Grief, Growth, and Open Doors: Why This Fantasy Had to Be Adult

🕯 Childhood Expectations vs. Adult Reality

Do you remember what you thought about adults when you were a child?

I remember believing they had it easy. No bedtimes, no school, total freedom. On other days, I couldn’t fathom how they kept themselves entertained all day long.

I always pictured adulthood as an escape—this incredible freedom where I would be in charge.

But being an adult is far more complicated than I imagined. We carry the baggage of our pasts, the weight of our present responsibilities, and the constant buzz of the future pressing in. It’s not just about making your own decisions—it’s about carrying them.

Maybe it was childhood trauma that forced me to grow up too quickly. Maybe it was the overwhelming sensitivity I carried, always attuned to the tension in a room, the sorrow in a news headline, the way no one seemed to say what they really meant.

Maybe it was 9/11, or the war that followed.

Whatever the reason, I began to sense that the world was large, chaotic, and deeply painful. And I wanted stories that didn’t lie about that.

📚 Where Are the Stories That Don’t Lie?

I remember sitting in the library in middle school, flipping through YA titles and thinking:

“This isn’t all of it. Where’s the rest?”

I read Anne of Green Gables like everyone else—but I was also checking out adult romance novels, war memoirs, and nonfiction on trauma and survival. Was I too young for those books? Maybe. But even then, I craved something deeper, darker, and more honest. I wanted stories that acknowledged the fear and the grief that already lived in me.

So when I began writing The Dark Mage, I knew exactly what kind of story it was.

This was never going to be YA.

🖤 Why Adult Fantasy?

I have immense respect for YA authors, and I often recommend young adult books to my own kids. But the story I had to tell wasn’t neat. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t meant to fade to black.

It was scarred, sensual, grieving, yearning.

It needed room to breathe, to rage, to burn.

And I needed that, too.

The world of adulthood is often dismissed in fantasy fiction—especially when told by women. Female authors are regularly encouraged to shift their stories to YA, to soften the edges, to “fit the market.” We’re told adult fantasy is a harder sell unless we write like men.

But that’s ridiculous.

And frankly? I’m tired of it.

Adult fantasy isn’t just adult characters. It’s stories that refuse to lie. It’s magic that’s intertwined with trauma, redemption, and reality. It’s intimacy that doesn’t look away. It’s grief and growth and desire, all tangled together like the mess that is being human.

🔥 Sex, Violence, and Vulnerability

The Dark Mage includes open-door sex scenes—not for shock, not for spice alone, but because intimacy is part of the story.

Healing from trauma doesn’t stop at the bedroom door.

The violence in this book is brutal, because violence is brutal. The trauma responses are raw—freezing, fawning, dissociation, flinching—because they’re real. The love is deep, because it had to be.

Ren’wyn’s story is a reclamation.

Of body. Of voice. Of power.

It’s also a romance. A yearning. A choice to believe that someone could see every shadow in you and still say: You are safe. You are wanted. You are loved.

Writing this book helped me speak truths I couldn’t find in conversation. It let me carve out space for my own survival, my own body, my own voice. It carried me through therapy, parenting, pandemic, partnership—and it reminded me that magic can look like fierce, feminine softness held in a burning fist.

🌑 This Book Is for You If…

• You’ve ever shrunk yourself to fit the smallest space.

• You’ve avoided conflict because the cost of it was too high.

• You’ve flinched at raised voices, even when they weren’t meant for you.

• You’ve felt the ache of trauma in your bones, long after the wound should’ve healed.

• You’ve ever believed you were too much. Or not enough. Or both at once.

This book is for you.

You can be battered, bruised, broken—and still deserve deep, soul-wrapping love.

🔮 May You Find Magic Here

The Dark Mage isn’t tidy. It isn’t clean.

It’s for the grown-ups who still ache.

The ones who want a story that doesn’t look away.

The ones still learning how to hold love and grief in the same hand.

If you’re one of them:

Welcome to Aridryn.

You’re not alone here.

—Erin