Product Description
"If the emperor wants a war, he's got one. To the eternity."<br><br>In an Ancient Rome ruled by Remus, the vampire Emperor, five teenagers: a Drow werewolf, a halfgod, a noblewoman, an Orc ranger and his halfblood sister, join forces to fight tyranny.<br><br>Trigger warnings:<br><br>Fee and Kade experience child physical abuse by their mothers, because they themselves were abused by men and by their patriarchal societies. I wanted to depict how abuse can sometimes echo down the generations. Vargr experiences child sexual abuse by his owner, the emperor. The theme is a fictionalized version of the abuse of the child slave Sporus by Emperor Nero, recorded by Suetonius and Dio Cassius. The scene contains no details, but Vargr’s mental state is described viscerally. He escapes, grows into a lethal werewolf, and has his revenge, but experiences an episode of PTSD that manifests in derealisation.<br><br>Lux was born with the condition classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and was assigned the wrong gender at birth because of it. I have used he/him pronouns even in scenes from Lux's POV, because in Remilan society gender is 'role not soul', and she is trying very hard to be what her parents want her to be, and to see herself as a boy. Her growing realization that she is a girl is depicted sensitively, so may be triggering to intersex and trans readers. I use female pronouns only when she is ready to live her truth at the age of nineteen.<br><br>Kade is upset to learn that Half-Orcs are infertile, when she had always dreamed of motherhood.<br><br>Fee is groomed since childhood by Emperor Remus, a 700-year-old vampire with absolute power. She agrees to marry him at the age of eighteen in order to stop him crucifying her sister, for having conversations in their own home about a Remilan Republic. Like Big Brother, Remus is always watching.<br><br>There are also trigger warnings for body horror - including cannibalism, blood (the drinking of blood and two friends using blood to seal a promise) rabies, typhus and decomposition - for suicidal ideation, murder, torture by a doctor who is ‘just following orders', attempted rape, slavery and forced marriage being seen as the ‘right’ of a patriarch, racism, sexism and homophobia being seen as normal in the Remilan Empire, and graphic war violence.<br><br>Remilan society is evil, and I have not shied from depicting what growing up was like for my five teenagers, who are all diverse. The positive side is that my teenage friends are all idealists determined to change their society. The genre of the book is nobledark: a fantasy world where evil usually triumphs over good, but the characters become empowered to change it.<br><br>According to my editor, Stephen Black, author of ‘The Famine Witch’: ‘the overriding message of the book is that it’s okay to be different.’
