When Demons Travel. How the Realms of Penumbria Found Their Way Across the World.
Apparently, even the Darkest Demon needs a passport.
I created Penumbria in Austria. Since then, its Demons have crossed into the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and, most recently, Sweden.
All without asking my permission or offering me a place in their luggage.
Which is a shame, because I love to travel.
Soon, Ashan, Sinia, Carlos, Mo, Rodon, Thorn and Sadness will have travelled further than I ever have. They will find homes on bedside tables and dusty bookshelves. They will stand squeezed between other fantasy worlds or be placed carefully on display.
Perhaps one of them will even be used to level a piece of furniture.
Don’t worry. I won’t take it personally.
Mostly.
The Penumbria Travelling Party
Sometimes I imagine them travelling together.
They would sit around a fire as they once did in Balanceburned, passing a bottle of Hildred’s brandy between them. For a while, they might almost look like an ordinary group of travellers resting before the next part of their journey.
Then Thorn would make some comment comparing the brandy to Belgian beer or that suspiciously strong Swedish stuff they discovered along the way.
Everyone would agree that nothing beats Hildred’s brandy.
Hildred would pretend not to look pleased.
Carlos, the born leader he is, would eventually decide that somebody needed to bring order to the evening. He would stand, look around the fire and tell them exactly what the plan was—and which country they should march upon next.
Hildred would raise a brow and insist that he choose somewhere capable of cooking a trout properly.
Gaija’s tail would begin to wag at the mention of food.
Mo would probably encourage the entire conversation simply to see where it went. Rodon would listen with the patience of someone already expecting trouble. Thorn would continue offering opinions nobody had requested.
And Ashan, having endured enough discussion about mortal countries, would announce that he had already seen more than enough of the mortal realms.
He would throw Sinia over his shoulder and insist that they were returning to Penumbria.
She would laugh while hitting his back and make absolutely no believable attempt to escape.
Sadness would silently roll her eyes at them all.
Some things, apparently, remain the same in every country.
Born in Austria
In reality, every one of them was born here in Austria.
They arrived between shifts, ordinary troubles and all the demands of real life. They were created before marketing and social media became part of an author’s everyday routine—back when writing their story still felt private.
There were no readers waiting for the next book then. No posts to prepare. No retailer pages to watch, newsletters to send or advertisements to understand.
There was only the story.
Penumbria belonged entirely to me. Its roads reached only as far as I had written them. Its characters existed wherever I carried them, and nobody else knew the sound of their voices.
I could change their world without anyone noticing.
I could return to a chapter, move a mountain, destroy a village or decide that a man was not one man but two. I could sit with Ashan and Sinia for as long as I wanted because, at that point, they had nowhere else to be.
They were mine.
Then I placed them inside covers and let them go.
When a Story Leaves the Desk
With every journey the Realms of Penumbria trilogy takes, I understand a little more about what it means to release a book into the world.
It means not knowing how far the story will travel.
It means watching from a distance as something that once existed only inside your mind appears in places you have never carried it yourself.
Once a story leaves the desk, wrapped in the cover you chose and carrying the blurb that took far too long to write, its path is no longer entirely yours to decide.
There is no telling which reader might discover it next.
There is no telling which bookseller might place Penumbria among all the other worlds it offers – or in which country that shelf might be waiting.
A completed dark romantasy trilogy created in Austria can find its way into a bookshop in the Netherlands. A hardcover can appear in Belgium. The final book can quietly arrive on a Swedish retailer’s page while its author is at home, drinking coffee and wondering how the Demons reached Scandinavia before she did.
That is one of the strangest and most beautiful parts of publishing.
The physical book travels without you.
The story travels even further.
Reaching New Shores
I look for them almost every day.
When Penumbria appears in another country, I stare at the listing for longer than necessary, checking the title, the cover and my own name as though one of them might suddenly change.
I smile when the books reach a new shore.
I raise a glass when a copy is sold somewhere new.
And then I wonder about the person waiting on the other side of that journey.
Perhaps the book will be opened immediately. Perhaps it will sit untouched for weeks before the right evening arrives. Perhaps someone will begin with the intention of reading one chapter and look up much later than planned.
Perhaps they will love the character I expected them to hate.
Perhaps they will distrust the one I secretly adore.
Perhaps they will want to throw one of the books across the room, only to reconsider because doing so would ruin the collection.
Wherever the books travel, I hope the reader who eventually opens them can feel how much love went into creating that world.
I hope they feel it in the quiet moments beside the stream, in the darkness beyond the mountains and beneath the silvered leaves of the forest.
I hope they recognise that these characters were never created merely to move a plot forwards. They were given histories, wounds, terrible decisions and people they could not stop loving.
Once, all of that belonged only to me.
Now Penumbria lives differently inside every reader who enters it.
Travelling Without Me
There is something slightly unsettling about letting a story travel without you.
I cannot explain the world to each new reader. I cannot stand beside them and point out which detail will matter later. I cannot warn them when the road is about to become darker or ask them to forgive a character before they understand why.
I can only trust the story to carry itself.
Perhaps that is the final stage of writing a book: not finishing it, publishing it or placing it onto a shelf, but accepting that it will go somewhere you cannot follow.
The Demons have their passports now.
They are crossing borders, finding new shelves and entering homes I will never see.
I will continue watching from Austria, celebrating every new shore they reach and quietly hoping they behave themselves once they get there.
Although, knowing them, that may be asking too much.
Because once I wrote a character driven story.
And now those characters drive themselves.
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