Of Stormsalt & Smoke

Lacey Caine · Chronicler

About

I started a story at sixteen and never finished it. It took me the better part of two decades to find my way back — and when I did, it wasn't a plot that brought me. It was two people who wouldn't shut up.

Here's my problem with the shelf. Wizards get prestige. Vampires get reinvented every decade. And wolves get shoved to the back, half-priced, side-species, starving. They deserved the front of the shelf the whole time. The Faeheart Series is ten books of putting them there.

And here's my other problem. We follow these people for a thousand pages and then we get an epilogue. One paragraph about the kids. I don't want the paragraph. I want the good years — the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the fights that don't break them, the children who become people instead of a closing line. Allura and Reign are endgame, and I mean it the way it sounds.

I have aphantasia. I have never once pictured their faces. I got their shape instead — the way a person changes the air in a room — and after that they never stopped talking.

I write from wherever I land: a cliff over the river, a coffee shop with a matcha going warm beside me, or sixty-four inches of curved monitor with the patch notes open in another window. Houston is home. Texas is the rest of it. A five-year-old and two GSDs keep me honest.