Aurora Cold

Aurora Cold writes adult epic fantasy. She is the author of The Old Hunger, a series that begins with Where Steel Failed. Her stories explore vengeance, dangerous power, and trust earned at a cost, with wonder never far from brutality.

It grew out of a fevered dream of surviving some very hard stretches of my life, the kind all of us face sooner or later. The story began as an escape, became a refuge, and then turned into a search: a way to give pain the dignity it deserves. A wound with no purpose is only pain.

One moment in Where Steel Failed holds that seed. After a storm at sea, a knight of the East rides beside Seraph, watches him torment himself, and says, “There are those who suffer, and there are those who endure.” Seraph asks whether there’s a difference. “There is a difference.” Then nothing more, for hours. Seraph turns it over and over. I keep coming back to that silence, and to what the knight finally says.

I read every day, at least an hour or two, and those are reading hours, not writing hours. Tolkien is one of the very greatest; he shaped the way I grew up and my love of fantasy. Gibran, Castaneda, Hesse, Gibson, and Asimov opened other windows I still look through. And I could never narrow that company down to a single favorite.

Maybe that’s why Seraph’s road starts at a library. At the head of a windswept valley, a monastery keeps a kingdom’s memory: dusty books, old relics, tales handed down by word of mouth. The elite soldiers ordered there grumble: they’ve fought monsters the Palace would rather not know about, and now they’re being sent to a library. I was on the monks’ side from the first page. The soldiers are about to find out what a library can keep.

In silence, or with ambient music that suits the scene. Einaudi’s music has meant a great deal to me. I never give a whole novel a soundtrack; some scenes simply have one.

Then comes the work: outlines, drafts, revisions. I keep revising until a line belongs to that person, in that moment, with what they know and what they can’t yet admit.

Silence is how I hear the pauses. At the Sanctuary, a Warrior named Reidell tosses Seraph a sword and asks, “Ready?” If there’s one thing Seraph is sure of, it’s that he’s anything but. Their whole friendship begins in the breath before he answers.