A Shroud Undone follows a haunted hunter drawn back into an ancient war between humans and the Sylphar, where faith, grief, old gods, and impossible choices collide in a brutal struggle to end generations of bloodshed. What inspired the ancient conflict between humans and the Sylphar?

I wanted a war that had gone on so long nobody alive remembered why it started, and yet both sides were completely convinced they were right. The Stillight burns above the Mountain Temple, this double helix of red and gold, and both humans and Sylphar believe it validates their claim. Their entire faiths are built around it. Their cultures, their military structures, their sense of identity. So the war isn’t just territorial. It’s existential. If you stop fighting, you’re admitting that everything your people believed for a thousand years was wrong. That’s a harder thing to ask of someone than just laying down a sword.

The inspiration came from real history. Many of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in human history have had religion or ideology woven through them so deeply that the original cause gets buried under centuries of grievance and doctrine. I wanted to explore what happens when the thing both sides are fighting over turns out to be something neither side understood in the first place.

Theron carries a great deal of emotional weight throughout the story. What was most important to you when developing him as a reluctant warrior?​

When we meet Theron, he’s not doing anything grand, and that was intentional. He’s wandering from village to village, feeding people who are starving, and asking for nothing in return. That was the foundation of his character for me. He’s not hiding because he’s afraid. He’s hiding because he failed, and penance is all he has left.

The most important thing was making sure his reluctance felt earned rather than passive. He doesn’t avoid the fight because he’s a coward. He avoids it because he knows exactly what it costs. He’s already paid that price once, and the world bled for it. So when he gets pulled back in, there’s this tension between a man who desperately wants to stay small and invisible, and a man who knows he might be the only one who can stop what’s coming. I didn’t want a brooding hero who sulks about his destiny. I wanted someone who had genuine reasons to stay away, and more importantly… genuine reasons he couldn’t.

The Stillight sits at the center of both faith and violence in the novel. How did you approach building its mystery and significance?​

I knew from the beginning that the Stillight had to feel like something worth killing over. Not just politically, but spiritually. Both sides of this war have built entire belief systems around it, and if the reader doesn’t understand why, the conflict falls flat.

So I approached it in layers. On the surface, it’s a symbol of divine authority. Both humans and Sylphar look at it and see proof that their god or gods chose them. Beneath that, there are hints that the Stillight is doing something neither side fully grasps. And beneath that is the real truth, which I obviously won’t spoil here. But the key was making sure each layer felt complete on its own. A reader halfway through the book should somewhat feel like they understand what the Stillight is. A reader in the last chapter of the book should realize they were completely wrong. And a reader who has completely finished the book should understand that both sides were wrong from the very beginning. That line in the blurb on the back cover, “They were all deceived,” is the entire engine of the book.

A Shroud Undone has a bleak, grounded atmosphere where war feels exhausting rather than glorious. What themes do you hope readers take away from that portrayal?​

I grew up on fantasy where battles were exciting and heroic, and I love those stories. But I wanted to write the version where you feel the mud and the fatigue and the weight of carrying a friend’s body off the field. War in this book is not glorious. It’s grinding and ugly and it breaks people in ways that don’t heal cleanly.

The theme I care about most is the cost of conviction. Every character in this book believes they’re doing the right thing, and most of them are paying for it with pieces of themselves. Theron is paying with years of guilt. Nyra is paying with the doubt that gnaws at her after every victory. The soldiers on both sides are paying with their lives for a war they inherited from people who are long dead. I want readers to walk away asking whether the causes we fight for are worth what we sacrifice to win them, and whether the people who started those fights had any right to ask that sacrifice of the generations that followed.

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