typing. And then, suddenly, it was quiet.
“Lila, check the news,” Nika said with a strange tension in her voice. “I’ll call you later, ok? Check the latest news!”
Lila wanted to ask what kind of news she was supposed to check because there were a lot of websites and TV stations, but her friend hung up. Eventually, she entered the address of the portal on which she usually read news from Poland. As it turned out later, she could have visited any news website in the world.
Atlantis really existed.
And it had its own internet.

Author Bio:
Lena knew that someday she would write a fantasy book. That it would be a fantasy romance book became clear while reading the next epic volumes, when she caught herself more interested in character relationships than upcoming battles (but not more than magic — magic was awesome). Eventually, ideas turned into words and "Rainy Magic, Windy Roads", the first book of "Dominions", series set in a contemporary magical world, was created.

If Lena doesn’t write, she reads books (mostly fantasy novels — what a surprise). She loves travels, winter sports, and walking for hours. She secretly dreams about magic (you wouldn’t have guessed, would you?).

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