Civilization

“I’m not in my world anymore.” The Civilization is a teen/YA fantasy about a girl caught between the modern world and an ancient, cursed kingdom that remembers her as a gift from the gods. Kadsa has spent years wandering across Africa with her grandfather, chasing stories of a buried homeland called Marut and the dull crystal he swears is their way back. When she slips away to reclaim her stolen identity as Skylar Labelle and find her mother in Toronto, she uncovers a missing-child case with her own face at the centre—and a web of lies that began long before she could remember. Just as she starts to pull her life toward the ordinary—school, city streets, a future she chooses herself—the crystal opens a passage into Marut, a sun-blasted kingdom trapped in perpetual darkness, ruled by a frail king, threatened by a witch, and waiting for a stranger it calls Abnr’s Gift. In Marut’s walled cities and shadow-choked forests, Kadsa must decide who she is: the kidnapped Canadian girl hoping for a new start, or the young woman whose presence can break the Dark Enchantment that has twisted people into beasts, turned warriors into stone, and cut a whole world off from the light. To survive, she has to navigate palace politics, old gods, and the expectations of a hidden prince and a shapeshifted warrior who both believe her arrival changes everything. The Civilization explores what happens when Kadsa’s three worlds—her mother’s Toronto, her grandfather’s Marut, and the African roads between—collide and ask her to choose, told through a portal-fantasy narrative that weaves together family drama, political intrigue, mythic cosmology, and survival adventure, told in accessible, character-focused prose for teen readers.