How Folklore Became Fantasy Romance

I have always loved fantasy and the creatures it brought into our world.

Like many fantasy romance readers, I spent years falling in love with werewolves, vampires, fae, angels, demons, and all the beautifully dangerous creatures we probably shouldn't be rooting for but somehow always do.

Eventually, I started looking for something different. Something new, yet strangely familiar.

I wanted creatures I hadn't already met a hundred times. Monsters whose characteristics I didn't already know. I searched through books and recommendations, trying to find that very specific thing I couldn't quite name. And eventually, my search brought me somewhere much closer to home.

Slavic folklore.

The funny thing was, I already knew many of these creatures. They were in the stories I heard as a child the creatures hiding in forests, lurking beneath dark water, stealing women, tricking travelers, and waiting in the places humans were warned not to go.

But they were almost always the villains. The thing at the end of the warning.

As I started researching them again as an adult, I realized just how rich Slavic mythology and folklore are and how rarely I encountered these creatures in the fantasy romance books I was reading.

And when they did appear, where were their steamy love stories?

Where was the story in which someone looked at the creature everyone had been taught to fear and wondered: What if we never heard their side?

So I decided to write it.

I wanted to take the villains from the tales of my childhood and give them something those stories rarely allowed them to have…love.

There is a quote I've always loved:

“A hero would sacrifice you to save the world, but a villain would sacrifice the world to save you.”— Unknown

That idea stayed with me while I was creating The Wardens of Nav. Because I didn't want to turn my villains into heroes. I still wanted them dangerous. I wanted them ancient, powerful, selfish, frightening, and sometimes morally questionable.

What if perhaps a villain is be created when his story is never truthfully told.

My hope for The Wardens of Nav is simple:

That you will fall in love with a villain you haven't met yet, just as hard as I did.