As I sit before this blank page, preparing to write what it is I want to say, I feel the weight of my unworthiness. How can one simply speak of the unfathomable magnitude of the glory of God and do it justice? Yet every day, I seek to do just that.
All my life, I have been entranced by the genre of Fantasy. I inherited it from my father, of whom my earliest memories contain images of him sitting at our kitchen table, devouring one fantasy book after another. Through his influence and movies like Dragonheart and the Fifth Element, I became obsessed with the pretend.
As a young person, that obsession blurred vehemently into reality. That’s right, I’m that kid all the TV pastors warned you about. I read the Harry Potter books, and became obsessed with witchcraft. I had no foundation of faith instilled in me at home, and didn’t even realize my family considered themselves Christian until I announced I was a wiccan, and my parents were quite upset.
From middle school until a month before I graduated my senior year, I drifted from one branch of New Age religion to another, until I finally landed on labeling myself “Pagan” and “Witch,” for lack of better terms. It was in my senior year that the Lord Jesus, in His mercy, revealed Himself to me in a way that made it impossible not to respond. At 17 years old, I became a Christian, and have never looked back these last 15 years.
But what does this have to do with Fantasy and Forsaken by Shadows? I promise, I’m getting there.
Something I wasn’t warned about when I prayed to the Lord and begged him to take me in was that, when a person becomes saved, a supernatural occurrence happens. The Holy Spirit, who is Himself God, one of the three persons in the Trinity, comes to indwell inside of you. You literally become a new person internally. When Jesus speaks of our need to be born again in John chapter 3, this is what He speaks of: The Spirit of God must come into your being and regenerate the dead souls we are all born with.
When that happens, our lives change.
Everything I loved before Christ saved me, I began to despise. The kind of humor and entertainment I indulged, the goals I had set for myself, even the music I listened to, all lost their luster, replaced by new, holier desires. I had truly become a new creation.
But the one thing that has remained, both before and after my salvation, was my love for reading and writing fantasy.
Now, church culture has shifted over the last 15 years, to the point that I am now hosting a D&D club in my local church. But when I first became a Christian, there was a resounding attitude that if you were a Christian, you couldn’t write Fantasy, unless your name was Lewis or Tolkien. Somehow, they got a pass, when others were either wasting their time or sinning. A dear friend once said to me, “A Christian has no right to write stories about such things.”
So I didn’t write, for a long, long time, because the stories in my head were about vampires and demons, monsters and dragons, and evil things that turned away from darkness and embrace light.
But where did God fit in a story about an Egyptian vampire who, instead of turning his human love interest into a vampire, was actually healed of his curse and regained his mortal soul? I mean, vampires aren’t real, (though that statement is debatable, and if that subject interests you I recommend a podcast called Haunted Cosmos). How could I tell God-glorifying stories in settings that weren’t God’s creation?
Every time I began a new story, those questions would plague me, and I would inevitably quit after a few chapters and try to double down on Bible study. I had swallowed the lie that the only way to serve God was to actively participate in ministry and suffer through a soul-crushing corporate job so I could have a “mission field.”
Well, life happens. Hearts get broken. Family moves away. Independence has to be fought for. Doubts begin to rise.
And good things, too. Falling in love. Marriage. Building a home together. Cats. So many cats.
And through all of this, my love for writing crept just under the surface of my skin. The hobby I couldn’t shake, even though “Christians had no business writing fantasy.”
And somewhere in this life being lived, I was introduced to Brent Week’s novels. If you’ve never read a Brent Weeks novel, I highly recommend them, though I warn you, every trigger warning you can imagine is nestled in his sagas. And yet, through incredibly bleak and despairing tales, I found the brightest lights of God’s redeeming glory. Brent Week’s novels healed me in ways I am still discovering, as a creator and a Christian, and I will be forever grateful to them.
And then came D&D. When I was first introduced to the game, as a brand-new baby Christian, I shied away from it. The concept of magic and deities was too close to what I had been previously worshiping, and I feared what influence it might have on me.
Yet when I was reintroduced, my faith in Christ had matured, and I was able to enjoy the game without stumbling. And, as many of you know, it has become a large part of my personality.
Through the introduction of D&D came my introduction to Drow, which led to my introduction of Drizzt Do’Urden, and oh, what a turn that has taken in my life.
If I haven’t made it clear already, I am OBSESSED with drow. Which kind of seems like a weird thing for a Christian to say. There is nothing about drow culture that lines up with Biblical principles. They are truly written to be an “evil” race.
Yet that world of darkness is ripe for the harvest of tales of hope. Look at Drizzt, a drow who turned out to be good.
Now, if you read my first ever Substack post, you know I have beef with Drizzt. Not that I don’t love him or love the work R.A. Salvatore has done. I really, really do. But as I read the story of Drizzt, I found myself lacking a connection. Drizzt is a static character. He isn’t an evil drow turned good. He just… is good. He has always had conscience. And that just felt… not right to me.
And thus, Forsaken by Shadows came to be. Now in no way am I claiming to write better stories than R.A. Salvatore. I merely wanted to write a story that echoed my heart, a story about a drow who should have been evil, based on where he was being raised, whose life changes direction. A real redemption tale.
And how does this drow become good? Well, I’m a girl, and therefore a sucker for a good romance story. (I know, I know, not ALL girls…but I digress). The tale of Rismyn and Kitty (before she was even named Mazira) began to weave itself in my head before I fully gave it permission, and the next thing I knew, I was writing.
And it was dark. If you can believe it, I toned a few things down before I published it. But the story was never meant to be published. It was meant to be an outlet for my soul, a safe space to confront the darkness that lurks in my soul, the same darkness that lurks in all of our souls, and expose it to the light.
And that old question came up: How do I glorify God in a setting that is openly hostile to everything God has made? Forgotten Realms is a pantheistic realm with flawed gods who, in my opinion, aren’t worthy to be gods. They are not omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. They bicker and fight and can be killed. They are hardly mirrors of the true God.
These last two chapters have been the culmination of my answer to that question. While playing in the playground of the source material, I have always striven to point my readers to what is true, to create a longing in your heart for what is actually divine. Now don’t get me wrong, Eilistraee is not meant to be Christ. She cannot be; she is an imperfect creation of the minds of men. I am, in no way, trying to set her up to be a messiah.
But I do want to use her to point to what the real Messiah.
Let me tell you the true story, and you see if you can see where I drew inspiration from:
In the beginning, God spoke, and the Heavens and Earth came to be. God continued to speak, separating light from darkness, order from chaos, and forming the reality we know today. He spoke again, and filled that which was empty with life. Everything he called good, but man and woman he called very good.
God placed the man and woman in the Garden of Eden, and he gave them literally everything they could want or desire, with the exception of one thing: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That he placed in the midst of the garden and warned them not to eat of it.
After all, what would freedom be, without choice?
Yet the serpent, the fallen angel Lucifer, whom we call satan, slipped into the Garden and spoke lies to the man and woman. He said to the woman, “Did God really say…?” and then twisted the words of our Creator, making her believe God was holding out on her. And thus, believing his lies, the man and woman ate from the tree, and all of creation broke.
No longer would the universe spin in harmony, but with strife and disorder. Death came as a consequence of the sin of the man and woman, and we, their children, have been languishing under the effects of their curse ever since. No longer are we born free, but enslaved to the power of satan and sin from the moment we are conceived.
Yet even in the midst of the judgment rendered, God gave the man and woman hope: One day, the seed of the woman would come. He would crush the head of the serpent, who would bruise only his heel. The rest of the story of Scripture asks and answers the question, “is this the promised seed…? No, not yet,” until Jesus, the Nazarene, came to the earth.
During the era of Roman captivity, after a long spell of silence, God came from Heaven and wrapped himself in human flesh. He came as a baby, born of a woman, a woman named Mary, in a town called Bethlehem. Make no mistake: Jesus IS God incarnate.
The Holy Trinity is an impossible concept to wrap our finite heads around, but just because we cannot understand something doesn’t make it less true. If God could be understood by men, He wouldn’t be worthy of being God. But I digress.
Jesus came, the seed of the woman, the perfect man. 100% God, 100% human, and he came for one purpose: to save us from the curse of sin. Jesus accomplished this task by fulfilling every law of God, and never sinning once. Jesus is the only man to walk this world who is without sin or blemish, and is therefore not owed the wages of death.
Yet, though he did not deserve it, Jesus chose to die on our behalf. Just as he lived the life none of us could live, he died the death we all deserved. He allowed the just wrath of God to wash over him, paying once and for the full price of sin. All sins, past and present.
Three days later, God raised Jesus from the dead, proving He is who He says He is, the Messiah, the God-Man, our savior. Death could not hold him, and death will not hold us who are held by Jesus’ hands. That is the message of the Gospel, the true story Christians proclaim:
God, in his infinite love for us, while we were still in our sin and rebellion against him, sent his son Jesus to die on the cross on our behalf, so that whoever turns away from their sin and puts their trust and faith in Jesus would have everlasting life and be restored in right standing in God’s presence. Where we were once separated from God in the Garden, we are now summoned to return to God in his Son.
Did you catch anything that reminded you of Forsaken by Shadows? I certainly hope so. As I typed away Mazira’s vision of Eilistraee and subsequent interaction afterward, I tried, as C.S. Lewis did with Aslan, to echo parts of this true story.
We are all of us like Mazira. Lost, broken, enslaved, unworthy to be noticed. We didn’t seek our savior first, He sought us. We cannot free ourselves from our captivity. We need a savior, a sustainer.
I hope your heart was moved when Eilistraee took Mazira’s wounds on herself, wounds she didn’t deserve, to ransom her soul from the enemy. If it was, it is only because the story whispers of Jesus shouts: He bore our strikes to set us free.
Forsaken by shadows is a dark, dark story at times. There is a significant drop in my downloads after chapter 7, the chapter where Rismyn learns the very hard way he was not enchanted. And I don’t blame people for it. But I also don’t apologize for it. We live in a dark, dark world. We need tales of light triumphing over darkness, even when the darkness lives within our own hearts.
That has always been my aim with this story, before and after the decision to share it was made.
If you’ve been listening to this tale, and you’ve found in yourself a yearning for more, a desire to be loved to the depths of love which Mazira has discovered, I want you to know you can be. Allow this message to be received by one who is an ambassador of Christ, pleading for you to come to the savior. My DMs and Discord are always open if you’d like to chat about it.
Special Episode: Faith and Fantasy