I didn’t set out to become an author.

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    For most of my life, writing was always there in the background. I had ideas, stories, moments that would play out in my head, but I never truly believed it was something I could do. It always felt out of reach. Like something meant for other people. People with more talent, more experience, more confidence. So I ignored it. Pushed it aside. Told myself it wasn’t realistic.

Then everything changed.

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    When my son Silas was stillborn, my world didn’t just shift. It broke. There’s no clean way to describe that kind of loss. No way to package it into something simple or easy to understand. It leaves you in a place that feels… empty, but also overwhelming at the same time. My wife and I were lost in it. Sitting in silence. Trapped in our own thoughts. Trying to process something that doesn’t make sense and never will.

You don’t just grieve something like that.

You live inside it.

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    Days blurred together. Nights felt heavier. And in those quiet moments, when everything else faded, all that was left were the thoughts. The questions. The anger. The kind of darkness that doesn’t come from the world around you, but from inside.

Writing started there.

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    Not as a goal. Not as a plan. Just… something to do. A way to get those thoughts out of my head and onto something else. At first it was scattered. Pieces. Emotions without structure. But slowly, something began to form. A character. A man carrying weight he couldn’t escape. Fighting battles no one else could see.

That man became Tymir.

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    Ashes of the Last Paladin wasn’t just a story I created. It was something that grew out of that place. Tymir’s struggle, his anger, his questions, his fight to keep going when everything in him is breaking, all of it came from something real. He fights demons in the world around him, but the true battle is what’s happening within him.

And that part isn’t fantasy.

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                         That part is something a lot of us understand.

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    I never expected the story to reach people the way it has. I never expected others to see themselves in it, to connect with it, or to tell me that it helped them in their own struggles. That’s something I don’t take lightly. Because this didn’t start as something meant to be shared.

It started as survival.

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    But somewhere along the way, it became something more.

Ashes of the Last Paladin was never meant to be the end. It was the beginning. Not just of a story, but of something I had ignored for most of my life. That pull to create. To tell stories that mean something. Stories that come from real places, even if they exist in different worlds.

Tymir’s journey has its place. His story will be told in full. But there are more stories ahead. Different worlds. Different characters. Different battle The setting may change.

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                                 But the core never will.

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                                   The same questions.

                                   The same struggle.

              The same fight to keep moving forward when everything feels lost.

                                Because that part is real.

                               And that part never changes.