Plot Summary
Prologue
Two stories open on the same fine day. In Scotland, a boy named Christopher Forrester1 is about to encounter something inhuman near a forbidden hilltop. Somewhere across the hidden Archipelago — thirty-four enchanted islands where mythical creatures still thrive — a girl named Mal Arvorian2 has just returned from flying over the treetops in her magical coat, when a knock at her door announces a man with a knife.
These two lives, separated by an ocean and a secret, are about to collide — because the ancient magic sustaining the islands is failing, the creatures are dying, and something terrible is stirring at the heart of the world's oldest maze.
The Boy Animals Choose
Since birth, animals have been drawn to Christopher1 with an urgency that borders on devotion — squirrels clustering at his feet, foxes licking his knees, swans pursuing him into ponds. His mother died when he was small, and his father, contracted by grief, sees danger in everything and warns against potato peelers and birthday candles alike.
Sent reluctantly to stay with his estranged grandfather Frank5 in the Scottish Highlands, Christopher1 finds a remote house at the foot of a steep hill — and one strict rule: never go past the treeline.
Frank5 is hiding something at the hilltop, something connected to a deep lake called the lochan. Christopher1 wears a necklace of coins brought by crows and opens his windows at night for birds, acts of quiet rebellion. He has always felt that the animals were a promise.
The Murderer at Mal's Door
That same morning, on the island of Atidina in the hidden Archipelago, twelve-year-old Mal2 buys a casapasaran — a compass that always points home — from a disreputable merchant. She taught herself to fly in a magical coat whose extra hem material must never be released, or it carries the wearer fatally high.
She marks dying patches of soil in the forest with sticks and string, knowing the creatures of her world are vanishing. When she returns home, her Great-Aunt Leonor14 cuts cake and scolds her filthy hands. Then a knock comes.
A professional killer named Kavil9 has been sent to find the flying girl. He stabs Leonor.14 The casapasaran stutters in Mal's2 pocket — she steps backward just far enough to dodge his blade. Leonor,14 bleeding, hurls an axe. Mal2 jumps from a garden wall into a swift river and is swept into darkness.
A Griffin in the Lochan
Christopher1 disobeys and climbs the forbidden hill. The ground shakes beneath him as a stampede of impossible creatures — a winged scaled horse, fanged shrews, horned squirrels, a silver-horned unicorn — pours downhill past him.
At the lochan, something small and winged is drowning. Christopher1 dives into freezing water and pulls out a baby griffin: lion's hindquarters, eagle's wings, green eyes, ears too big for its head. He carries it to Frank,5 who sits him down with sardines, whisky, and the truth.
A hidden Archipelago of magical islands exists. The lochan is a portal called the waybetween. Frank5 is its guardian — and Christopher,1 whose mother would have been next, is the heir. The ancient magic called glimourie is fading. Griffins are nearly extinct.
Two Children Cross the Waybetween
A soaking girl appears at the lochan. Together she and Christopher1 kill a kludde — a flame-eared hunting dog — by smothering its ear-fires with wet earth. Mal2 recognizes the griffin: it is Gelifen,6 her companion, the creature she hatched from an egg found at sea.
She tells Christopher1 that a murderer killed her great-aunt14 and will kill her next. She cannot go back alone. She speaks the most powerful sentence she knows: she needs his help. Christopher1 thinks of his grandfather's fury, his father's terror, the sheer impossibility of what she's asking.
He looks at the dark water, at the girl clutching her griffin, at the map of enchanted islands in his pocket. He says yes. They swim down together, touch a spark of phosphorescent green light, and vanish.
Riding Unicorns Through the Dark
They emerge in the river behind Mal's2 house. Kavil9 is inside, searching. Christopher1 hides in a willow tree while Mal2 crosses the lawn looking small and defeated — bait. When Kavil9 lunges, Christopher1 erupts with a rake, Mal2 bites the murderer's jaw, and Christopher1 swings a garden chair into the man's skull.
They tie Kavil9 and run through fields in the gathering dusk. Then Christopher1 sees what stops his breath: thirty-two unicorns, white and silver and opalescent, emerge from the forest and press around him — drawn by guardian blood.
Mal2 hoists herself atop one with Christopher's1 help. They ride at a gallop through trees while Kavil's9 howls echo behind them. At a cliff above the sea, the unicorns halt. Below, a single boat sails past, lamps lit for the evening.
Falling onto the Neverfear
Mal2 throws Gelifen6 first — the griffin plummets, half-flying, onto the boat deck. Then she and Christopher1 sprint for the cliff edge as Kavil9 breaks from the trees behind them. They leap. Wind blinds them. They crash through the sail and slam against the deck.
The boat's owner is furious: Fidens Nighthand,3 a man vast enough to make other large men look petite, with gold earrings and a voice like approaching weather. His navigator is Ratwin,7 a green-furred ratatoska — a horn-headed squirrel who threatens to bite them.
They tell Nighthand3 their story. He gives them biscuits and blankets — a sailor's grudging kindness that means more than it seems. Nighthand3 is a Berserker: a warrior born without the capacity for fear. His boat is called the Neverfear.
Nighthand Topples the Lamp Posts
At the port city of Bryn Tor, the Azurial Senate arrives — a circular stone building carried through the sky by harnessed longmas, set down with surgical precision in the town square. Inside, a marine scientist named Irian Guinne4 testifies about dying ocean creatures, dead mermaids, and a ruptured ecosystem.
The senators offer six months of bureaucratic delay. When Irian4 drops to her knees to beg, they have her arrested. Christopher1 and Mal,2 barred as minors, are caught climbing in through a window. Then Nighthand3 acts.
With the glamry blade — a dagger that cuts any material — he slices through a circle of iron lamp posts, which topple like dominos in a cascade of shrieking metal. In the chaos, all four escape. Irian,4 whose quiet voice makes strangers hush to listen, joins their quest for the sphinxes.
The Kraken Spares the Girl
Sailing toward the sphinx peninsula, a kraken surges from waters it should never inhabit — displaced by the failing glimourie. Its tentacles crush the Neverfear. Nighthand's3 first mate15 is swallowed.
But the kraken does something inexplicable: it lifts unconscious Mal2 from the wreckage and lays her carefully on a piece of driftwood, as though handling something sacred. Then it pulls the ship and everything else beneath the waves. A nereid named Galatia rescues the survivors on hippocamps, telling Christopher1 she could smell the glimourie on Mal2 and knew her for what she is.
Nighthand3 grieves his lost crewmate in silence — Berserkers do not weep, he insists, though his eyes tell another story. In the City of Scholars, a wealthy woman named Anja Trevasse10 lends them a new ship. The nereid's cryptic words lodge in Christopher's1 mind.
The Sphinxes' Written Mountain
They climb the sphinx peninsula — Christopher1 falls and is saved by Mal's flying coat, which he uses to soar back to the clifftop. The sphinx matriarch Naravirala8 poses riddles: Nighthand3 answers breath, Irian4 answers a book, Mal2 answers a person, Christopher1 answers day and night.
Satisfied, Naravirala8 tells them the history. Three thousand years ago, the Immortal — an eternal soul born from the world's first apple tree — sealed the Archipelago's protection. Leonardo da Vinci later built an impossible maze around the source of all magic: the Glimourie Tree.
A hundred years ago, an Immortal named Marik, revolted by eternal memory, drank a potion of forgetting that severed the chain of knowledge. No Immortal since has known who they are. Something has now entered the unguarded maze and is devouring the tree from within.
Malum Means Apple
Back in the City of Scholars, two thugs attack them — sons of a fortune teller who read Mal's2 palm and glimpsed something so frightening she returned the coin. One boy blurts what Kavil9 has been telling people: Mal2 is the lost Immortal, and there is money for her capture.
Christopher1 fights them off, but the accusation lodges. At midnight he jerks awake with the word his sleeping brain finally caught. Malum — the name a seer gave Mal2 in a trance — means both mischief and apple in Latin.
Apple: the fruit of the first tree, from which the Immortal soul was born. He shakes Mal2 awake. The casapasaran in her pocket spins wildly, then locks due north, pointing toward the Glimourie Tree. Everything aligns: the kraken's tenderness, the nereid's recognition, her name.
The Last Griffin Falls
Mal2 refuses the burden — she will not carry eternity, will not remember every death ever witnessed. She and Christopher1 flee the boat at night. In a moonlit fountain square, Kavil9 ambushes them.
Nighthand3 arrives and kills the murderer — but Gelifen,6 who flew at Kavil's9 blade to protect Mal,2 is found bleeding among the fountain stones. The wound is too deep. The last griffin dies as the city clocks strike. Christopher1 and Mal2 kneel together in red-stained water, the small body held between them.
They bury Gelifen6 in a royal forest cemetery beneath a great oak. Mal2 carves a stone honoring the last and best griffin. Over the grave, her muddy fists white at the knuckle, she makes her vow: she will take the potion, enter the maze, and destroy whatever lurks inside.
Poison, Gold, and Betrayal
The quest demands three things. At the Immortal's abandoned palace, Nighthand3 battles nearly fifty venomous karkadanns while Christopher1 finds a dryad-wood boat called the Ever Onward sitting on a dining table. A karkadann horn pierces Nighthand's3 arm, its poison spreading fast.
On a tiny island, Christopher1 climbs a burning-hot golden tree and negotiates with its guardian: Jacques,11 a jaculus dragon the size of a hummingbird, who agrees to release them in exchange for a name and a promise to be remembered in the outer world.
On the Island of Murderers, the exiled centaur Petroc12 brews the potion overnight — then hurls the vial into the sea. Christopher1 dives into dark water and catches it. Petroc12 steals their ship, but the irreplaceable potion is saved.
Mal Remembers Everything
With Nighthand3 critically ill, Irian4 reveals her secret: she carries nereid blood and can summon help with an underwater call in the sea's own language. She touches Nighthand's3 face for the first time — the look of someone at sea who has suddenly sighted land — and flies with him to a centaur healer on Anja's10 longma. Christopher1 and Mal2 sail alone to the Island of Dryads.
In a circular clearing, the dryad queen Erato heats the potion over dryad fire — the hottest flame in existence. Mal2 drinks in one gulp. She collapses, speaking in dozens of languages: English, Arabic, Dragon, Sphinx. She weeps and laughs as centuries of memory pour through her. She wakes knowing the maze's 152 turns — but her legs will not carry her.
The Man Inside the Tree
Christopher1 carries Mal2 to the island of Arkhe. They enter the maze together, crawling under poison-tipped arrows, reciting the path memorized on the boat. But at the chasm — widened by the creature within — her legs fail. Christopher1 swings across on a rope alone.
The lights end. A grey mist seeps into him, flooding his mind with jealousy, despair, and the conviction that goodness is a lie designed to control the weak. He fights an unseen creature in total darkness. He counts his turns.
At the center, he finds the Glimourie Tree — and grafted into its trunk, a human body. Francesco Sforza,13 a descendant of the man who built the maze, found hidden plans a century ago and has spent a hundred years devouring the tree's power, breathing dread into the dark.
Into the Somnulum
Sforza13 hurls Christopher1 across the cavern and suffocates him with mist. Christopher1 fights with a kitchen knife, but the creature is impervious — tree-armored, a century strong. Then a shout rings through stone. Mal2 flies in, low and fierce, arms outstretched, and throws the glamry blade to Christopher's1 feet.
He snatches it and hacks where man meets tree until they separate. Sforza13 collapses, withered and ancient. They drag him into sunlight — but he rises, sending grey mist billowing across the world.
Mal2 cuts the final stitches from her coat's hem, releasing its forbidden power. She kisses Christopher1 on the cheek, whispers one sentence in his ear, and seizes Sforza.13 She flies them both straight up into the Somnulum's pure burning light. A flash. Silence. Then music rises from the sea.
Epilogue
The glimourie surges back through soil and sea. A funeral march of sphinxes, nereids, centaurs, dryads, unicorns, and ratatoskas honors Mal2 on a stretch of sand where land meets water — the greatest assembly of creatures anyone living has seen.
Christopher1 rides a red-winged dragon to a portal and returns to Scotland, where his grandfather's5 cry shakes the trees and his father's roar of pride shakes the world. They feast on too much food, prepared each day in hope during the weeks Christopher1 was gone.
Somewhere in the Archipelago, at the moment of Mal's2 flight, a baby is born who laughs and weeps without pause, clenches tiny fists, and juts a tiny jaw. The Immortal lives on. What Mal2 whispered before she flew was a single fierce yes, spoken three times — her answer to the world.
Analysis
Rundell builds her central question around Marik, an Immortal who chose to forget: is humanity worth the pain of knowing it fully? The villain answers no. Francesco Sforza13 is not a fantastical evil but a recognizable one — a man so terrified of being ordinary that he grafts himself into the Glimourie Tree rather than remain exposed to the world's indignities. The manticore diagnoses this precisely: fear married to greed married to power drives human destruction. Sforza's13 century of isolation is both metaphor and consequence; absolute power demands absolute solitude.
Against this, Rundell sets a twelve-year-old girl whose ultimate answer is yes. Mal's2 arc from furious refusal to agonized acceptance is a genuine philosophical reckoning, not a simple hero's journey. She understands what Marik understood — eternal memory means eternal grief — and still drinks. The potion incapacitates her, leaves her speaking in tongues, barely able to walk. Knowledge here is not a superpower but a weight that threatens to shatter the body carrying it.
The book systematically dismantles every adult institution the children approach. The Senate delays. Anja10 betrays. The centaur12 double-crosses. Salvation comes instead from two children, a fearless drunk, a scientist hiding her nereid blood, and a squirrel navigator. Rundell's deepest argument echoes the sphinx Naravirala:8 great power must never reside in one person but be shared among imperfect many — because the alternative is Sforza,13 alone with his hunger in the dark.
The flying coat's hem — extra material that must never be released, or it carries the wearer fatally high — is the novel's most elegant device. When Mal2 cuts those stitches, she chooses to exceed her limits at the cost of herself. Her whispered yes, the story's final word, answers Marik's despairing no: an insistence, fierce and fragile and absolute, that the world — with all its darkness — is worth choosing.
Review Summary
Impossible Creatures has received mixed reviews, with many praising its imaginative world-building, lyrical prose, and engaging characters. Some compare it favorably to classic fantasy works, while others find it derivative or lacking depth. Critics appreciate the book's adventure elements and mythical creatures but note pacing issues and underdeveloped themes. While some hail it as a modern classic, others feel it falls short of the hype. The book seems to resonate more with younger readers, offering a magical journey filled with friendship, courage, and wonder.
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Characters
Christopher Forrester
The guardian's heirSince birth, animals have flocked to Christopher with an urgency that borders on devotion—squirrels at his feet, foxes at his knees, swans pursuing him into ponds. His mother died when he was small, and his father, contracted by grief, sees danger in everything and warns against potato peelers and birthday candles alike. Christopher loves his father but chafes against the restrictions, secretly opening windows for birds and wearing a necklace of coins brought by crows. Tall, gangling, with finely made hands and a face that takes on the look of a drawn bow near animals, he carries a burning hope that life holds something larger than what he has yet seen. He is loyal in the absolute sense—the kind who dives into freezing water before thinking, and follows a stranger through a portal on faith.
Mal Arvorian
The girl who fliesRaised by her Great-Aunt Leonor14 on the island of Atidina after her mother died in childbirth, Mal taught herself to fly in a magical coat—through years of broken ankles, snapped wrists, and bloody knees. She is fierce, prickly, prone to blushing when embarrassed, and carries herself with a chin-jutting imperiousness that masks deep vulnerability. In the sky she moves with absolute grace; on the ground she calls herself grubby and awkward. She marks dying soil patches in the forest with homemade stakes, a solitary scientific mission the adults dismiss. Her devotion to her griffin Gelifen6 is total and unguarded. Her name, given by a seer in a trance, carries a meaning she does not yet understand. Mal runs toward danger not from courage but from an inability to look away from what needs doing.
Fidens Nighthand
Berserker without a chargeA man whose physical presence makes other large men look ballerina-esque, Nighthand is a Berserker—a warrior genetically incapable of fear. He carries gold earrings worth enough to buy his coffin wherever he dies, drinks prodigiously, and navigates the world with the blunt-force grace of someone who has never needed diplomacy. His dagger can cut anything; his preferred response to most problems is violence executed with extraordinary elegance. Beneath the bravado lives a profound aimlessness: his historical role is to guard the Immortal, and without one, he has drifted into trading and drinking. He shows tenderness only accidentally, in moments that shock him as much as everyone else. He insists Berserkers do not weep and do not love—claims that grow less convincing as the journey deepens.
Irian Guinne
Marine scholar with silver bloodA marine scientist whose quiet voice makes strangers hush to listen, Irian studies the ocean's failing magic with a scholar's precision and patient courage. She dresses deliberately plainly to avoid being watched and hides a lineage connecting her to the creatures of the deep sea. Her intelligence is matched by a capacity for decisive action under pressure that startles those who mistake her stillness for passivity. She is drawn to boats and libraries—and to questions that have no single answer.
Frank Aureate
Guardian of the waybetweenChristopher's1 grandfather, a man of heft and bushy eyebrows who dresses beautifully in patched green corduroy. He guards a portal between the human world and the enchanted islands from his remote Scottish hilltop. He knits jumpers, stocks his pantry with anchovies, and delivers world-altering revelations with dry understatement. His grief for his daughter—Christopher's1 mother—is quiet and permanent, shaping his cautious disagreements with Christopher's1 father over how much truth the boy can handle.
Gelifen
The last living griffinA baby griffin with a lion's hindquarters, eagle's wings, and ears comically too big for his head, hatched by Mal2 from an egg she found at sea. He radiates physical warmth, eats with courteous table manners, and expresses love by biting, scratching, and vomiting on his favorites. He is the last of his kind—a fact Mal2 has never spoken aloud. His bond with Mal2 is total: he sleeps on her pillow, tucks into her sweater, and watches her with green eyes full of steady trust.
Ratwin
Ratatoska navigatorA green-furred, horn-headed ratatoska—a squirrel the size of a cat—who serves as Nighthand's3 navigator. She collects compass points and water-routes rather than the gossip typical of her species. She speaks in mangled but vivid English, threatens to bite anyone who annoys her, and provides a squirrel's-eye reality check on human foolishness throughout the journey. Her loyalty to Nighthand3 is fierce and practical.
Naravirala
Sphinx matriarchLeader of the sphinx clan, ancient and massive, with white-freckled fur and the face of distilled knowledge. She asks riddles by tradition but privately finds them tedious, preferring questions with no single answer. Her counsel is fierce and unsentimental, and she carries the weight of knowing the Archipelago is dying. She licks wounds to heal them and speaks truths that cut deeper than teeth. Her mountainside is etched with centuries of sphinx writing—histories, philosophies, and songs carved into stone to last a thousand years.
Adam Kavil
The hired knifeA professional killer with forgettable features and clean hands, hired to find and murder Mal2. Promised power by an unseen master, he chose to side with darkness over hope, believing that siding with rising power is wiser than clinging to decency.
Anja Trevasse
Jeweled city matriarchOne of the Archipelago's wealthiest women, Anja flies a longma, collects jewels daily, and hoards secrets as her most powerful currency. She values social position above all else, making her generosity conditional and her loyalties dangerously unpredictable.
Jacques
Hummingbird-sized tree dragonA jaculus dragon barely larger than a hummingbird who guards a golden tree on a tiny island. Imperious, lonely, and desperate for recognition, he breathes fire that belies his miniature stature and has spent centuries without a name.
Petroc
Exiled centaur potion-makerA white-skinned centaur chained in gold on the Island of Murderers—the only being who can brew a particular potion. Beautiful by design but cruel in expression, he trusts nothing but blood, gold, fire, and dirt.
Francesco Sforza
The thing in the mazeThe unseen force at the heart of the labyrinth, whose hunger for absolute power drives the story's central threat. His fear of being ordinary and vulnerable to other people's whims led him to seek a monstrous form of freedom in isolation and darkness.
Leonor
Mal's great-aunt and caretakerA seventy-six-year-old woman who shows love through extraordinary baking—nut cakes, cinnamon twists, hot spiced cordial. She forbids a book-length list of things and keeps her girl close to home.
Warren
Nighthand's first mateA compact grey-bearded man in his sixties who tends the Neverfear with steady hands and offers dry observations about Nighthand's3 excesses.
Plot Devices
The Casapasaran
Compass that always points homeA small pocket compass with an engraved silver lid that Mal2 buys from a disreputable merchant. Its needle always points toward home—but home, for the Immortal, is a shifting concept. When Kavil9 attacks, it vibrates wildly, causing Mal2 to step backward and dodge his blade—saving her life through pure mechanical coincidence. Later, when Mal2 accepts her identity, it swings to point due north toward the Glimourie Tree, the Immortal's true origin. It contains glimourie in its metal, making it impossible to break or misguide. The casapasaran functions as both literal navigation tool and metaphorical identity-revealer: where it points tells Mal2 not just where to go, but who she is. It guides the final journey to the island of Arkhe.
The Glamry Blade
Dagger that cuts anythingAn ancient centaur-made blade so sharp its tip seems to vanish into invisibility. Nighthand3 purchases it from a merchant and accidentally cuts to the bone by merely tapping his thumb against it. He uses it to topple a circle of iron lamp posts, battle karkadanns, and fight the murderer Kavil9. The blade changes hands at critical moments—passing from Nighthand3 to Mal2 when he falls ill, and finally thrown to Christopher1 at the story's most desperate moment. It embodies the principle that the right tool means nothing without the right hands: each wielder brings a different kind of courage. Its power is absolute but morally neutral—capable of protecting or destroying depending on who holds it.
The Flying Coat
Wind-catching garment for flightA magical coat given to Mal2 at birth by a traveling seer who named her. Too large, with sleeves rolled up four times—when wind blows, she spreads its edges like wings and lifts into the sky. The hem contains extra material that must never be released, or it will carry the wearer higher than any human body can survive. Kavil's9 knife tears the coat during his attack, grounding Mal2 until Christopher1 sews the rip with tight overlapping stitches. The coat also works for Christopher1, saving him from a fatal cliff fall. Its hem stitches function as a limiter on the coat's full, forbidden power—a restraint whose removal represents the ultimate sacrifice of self-preservation for something greater.
The Glimourie Tree and Da Vinci's Maze
Source of all magic, fortifiedThe source of all magic in the world, the Glimourie Tree grows in a cavern at the heart of a labyrinth on the island of Arkhe. The maze was designed by Leonardo da Vinci and built by his cousin Enzo—set with arrow traps, a bottomless chasm, and 152 turns of total darkness. Only the Immortal knows the path. The tree sends glimourie into soil, air, and water, sustaining every magical creature. When the tree weakens, griffins go extinct, krakens abandon their waters, and dragons attack inhabited islands. The maze also functions as a psychological gauntlet: a grey mist of despair seeps through its passages, eroding hope and conviction in anyone who enters, making the journey as much a test of the soul as the body.
The Potion of Remembering
Restores the Immortal's memoryAn antidote to the potion of forgetting that silenced the Immortal's memory a hundred years ago. It requires chimaera bone, cetus blood, red urchin sap, dew-wort flowers, gold from a living golden tree, and must be heated over dryad fire—the hottest flame in existence. Only one exiled centaur knows the recipe. The potion is irreversible: once drunk, the Immortal remembers every life, every death, every language, and every joy and sorrow since the beginning of human existence. It physically incapacitates the drinker, who speaks in tongues and may lose the ability to walk for weeks. The potion represents the story's central tension between the freedom of ignorance and the crushing, necessary responsibility of knowledge.
