Dragons might seem dangerous to most of the people of Anglavar, but to the Knights of Ash, hunting them down is just another job. When Yara starts off her apprenticeship with the order of dragon hunters, it seems like she may get used to this new reality fairly easily, even if her mentor Arran is a little more closed off than she’d like.
Just when she’s beginning to feel comfortable, a new threat rears its ugly head. Undead dragons, called Titans, have begun to show up across the country and the source is dangerously unclear. Yara and Arran find themselves with the responsibility of finding the cause of the undead creatures — and cleaning up the mess that comes with them.
Author of The Knights of Ash series Sebastiaan Constantino van Doorn spoke with us about writing autistic characters, his writing plans for the future, and, of course, dragons. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
A main aspect of your YA fantasy book is dragon hunting. Of course, dragons are big in the fantasy genre. What drew you to the genre, and to dragons?
I’ve always loved dinosaurs, and dragons are basically just fantasy dinosaurs in a lot of cases, but what really dragged me into this genre by the back of my neck was Bethesda Studio’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I got it at age twelve (a few weeks before my birthday, I was only allowed to play it for fifteen minutes a day), and it made me invested in fantasy. I didn’t do much in the way of RP or anything, but soon ideas for stories would start to creep in. The dragons in that setting are really interesting to me, both because of how they are portrayed and how they function lore-wise. They would have to be the biggest inspiration behind anything dragon-related.
At Knee Brace Press, we love to highlight works with neurodivergent representation. Your dragon hunter protagonists, Yara and Arran, have autism. We’d love to hear more about them.
Sometimes I feel as though I’m really not good at talking about them, but I’m gonna try real hard! Arran is the disinherited legitimised illegitemate son of a lord (confusing, I realize). He was born as a bastard before his father married his mother. He’s got … issues about this. The family he’s from has a history of violent illegitemate children, but one particular example is the founder of another noble house which tore apart Anglavar, the kingdom in which Arran and Yara live. Arran didn’t want to be another one of those, so he ran away from home to avoid his responsibilities and any potential power he may be given.
He really doesn’t like talking about his emotions, at least initially. He believes he should keep it all to himself, because outside of feeling like a burden to the people around him, he also doesn’t believe talking about it would really help. This, of course, hurts him in the long run, and it’s not until Yara comes along and pushes him to open up that he actually does.
Yara is both very different from him, and still very similar. Those similarities mostly crop up after they meet, they essentially rub off on each other. She believed herself to be an orphan for the first 16 years of her life, as she was raised as the ward of a noble lord. She didn’t particularly enjoy her childhood, surrounded by her guardian’s older sons, all of which viewed her as an easy target for bullying. At the same time, her guardian looked at her as a fragile, tiny thing, like she was made of glass, and pretty much prevented her from doing anything she actually wanted to. She’s been left socially awkward and touch averse because of her childhood. She’s also stubborn and rash, as she’s continuously made hasty decisions which have cost her in one way or another, while also sticking by them. Because she learns quickly she’s been able to pick up dragon hunting more quickly than Arran’s previous student, Laras.
They’re also related to each other. Arran is Yara’s estranged father (though not for reasons he could control). Arran deals with that revelation really poorly, but to learn how Yara reacts, people will have to read Death’s Defiant.
In your bio, you mentioned being an amateur palaeontologist, with a particular love of ammonites. Have you combined this love with your writing? If not, do you plan to?
I have! It’s little tidbits most people won’t notice, because if I started using biniomial nomenclature for real animals in the text it’d get confusing. My novels are set during the end stages of an ice age’s glacial period. There’s ice age megafauna like Elasmotherium wandering around (though they are slowly going extinct) and marine birds have been entirely outcompeted by pterosaurs of different sizes. In my second book Yara observes a group of them at a dockyard, stealing someone’s food. Their description is meant to reflect Dimorphodon, patterned to look like the modern-day Puffin (as that is my favourite reconstruction of it).
Additionally, and this is one folks might not have picked up on immediately: the main unit of currency are pyrite coins shaped like spirals, not unlike pyritic ammonite fossils found in Lyme Regis, England. The coins themselves aren’t entirely pyritic, just their core (Pyrite is iron-sulphide, meaning it’s made up of two of my setting’s magic-negative substances, preventing duplication magic), but they are inspired by them.
What got you into writing?
Video games! Too much of them, probably. The basic setting for what I’m writing now started out as a minecraft world I’d been building. I’d show you screenshots but I have no idea if I saved any of them.
What are your writing plans for the future?
I’m currently rewriting a collection of short stories focused around Yara grieving. It’s a sort of ritual I do when mourning the loss of someone close to me. I plan to release these on Royalroad again once I’ve finished. Outside of that, I have to write book 3, which is titled Search of the Sightless, and I have to rewrite its companion novel, Ride of the Storm Knight. After that I’ve got a few more ideas, but nothing concrete I’ve written down yet.
Anything else you would like to share?
Not particularly! If I speak any more I might spoil what people could read in both Knight of Ash: The Venomous Tempest and Knight of Ash: Death’s Defiant. Trust me, it’s worth it!
