What my fictional fathers teach me about my own

I have a great father. The kind of man who showed up—quietly, steadily-the kind you could build a world around. He never raised his hand. He rarely raised his voice. He wasn’t afraid to show his love. I remember my friends envying me for that. Some of them lived in homes ruled by silence or, worse, by the kind of noise that made you flinch—fathers who drank, who yelled, who struck, who vanished. In our young world, those things weren’t always said aloud, but they hung in the air. You could feel it in the way some of my friends looked at my dad—as if he were something rare, something they didn’t quite trust to be real.

I think that’s why the fathers in my books are so different from the one I had. They’re shadows and storms, not anchors. They’re powerful and distant, or worse, present and dangerous.

Koen begins as a son who believes in his father’s dream. Emperor Vesper, the great Uniter, the architect of Lucardia’s peace, offers a vision that Koen wants to believe in. He gives everything to it. He slogs through battlefields, leaves his home, abandons love, and walks into the wilderness to face witches and monsters for a miracle. He carries the weight of that dream on his back, believing that if he just suffers enough and sacrifices enough, he can make his father proud. He returns home, changed but not broken, ready to complete his father’s dream.

And that’s when he discovers the betrayal.

Not just political maneuvering or cold disregard, but something more profound. Something Koen never imagined his father was capable of. A betrayal so personal and so terrible, it sets fire to the peace he thought he’d won. The spark of it becomes a cinder. That cinder becomes a blaze. And it all ends with war. Koen, once the dutiful son, becomes the rebel—because opposing his father’s will is the only way he can truly exact his vengeance. Koen’s sacrifice is profound, and in the end, it costs him everything. Vesper has him executed.

Then there is Sylvanus. Condemned for treason, labeled “The Slaughter,” forced to live an existence worse than death, locked away in the ruined stronghold of Runemaul, stripped of title and voice, and left to rot in quiet disgrace. A prince who once stood for change, now reduced to a ghost of memory. His survival is not a kindness. It’s torture.

Erik, Koen’s son, grows up in the shadow of the silence. He never truly knows his father—not the man, only the myth. Koen becomes a name whispered in disgrace, a legacy tied to suffering and ruin. Instead, it’s Brant who raises Erik. A hardened knight. A man of duty more than affection. A stern father figure who makes Erik toil as a blacksmith’s apprentice. But there’s something unspoken in him, something steadfast. He’s not the kind of father stories are written about. But Brant cares for Erik. What began as duty became love—but by the time Erik sees it, it’s too late.

Vesper’s oldest son, Ivar, fares no better. Once the heir to greatness, he grows too bright, too admired. Vesper—ever the visionary, ever the paranoiac—begins to see in him not a successor but a threat, especially in the wake of Koen and Sylvanus’s rebellion. And so, slowly, methodically, he poisons him. Not to kill. To weaken. To unravel. To remind the world that no one, not even a son, rises without his permission.

And then there’s Count Alric in the tale of Duke Rhime of the Spire. No throne. No empire. Just a debt. And a daughter. Evaline becomes his offering—a bride sold to a man of power and secrets. Her marriage is not a union but a transaction. A daughter handed over like a writ of clearance. The cost of his freedom stamped across her future.

But the one that stays with me most is Jezelle’s father—a man who leads his seven-year-old daughter to a brothel and leaves her there. No storm. No shouting. Just the quiet cruelty of walking away. That kind of abandonment doesn’t fade. It calcifies. It shapes everything that comes after. Jezelle doesn’t carry a wound. She carries a world that was shattered too soon, a betrayal few of us can know.

So why write these fathers? Why populate my world with men who fail the ones they’re meant to protect?

Maybe because I fear them. Because I saw glimpses of them growing up—in other homes, in other lives. Because for every good man like my father, there are too many who disappear, or break, or turn the love of a child into something conditional. Maybe, in writing them, I’m facing the fear of absence. Perhaps I’m imagining the world my friends grew up in—the one they didn’t choose—and trying to understand it.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Perhaps I’m honoring the man who never became these things. The man who showed up. Who stayed. Who never once traded love for power, silence, or fear. Fiction lets me hold up the worst of what fatherhood can become—and by contrast, I remember what it should be, and I’m thankful for what I have.

The fathers in my books are complicated. Often cruel. Sometimes monstrous. But never forgettable. And perhaps that’s the actual fear—not to be hated by a father, but to be invisible to one. In writing them, I remember. And in remembering, I give thanks for what I have.

Cheers!