LIGHTBRINGER is here ☀

I still remember the day I started writing the book that would become Furyborn.

I was in the spare room at my mom's house--a little room with a wall of windows and a very comfy couch and a television. My brother and I spent many hours playing video games in that room. I remember passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth during our marathon gaming sessions. And I still remember the particular thrill of triumph when we finally beat a really hard level through sibling teamwork and sheer tireless determination (Treetops in the original Spyro game, anyone?).

I remember practicing my trumpet in that room, too. Our old family dog, Amos, who was part Basset Hound, would lie on the floor outside the room, press his nose to the crack under the closed door, and sing along. He especially responded to the opening trumpet solo in Mahler's Fifth Symphony. He would throw back his head and howl.

It was a good room. It was full of light.

The day I started writing the first draft of Furyborn came after a few years of daydreaming, brainstorming, and outlining. I had changed my major at school and had dedicated my life to making this project a reality. I had the solid bones of a story, enough for a whole trilogy. I knew the characters. I knew the ending.

Now I just had to start.

I queued up one of my favorite pieces of music--Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. I played it on repeat. It's a poignant, lovely, sad piece for string orchestra. It hints at epic tragedy, at loss and longing, and it has always made my chest ache with feeling. For the opening scene of Furyborn, that's exactly the backdrop I needed.

I remember sitting down on that couch, my old clunky laptop on the coffee table before me, and typing the first sentence of the book with shaking hands. Heart in my throat, palms a bit sweaty.

"She would have to bring the castle down." That was the original first sentence.

Now, the book's opening sentence is different: "The queen stopped screaming just after midnight."

And the structure of that first chapter, the prologue of Furyborn, is different too. Originally, the narrators were Rielle and Garver Randell, Simon's father. I liked being in Rielle's head during those desperate moments, but over the years, the prologue was rewritten to finally feature Simon as the sole narrator.

I love what the prologue is now. But I'll always have a profound fondness for that first version, as melodramatic and awkward as it was, typed out by my trembling fingers. I was twenty-two years old, and I'd been working on this story since I was eighteen, and it was the beginning of a journey, when anything and everything was possible, and my gut churned with hopeful butterflies, and love for these characters I'd made--a consuming, unending love--burned like stars in my chest.

Now, many years later, I'm thirty-four years old, and this story is at an end. Lightbringer, the final book of the Empirium Trilogy, is out today.

This series has seen me through the best and worst parts of my life. Besides the Empirium Trilogy, I've written and published six other novels, with two more forthcoming. I've co-authored an anthology I'm wildly proud of. I've partially written and abandoned many other stories that may never see the light of day. And each of those words--published and not--carries a piece of my heart inside it.

But nothing can compare to how much I love the story of Rielle and Eliana. I'm not sure anything else ever will. My friends and family tell me it will happen again someday, and they're probably right.

I do think, though, that nothing will ever quite feel like this again. This trilogy made me. It ushered me from adolescence into young adulthood and now, finally, to true adulthood. I've put everything I am and everything I have into making it the best possible version of itself.

And the ending of Lightbringer is the exact ending I'd planned out all those years ago. Nothing has changed. The characters' fates are what they have always been, and the sense of rightness that fills my heart when I think about those final three chapters fills me with peace.

I'm so proud of this book. I love it, and I hope you will too--you, who have read and loved and supported these books from the beginning. Thank you for that, for embracing this story and these characters with such enthusiasm and sensitivity. Your readership is a gift, and I'm grateful beyond words for it.

A couple of things I wanted to share, on this happy day: