Writer's Commentary: Why I Wrote Fallen Hearts

I started Fallen Hearts in a bad winter.

That is the honest answer, and I have spent enough drafts dressing it up as something more literary that I am going to leave it bare here. I started the first book in a winter where I had been writing other things — quieter things, smaller things, books that had not landed — and what I needed, more than another careful interior novel, was a woman with a sword in a council chamber refusing to apologize. I wrote the opening of Stolen Hearts in a single sitting at a kitchen table, with three Council members and three assassins and a princess who walked in ready to lose, and by the time I went to bed I knew I had seven books in front of me whether I wanted them or not.

This is the post where I get to say what Fallen Hearts is about, underneath the politics and the swords and the slow-burn romance that runs the whole length of the saga. I have answered this in interviews. I have answered it in author letters. I am going to answer it once more, properly, in the place where my paid readers can find it.

The Question Underneath

Every series has one question that sits under it, and every author either knows what theirs is or pretends they don't. Mine is a question I have been afraid of in my own life, and a question I think a lot of romantic-fantasy readers carry whether or not they have words for it.

The question is: Can the things you have done in order to survive be put down once survival is no longer the issue?

Aria's whole arc is built on it. She survives the West Wing by accident. She survives the next three years in hiding by becoming the kind of woman who does not flinch. She wins her throne by being that woman. The catastrophe of her queenhood is that the war ends and the woman she became does not. She holds her son for the first time in a forest camp and looks down at him and does not know how to be what he needs, because what he needs is the soft version of her, and the soft version is buried under twenty-two years of bad horses and signed treaties and dispatches at the door.

Elena inherits the same problem. The poisoning at the start of Shadows of the Crown drops her into a queenhood she has not earned and does not want. She survives by becoming her mother, faster and harder than her mother ever asked her to. The rest of the series is Elena trying — and only sometimes succeeding — to put down the survival posture before it becomes her face.

Romance, in Fallen Hearts, is not decoration. Romance is the test. Both Stormborn women find love with a man who has watched them be the version of themselves that wins wars, and who is asking — gently, persistently, sometimes badly — whether there is another version underneath. Darius asks Aria. Aldric asks Elena. The men, in this series, are not rescue. They are witness. They are the people with the patience to watch a queen put the sword down for an evening, and the courage not to comment on her hands shaking afterwards.

If you read Fallen Hearts and the romances landed for you, that is why. They are the place in the books where the survival mask gets to come off. Most romantic fantasy uses the romance to build the heroine up. I tried to use mine to give her permission to come down.

What I Did Not Want To Write

I want to be honest about a piece of this.

I did not want, when I started, to write a series where the kingdom ends in democracy. I had a much simpler arc in mind — Aria reclaims her throne, raises a daughter, hands the throne to that daughter, the dynasty endures. The seventh book was supposed to be a wedding and a coronation and a slow walk into a sunset.

What changed it was Aria's hospital scene at the end of Iron and Flame. The vigil at Darius's bedside, where Aria reckons with the Nightsbane invoice she had read and not flagged. I had written Aria, by that point, as a woman whose internal certainty was a moral hazard. She knew. She had always known. Her tragedy was the gap between the knowing and the saying, measured in the bodies of the people she could have saved with a sentence.

A woman with that flaw cannot end the series on a throne. Not honestly. Whatever the marketing slot for romantic fantasy says about how these books are supposed to land, I could not in good conscience hand the kingdom over to Elena and call it a win. The kingdom Aria built was a kingdom where one woman's silent certainty kept ten thousand people in a queue waiting for her to speak. The next generation could not survive that. So Elena does not. Elena hands it over to a council. By the time her own daughter is fifteen, the throne is a constitutional courtesy. By the time Aria the granddaughter is grown, the throne is a chair in a museum.

I do not think this is a tragedy. I think it is the only honest ending. A series whose central question is can the things you did to survive be put down cannot end with the survival apparatus — the throne, the army, the absolute royal will — being kept. It has to be set down. Some readers were furious about this. I understand. I left the throne behind because I do not believe a romantic fantasy worth reading ends with the heroine still wearing the armor.

On the Romance, Specifically

Two notes on craft, while I am here.

Slow burn was a discipline, not a choice. Aria and Darius do not become physically intimate until chapter fourteen of book one. Darius does not remove the mask in front of her until chapter eight. They do not say I love you until chapter eight. I get a steady stream of letters from readers who wanted those moments earlier, and a thinner stream from readers who are glad I made them wait. The reason I made them wait is not that I am withholding. The reason is that Aria, on the page, does not let anyone in until they have proven they will not flinch from her, and the reader needed to live in that hesitancy with her. If I had given her Darius in chapter four, the reader would have learned that Aria's defenses fall to a handsome face. They do not. They fall, in chapter eight, to a man who removes a ceramic mask in a tent and tells her about the West Wing and waits — without flinching — for her to decide whether his story is hers to forgive. The slow burn was the only way to teach the reader what kind of trust this woman gives.

Elena and Aldric are a different problem. Where Aria's romance is built on witness, Elena's is built on separation. They spend most of Shadows of the Crown and Echoes of Vengeance apart, writing letters across kingdoms. They marry in The Price of Trust and immediately face a constitutional crisis that puts them in different capitals for years. The romance in their arc is not the question of whether they love each other — they do, openly and continuously. The question is whether two heads of state who love each other can stay married while disagreeing about the shape of government. They almost do not. They formally separate in the middle of book seven. They reconcile at the end. Some readers found this unsatisfying. I think it is the most adult romance I have written, because it acknowledges that love is not the only force shaping a couple, and sometimes love loses an argument with conviction and the marriage has to find a way through anyway.

The Inspirations

I want to name a few things that fed the series, partly because readers deserve to know and partly because some of these books and stories shaped me enough that they belong on the record.

The Council of Seven structure owes a debt to the Hanseatic League — to the experience of reading about merchant federations who could refuse a king. The Mountain Clans owe a debt to a long apprenticeship reading about the Sami and the Highland clan systems, neither of which they exactly resemble, both of which they borrow from. The Korrathi war-mage rotation system was directly inspired by what I learned about late Roman cohort drill — the discipline of soldiers fighting in shifts because endurance, not heroism, is what wins long battles. The Death Lord's phylactery is borrowed from older necromantic literature, but the concentration-as-anchor mechanic was my own and I am proud of it.

For the romance, I owe debts to the writers I read while I was teaching myself this genre. Sarah J. Maas taught me that visceral action and slow-burn romance are not mutually exclusive. Sabaa Tahir taught me that political fantasy can carry an interior cost that does not let up. Jennifer L. Armentrout taught me that romantic-fantasy readers are smarter and more demanding than the genre's reputation suggests, and that they will follow a writer who takes the romance as seriously as the worldbuilding.

I am grateful, on a permanent basis, to the readers who stayed for seven books. There are thousands of you. I have read every letter that has reached me. I am especially grateful to the readers who wrote to tell me — sometimes very angrily — that Aria deserved a softer ending. I want to say to those readers, in this venue where the marketing department cannot edit me: I know. I wrote her a softer ending in the deleted scene I just published. I gave her a folding desk and a window and a sleeping husband and a six-week-old son, and I let her ask, on the page, for permission to set it down. She did not get to send the letter. She did not get to take the rest. But the letter exists, in the imagined chest at the foot of her bed, and I think a part of me has spent seven books trying to get her to write it.

That is the underneath. That is what Fallen Hearts is.

— Elara