The Circle of Life (But Make It Dragons)

I have a confession: I didn't plan any of this.

Not the egg. Not the lava tube. Not the fact that a bad Norse God who creates werewolves and vampires — and is frankly too forgetful to manage either — ends up being the one who delivers a red dragon egg to a five-year-old girl. Not the meteor shower that brings Drake to Earth 3000 years later. Not the moment when that same girl, now 25, takes a Norse God's hand and walks off to Dragon World with a giant red dragon circling overhead.

None of it was planned. All of it was inevitable.

That's the thing about writing a universe instead of just a book. The threads you plant early — sometimes without knowing why — have a way of finding each other. Three thousand years before Sophia leaves Earth, Odin is helping Tuppy carry an egg to a lava tube on Earth. Why? Because Odin is quietly, deeply sorry that he banished his brothers. His special skill — whether the actual myths support this or not, and I've decided they do — is being extraordinarily good at spells. So he lifts the banishment eventually. But first, the egg has to wait in the lava tube. For three thousand years. As one does.

I should mention what happened on the way back. Odin got distracted by kittens. This is not a metaphor. There were kittens, and Odin — being Odin — got distracted, and the kittens went back to Dragon World with them. Three thousand years later, those kittens have evolved, and Dragon World now has a Nuzzle Nook, because the dragons are completely obsessed with cats and nobody — nobody — is allowed to hurt one. This is canon. I don't make the rules. The dragons do.

The bad brother — the one busy making everything that goes bump in the night — turns out to be the father of werewolves and vampires. He's also inconsistent and somewhat forgetful, which means his creations tend to wander off and do things he never intended. This is, honestly, very on brand for a villain who got banished for sleeping with his brother's wife and has been holding a grudge ever since.

And then there's Sophia. She appears at the end of the first Vegas book as an epilogue — a young woman who puts her hand in Drake's hand and steps off Earth. But not before she stops, transports herself back for one last moment, and then reappears with a giant red dragon. Because of course she does.

When Sophia arrives on Dragon World, she meets Tuptin Anna Dunez — once known simply as Tuppy, the little girl who was there when the egg went into the lava tube. Now she's a little old lady, shuffling through Dragon World followed by an ancient desert dragon and, naturally, a trail of kittens. The circle, as it turns out, includes cats.

The stories are circular. The Vegas world and the Dragon World are always circling back toward each other, connected by an egg that waited three millennia in a lava tube, a prophecy I wrote in the first 10,000 words before I knew what it meant, and apparently a very significant number of cats.

I still sometimes struggle to hold all of it in my head at once. But when I step back and look at the whole shape of it — the brothers, the egg, the meteor shower, the girl, the dragon, the kittens — it makes a kind of sense that I couldn't have designed on purpose.

Maybe that's what a universe is. Not something you build. Something you discover.

With cats.