Long before the Arthurian legends were written down, Britain was a land of voices. Stories lived in the air in the chants of bards, the songs of warriors around firelight, and the lullabies passed quietly from mother to child. Oral tradition was the lifeblood of memory. It carried not only history but identity, a way of making sense of a fractured world.

When I was shaping the landscapes of Child of Conquest, I found myself returning again and again to the Romantics. Wordsworth’s quiet reverence for the “still, sad music of humanity” in Tintern Abbey, Coleridge’s dreamlike caverns in Kubla Khan, and Keats’s tender images of hedgerows and autumn skies all reminded me that nature is never just a backdrop. For the Romantics, the natural world was alive, breathing and restless, carrying both beauty and danger within it.

I’m so excited to share the opening of my fantasy novel Child of Conquest: Daughter of Ashes, now available on Wattpad.

Names carry echoes of the past, and in Child of Conquest: Daughter of Ashes, I chose them carefully so that they whisper history and character into the story.