The Author

I have been building worlds for as long as I can remember. Places to escape into when the real one felt like too much. I tried to write many of them down over the years and lost the thread of most of them before they were finished.

Then Nyra arrived.

She came to me during one of the harder periods of my life, a time when I understood what it felt like to have no voice and no clear path forward. I recognized something in her immediately, and I wrote her first chapter in one sitting. That was five years ago. I have walked away from this story more than once, but Nyra and the people around her have always called me back.

The world of Aurelin is built from places I have visited and places I have only dreamed of seeing. The resistance at its heart was shaped by something closer to home. I grew up in Germany, and the stories my grandparents told me never left. The people who refused to stay quiet even when silence would have been safer. I wanted to write their kind of story.

I write under a pen name and keep my identity private because of an ongoing relationship with my own mental health that makes visibility feel difficult. The stories are deeply personal. Sharing them matters enormously. But doing so from a place where I feel safe matters too.

Aveline Halloway is a pen name. The stories are real.

I have an entirely unashamed love of dragons, though you will have to wait a little longer for those.

Aveline Halloway