Kev asked Aaron Lee Yeager:

What was your inspiration for "Heart of a Traitor" and do you plan any more stories in that universe? I found the setting fascinating.

Aaron Lee Yeager Good question. Believe it or not, it was all inspired by a song, Wake me up Inside by Evanescence.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wXcdYBh...

That song just gave me these chilling images of a person trapped in a nightmare, becoming a monster from the inside out, and I knew I had to write a story about it.

I always do my world building to reinforce the central theme, so I created a scenario where humanity faces an unbeatable foe, a foe born from the evils within the human heart itself.

While the demons of the Uragan are pure evil, humans are a mixture of good and evil, and I tried to paint them as such, drawing a lot from my love of civil war and middle age history. To reinforce Nariko's inner struggle, humanity is in decline, constantly losing ground it can never regain, numbly reciting ancient rituals and borrowed technology whose secrets they could never hope to inravel. There is no innovation, no true victory, only a steady withdraw further and further into a corner until inevitability.
I fully plan to continue the series. There are two more books planned, Heart of a Tyrant, and Heart of a Demon.

flag