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Lady Fortuna and the Cost of Offending Luck
Most people have a relationship with luck. They may call it good, bad, stubborn, absent-minded, or something less printable when the train leaves early. It is usually a distant relationship. Luck does not write letters. It does not hold grudges. It certainly does not look at you across a crowded room and decide that you have become a matter of personal interest.
In Speglara, things are a little less reassuring.
Chimera lives by luck. The city knows its fortunes have a source, that small successes are not always as accidental as they appear, and that the world can be persuaded to behave when the right old arrangements are maintained. But an arrangement is not the same thing as a guarantee. Magic has its own manners, and those manners are often worse than advertised.
Lady Fortuna stands at the edge of this idea: not a convenient answer to every mystery, but a reminder that luck can have weight, history and consequences. To offend luck is not merely to have an unlucky afternoon. It is to discover that chance, which everyone assumed was neutral, may have been taking notes.
Gibberish has a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This alone would be enough to make a man uneasy around the subject. But the trouble with Gibberish is that mishap rarely remains a private matter. A cracked paving stone becomes a detour. A detour becomes a meeting. A meeting becomes a royal quest. Before long, a person begins to suspect that the universe is not simply unhelpful; it may be trying to make a point.
Speglara treats luck as a source of humour, danger and genuine mystery. A fortunate break can save a life. A bad turn can reveal character. And a city that relies on good fortune must face a difficult question when that fortune starts to fail: what do you do when the force that has always helped you is no longer inclined to help?
The answer is not simple. It involves Chimera, the Holy Banana, a royal mission, and a hero whose qualifications remain under active review.
Lady Fortuna’s role is best discovered in the story itself. For now, it is enough to say that in Chimera, luck is never just luck. Read the opening sample and step into a city where even a coincidence may have an opinion.
The Holy Banana: Why Chimera’s Luck Is Failing
There are objects that acquire importance through age. There are objects that acquire importance through power. Then there are objects that acquire importance because an entire city has, over time, built a working relationship with a banana and would now rather like that relationship not to end badly.
The Holy Banana is Chimera’s most important relic. It is not important because it is especially fashionable, although it has survived long enough to outlast several terrible hats. It matters because the city’s luck is bound up with it.
Luck is easy to dismiss when it is behaving itself. A fortunate day can look like good planning. A narrow escape can be blamed on quick feet. A door that opens when you need it to may never receive the credit it deserves. But Chimera knows luck is real because it has lived with the benefits for generations.
And now the Holy Banana is rotting.
The problem is not simply that something sacred is spoiling. The problem is what follows. As the relic weakens, Chimera’s easy margin of safety weakens with it. Coincidences become less kind. Small mishaps gain ambition. A city that has always relied on the world tilting gently in its favour begins to discover what it is like when the world changes its mind.
That is why the quest in Speglara matters. It is not about protecting an odd treasure for the sake of tradition. It is about preserving a city’s ability to carry on being itself. Chimera’s markets, streets, friendships, arguments and routines all depend, in ways large and small, on the luck that has watched over them.
Of course, no crisis arrives without an official response, and Chimera’s response is King Chicko. A king with a city to protect and a relic to save has difficult choices to make. One of those choices is to send Gibberish after the answer.
Whether this is courage, desperation, or a catastrophic misunderstanding of the word “qualified” is a question the book is happy to explore.
The Holy Banana is a comic premise with serious stakes: the sort of idea that allows a world to be funny without asking its characters to pretend that danger is not danger. In Speglara, the absurd and the urgent are travelling together, which is often where the most interesting adventures begin.
Read the opening sample to discover why Chimera needs its luck back, and why the city’s most important banana may be the least convenient thing in it.
The Lost Sword Comes to Audio
Some stories stay with you longer than expected.
I first published Det förlorade svärdet in Swedish in 2020. Since then, Timothy and Anna’s journey has continued, the series has grown into The World Within, and the books have found a second life in English.
On 21 September, The Lost Sword will be released as an audiobook on Spotify.
It is the second book in The World Within, my middle-grade fantasy series for readers aged 9–12, where colour is magic and hidden worlds are often closer than they seem.
This time, Timothy and Anna return to a world that has changed since their first journey. Old dangers remain, new mysteries appear and the story begins to reveal just how much larger the World Within really is.
For me, bringing these books into English has never felt like simply translating them. It has meant going back into stories I wrote years ago, hearing the characters again and finding the right voice for them in another language.
The Lost Colour was the beginning.
The Lost Sword takes the next step.
And there is still a lot more of The World Within left to discover.
Meet Gibberish: The Least Suitable Hero in Existence
Every great quest begins with a hero. This is one of the less useful things about great quests, because heroes are expensive to source at short notice and tend to arrive with alarming confidence.
Chimera has a crisis. Its luck is failing, the Holy Banana is rotting, and the city needs someone to travel into danger and make the problem stop. Under ordinary circumstances, this would be a job for a knight, a wizard, or a person whose family history contains an unreasonable number of swords.
Instead, it gets Gibberish.
Gibberish does not have a prophecy. He does not have a sacred blade, a dramatic cloak, or the useful ability to stride into a room and cause nearby furniture to respect him. He is not trying to become a legend. He would, on balance, prefer not to become a footnote in a cautionary tale.
What he does have is an inconvenient sense of decency. He notices when things are wrong. He feels, against all sensible advice, that somebody ought to do something. And when the somebody available happens to be him, he discovers the rather alarming difference between wanting to help and being assigned a royal mission.
That makes Gibberish the right kind of hero for Speglara. Not perfect. Not prepared. Not especially pleased. But capable of continuing after the sensible part of him has filed a formal objection.
His journey is complicated by a city full of magic, the lingering displeasure of luck itself, and companions whose usefulness is real but never entirely calming. Greenback, the tortoise with a monocle, supplies judgement in quantities that make everyone else look understocked. Grease supplies messages, magic, and a level of uncertainty that makes both services memorable. The rest of the road does its best to prove that a heroic party is simply a group of people who have not yet agreed whose fault this is.
Gibberish is not remarkable because he never fails. He is remarkable because he keeps going after failure has made its point. That is a rarer talent than swordplay, and usually more relevant.
Meet him in the opening sample of Speglara: The Hunt for the Holy Banana. He is about to receive a quest, a problem, and far too little time to object properly.
What Is Chimera? A Spoiler-Free Guide to Speglara’s City
Chimera is the sort of city that makes a strong first impression and then quietly steals your umbrella. It is magical, crowded, opinionated, and held together by a mixture of custom, coincidence, and the kind of administration that has survived chiefly because nobody can find the form required to abolish it.
At first glance, it may resemble a fantasy city: towers, markets, alleys, strange creatures, old stories, and enough mystery to make a respectable map feel underqualified. But Chimera has one vital difference. Its luck is part of the city’s daily machinery.
Luck in Chimera is not an abstract hope people mutter about before entering a raffle. It is a practical civic resource. It helps small things go right. It gives the day a useful tilt. It is the reason a loose roof tile lands beside you rather than on you, and why a person looking for a particular alley occasionally finds it before sunset.
Naturally, this arrangement has rules. Naturally, those rules are neither simple nor entirely comforting. A city that depends on luck must keep a close eye on the things that govern it, particularly when one of those things is the Holy Banana. The relic has a history, an importance, and an unfortunate tendency to make all conversations about it sound like they were invented during a long lunch.
When the Holy Banana begins to rot, Chimera does not merely face an inconvenience. Its ordinary safeguards begin to fray. The city becomes a place where the wrong meeting can happen at the wrong time, where a perfectly good plan can develop a personality, and where a king may decide that the best answer to a crisis is to send Gibberish on a quest.
Chimera is not bleak, even when it is in danger. It is a place full of people trying to get on with their lives while magic, fate, and bureaucracy make that more complicated than a person has any right to expect. That mix of peril and absurdity is the heart of Speglara.
If you enjoy fantasy settings with real stakes, odd laws, and enough wit to notice when the universe is behaving badly, Chimera is waiting. Read the opening sample to step inside the city and see what happens when luck begins to take a day off.
Welcome to Speglara: A City in Need of Luck
There are cities that are built on stone, trade, or the patient refusal of several generations to move somewhere less damp. Chimera, the city at the heart of Speglara, is built on luck.
This is not merely a poetic turn of phrase, which is fortunate, because poetry is a poor material for bridges and an even worse one for municipal drainage. Chimera’s luck is a real and precious thing: the invisible habit of the world to let its citizens arrive at the right door, miss the falling piano, and occasionally find that the suspiciously cheap pie is only suspicious in price.
At the centre of this arrangement is the Holy Banana. It is a relic, a symbol, and, in a serious blow to the dignity of relics everywhere, a banana. When it begins to rot, Chimera’s good fortune begins to rot with it. Coincidences turn unfriendly. Plans acquire sharp corners. The city finds itself in need of a solution.
This is where sensible stories would send for a knight with excellent posture and a sword that has its own coat of arms. Speglara sends Gibberish.
Gibberish is not a chosen one. He has not spent his childhood practising heroic expressions in reflective ponds. He has no legendary weapon, no grand ambition, and no reliable reason to believe that he is the best person for a royal quest. He does, however, have the sort of proximity to trouble that makes trouble feel appreciated.
Around him gathers a travelling party with varying degrees of patience: Greenback, a tortoise with a monocle and standards; Grease, a postal runner whose magic is seldom improved by haste; and companions who make the phrase “the party has arrived” sound less like a social event and more like a warning issued by a small, overworked police force.
Speglara: The Hunt for the Holy Banana is a comic fantasy adventure about a city in need, a quest in poor hands, and the awkward business of being brave when nobody has issued you the proper paperwork. It has magic, danger, peculiar rules, and a rather more civic responsibility than any banana should reasonably be expected to bear.
If that sounds like your kind of trouble, the gates of Chimera are open. Read the opening sample and meet Gibberish before the situation becomes any worse. Which, to be clear, it will.
Dressed in Dragonscales Comes to Audio
he Dragon is dead. The endless winter is broken. Polar should finally be free.
Of course, it isn't.
On 5 September, Dressed in Dragonscales, the second book in The Realm of Polar, will be released as an audiobook on Spotify.
This book goes further into the parts of Polar I enjoy most: broken timelines, ancient magic, bad decisions, desperate alliances and people trying to survive in a world that does not particularly care whether they do.
It also introduces one of the strangest characters I have written: a Traveller dressed in living Dragonscales, moving through time and changing history one life at a time.
Writing Polar has always been different from writing The World Within. It is darker, more violent, more absurd and much less interested in behaving itself.
That is probably why I like returning to it.
With The Ice Dragon’s Curse already available in audio, Dressed in Dragonscales now brings the second part of The Realm of Polar to listeners as well.
If you like dark fantasy, dragons, fractured timelines and victories that rarely come without a price, this one is for you.
How Sagan om Världen Innanför Became The World Within
In 2018, I published my first novel, Den försvunna färgen. It became the beginning of Sagan om Världen Innanför, a fantasy series about Timothy and Anna, hidden worlds, strange creatures, friendship and a form of magic built around colour.
The World Within is Johan Edfeldt’s middle-grade fantasy series for readers aged 9–12.
Det förlorade svärdet followed in 2020 and Den stora flykten in 2023.
Three books sounds suspiciously like a trilogy.
It isn't.
The World Within was built as a much larger story, with eight books planned. The first three are simply the first part of that journey. Other books, worlds and projects have appeared in between, but Timothy and Anna's story was never meant to end with book three.
Over the past few years, I have also been bringing the series into English.
Den försvunna färgen became The Lost Colour. Det förlorade svärdet became The Lost Sword. And Den stora flykten became The Great Escape.
Together, they are now The World Within.
Translating them has been more than changing Swedish words into English ones. It has meant returning to stories I first wrote years ago, looking at them again and finding the right voice for the same characters and world in another language.
And now they are moving beyond the page as well.
The audiobook of The Lost Sword will be released on Spotify on 21 September 2026, continuing Timothy and Anna's journey through The World Within.
Three books written. Three books translated.
Five still waiting.
The Lost Colour as Audiobook
The Lost Sword as Audiobook is coming on September 21st.
Någonting har legat begravt länge
Någonting har legat begravt länge.
Inte bara i jorden.
I historien.
Vi bygger vår bild av det förflutna av det som råkat överleva – några ristningar, några föremål, några ruiner. Resten är tystnad.
Men tystnad är inte samma sak som tomhet.
Under en längre tid har jag arbetat med en ny roman. En berättelse som börjar på nyårsnatten 1984, när fyra vänner ser något falla från himlen över ett svenskt fjäll.
Det de hittar borde inte finnas.
Och ändå ligger det där.
Därifrån sträcker sig gåtan bakåt genom människans historia – mot förlorade språk, glömda platser och spår efter sådant vi kanske aldrig varit menade att hitta.
Jag tänker inte avslöja mer ännu.
Bara detta:
Vissa hemligheter begravs för att glömmas.
Andra väntar på rätt tid att bli upptäckta.
Snart börjar jag berätta mer.
🎧 The Lost Colour — Now Available as an Audiobook
A blue parrot appears outside Timothy Scott’s classroom window.
Then comes a message in a bottle, addressed to him by name.
Before long, Timothy and his new friend Anna are drawn into the World Within — a hidden realm where colours hold magic, impossible creatures roam, and a darkness thought defeated is beginning to stir again.
Step into The World Within.
When ten-year-old Timothy Scott encounters a mysterious blue parrot carrying a message meant for him, an ordinary summer becomes the beginning of an extraordinary adventure. Together with his new friend Anna Calor, Timothy enters a hidden world of colour magic, strange creatures, ancient secrets, and gathering darkness.
The Lost Colour, Book One in The World Within, is now available as an audiobook on Spotify — written and narrated by Johan Edfeldt.
✨ A magical middle-grade fantasy adventure for young listeners, families, and anyone who still believes another world might be waiting just beyond our own.
🎧 Listen now on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/2lmweQzIAWnylMpH0YcN1g?si=0279cd0aa4b74687