Bronte-Marie Wesson

It was very easy to see where the chain of history would go because one of the first things I learned as someone who was really into history and was going to do a history degree before I figured out that higher education was not for me was the first thing an empire does is try to devour its neighbors.

Once it's decided it wants to do this, the first person it leans on is those next to it.

And Logar is not even the first country that's been next to the original Fiocre.

Because Fiocre was a very different beast once upon a time.

And the people who run it now are not even the people who own it.

But they've just been creeping over.

Over this 400, 500 year period.

And no one thus far has been able to withstand the cultural pressure.

But even then you have...

zamorad who is the in-between and everyone you meet in the book who's zamoradi is still proudly zamoradi despite the fact that they no longer have their country they still speak the language they still dress they have no interest in cultural assimilation because i think this myth we have of cultural assimilation is kind of a lie we can pretend we're all a melting pot but you can still see the colors even when you've melted down the crayons effectively

Yeah.

And that was kind of all very Irish for me when it came in.

And I really wanted to chuck in some old school scary fairies in there because I grew up hearing stories of like leaving milk on the windowsill.

And not going wandering in the woods and why you have holes in your socks and how you should tidy up after bed, otherwise the brownie's going to steal things from you.

I think culturally sometimes fantasy has forgotten what fairies are because nowadays we have fairies that are just sexy elves.

Like that's the version that's now amassed in pop culture, whereas fairies, as we used to tell them back in the day, they were folklore and they varied wildly from one tavern to the next because it was some guy in a tavern telling you a story about a changeling.

Or someone who wandered out of the woods barefoot or the Kelpie down the way.

And a lot of those stories are social tools for other things.

Like there's a whole discussion to be had about changelings and what they were originally about.

Different story.