This is Maela. She’s the daughter of the High King of the Parade, the combined courts of the Seelie and Unseelie Fae, although not all Fae are members of the Parade, not by a long shot. She’s also in exile, having had ideas considered too dangerous to leave her unharmed. She is of House Dark, one of the elder Fae Houses.

When I was developing my ideas for DoD (as I call it), one of the central themes I wanted to explore was difference. Not diversity for its own sake, but how different peoples and cultures may never see eye to eye simply because their foundations rest on entirely different premises.

Having said that, I explicitly wanted to write a female protagonist whose colour (and Maela isn’t locked into being the same as this picture shows her) was starkly different to that of the other main characters.

I’ll show those characters in other posts – we have a Kitsune called Shaal, an ancient fox spirit and we have Chris, a schlubby white male student from the Great Britain.

For this story, whose ideas impact the entire world, it seemed fitting that the characters we access the tale through represent its very different elements.

I’m writing this now because the novel is done and I’m talking about it with a publisher I’ve admired for a while. I hope to have more news that I can properly share soon but in the meantime, I thought I better start talking about a book that I love, that stands on its own as a proper story but whose world is built for a properly epic cycle to be told within.