I was twelve years old when I first tried to write a fantasy novel. I didn’t know what I was beginning. I only knew there was something inside me—a voice, an image, a pull—that needed to be expressed. It started as a NaNoWriMo attempt. I didn’t realise that the characters I created would call me back again and again—even when everything else in my life fell apart.

Seven years later, at nineteen, I began again properly, this time with intention. A small room. A cheap laptop. Four characters who had lived in my mind for seven years already. A question I couldn’t yet phrase. An image I couldn’t shake: a young, beautiful queen overlooking the invasion of her city by a fleet of black ships, manned by twisted monsters.

The work was raw—uneven, naive, unpolished in every way a first draft can be—but it felt alive. Writing didn’t feel like invention; it felt like excavation. Each sentence revealing something buried just beneath the surface of my imagination—raw clay I didn’t yet know how to shape, but knew I would return to when I had the hands for it.

There was urgency in that early writing though, and innocence too. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I wasn’t even trying to write well—I was trying to follow whatever it was that kept tugging at me from the dark.

Looking back now, I realise I was already asking myself a question I didn’t yet know how to answer: What drives different people to chase power?

What surprised me was how rapidly the novel outgrew me.

Minor characters demanded their own arcs. Lore deepened on its own, almost without my input. Throwaway details rooted themselves and grew into myths. Timelines fractured and expanded. The world behaved like something organic, something intent on becoming larger than its maker.

At some point I realised it wasn’t a single novel anymore. It couldn’t be. The story had become unruly, complex, like its own universe—far too wide for the container I’d imagined for it.

The world grew faster than I did. And for years, I struggled to keep pace.

Life got complicated. Writing didn’t always survive those complications. But the story did.

There were years when I barely touched the novel. Yet certain images refused to fade. Certain characters wouldn’t die. Sometimes, out of nowhere, I’d open up old notes as if visiting a place I used to live.

It wasn’t ambition pulling me back. It was something closer to homesickness.

Sometimes you leave the story, but the story waits and calls you home.

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The transformation happened slowly, over years of returning and leaving and returning again. But eventually, I saw the whole shape. Not perfectly—but clearly enough.

The timelines spanning generations.

The crystallising mythology.

The way the characters had aged with me—and the world had matured as I did.

What began as a child’s attempt at a novel had become a mythos. A four-book epic with companion volumes before and after, rooted in an image first glimpsed at twelve—maybe even before then.

Only a handful of elements from that first draft survived; a single city, a few faces, the seed of a conflict. But something essential endured: a growing sense of truly knowing these characters and places.

I’m 31 now, and the years between then and now have taught me patience, and that some stories take time because you take time. A story can become a companion. It can wait for you to become the person able to write it well.

And now, finally, I feel ready—not because the story changed, but because I have.

With that clarity came another: I had spent years orbiting the work instead of entering it fully.

For a long time, I tried writing short stories and side projects between chapters. Different worlds. Different tones. Experiments for the sake of variety.

Each time I switched worlds, something fractured. The momentum broke. The energy dimmed. And every time I returned to the series, I felt whole again.

I’ve come to realise what’s been true for years: my passion as a writer is the series—not the side projects.

I’m grateful the story stayed. Grateful it survived the years when I couldn’t give it what it needed. Grateful to be returning with clearer eyes, steadier hands, and a deeper sense of purpose.

This doesn’t feel like beginning something new. It feels like finally stepping onto the path I’ve been circling for years.