What The Dawnshield Order Is Really About

As I am bringing Book 1 of the Dawnshield Order trilogy to publication readiness I am starting to put together synopses; not just for Lantern in the Fog, but the wider trilogy. This got me thinking more widely: What is the Dawnshield Order series really about?

When I began to put The Dawnshield Order into words, the most obvious description is also the least complete.

It is a fantasy trilogy about an order of soldiers. There is political corruption, religious power, rebellion, war, loyalty, betrayal, found family, romance, and a kingdom slowly discovering that the institutions it trusted are not necessarily worthy of that trust.

All of that is true, but it is not really the story I wanted to tell. At its heart, The Dawnshield Order is about love, duty, and choice.

More specifically, it is about what happens when those things stop fitting neatly together.

The characters begin the story with different ideas about what they owe the world. Some believe deeply in institutions; others distrust them instinctively. Some are trying to protect the people they love. Others are trying to protect an entire kingdom. Some want justice, some want peace and honey cakes. Most of the characters want several contradictory things at once.

And throughout the trilogy, they are forced to discover that doing the right thing is rarely as simple as choosing the correct side. Sometimes it’s about making choices that can hurt themselves or others they love. Most importantly, the story begins with people, not causes.

Although the trilogy grows into a much larger conflict, I have always thought of it first as a collection of emotional journeys and indeed, that’s how I started writing them. I have little scenes already written for book 3, and a potential prequel trilogy. This is because I began understanding my characters by writing their interactions with each other. I haven’t used them all, but my favourite moments survived in some form or another.

Of course, the conflict is central to the books. The political struggle matters because of what it does to people, the war matters because people must fight it. The corruption within the continent of Altheryon matters because there are individuals who once placed their faith, identity, livelihood, friendships, and futures in the institutions that run it. The rebellion matters because it is made of people who have been hurt badly enough to believe resistance is worth the cost.

I am much more interested in what those pressures reveal about a person than I am in creating heroes who always know the correct answer. In other words, they are gloriously human; something that keeps me interested in the full-time job I currently do. People matter.

The characters make mistakes, they become frightened, angry, stubborn, loyal to the wrong things, and occasionally convinced that suffering gives them permission to stop being gentle.  And then they have to decide what to do next.

Because one of the central ideas behind the trilogy is that pain can explain what someone becomes, or what they choose to do, without necessarily excusing it. A person can be wounded and still make choices. A person can be betrayed and still decide what kind of response that betrayal deserves. And someone who has lost almost everything can still choose tenderness.

Evander: Duty Without Surrendering Yourself

Evander is probably the clearest expression of this theme. He begins with an earnest belief in duty.

He believes in service. He believes in Solaris. He believes the Dawnshield exists to protect people. He takes responsibility seriously because, to him, responsibility has never primarily been about authority. It is about care.

Even as a captain, Evander does not instinctively think of leadership as standing above other people. He thinks of it as standing beside them and carrying more when necessary. That belief is tested repeatedly and the roots of that story reach back into the prequel books I’m mapping out

War teaches him that noble ideals do not prevent horrific consequences. Command teaches him that sometimes there is no choice that leaves everyone unharmed. Loss teaches him how easily grief can hollow someone out. And eventually the institutions he has served demand something incompatible with the principles that originally made him want to serve them.

That is where his real conflict lies. Evander is not forced to choose between duty and selfishness. He is forced to choose between two competing ideas of duty.

Does duty mean obedience? Or does duty mean protecting people, even when the people giving the orders have abandoned that responsibility themselves?

His journey is therefore not about rejecting everything he once believed. In many ways, it is the opposite. And throughout that journey, one of the things he fights hardest to preserve is his capacity for kindness.

Evander can become stronger without becoming cruel and he can become formidable without becoming cold. He can endure horrific things without deciding that tenderness is a weakness he has outgrown.

That distinction sits very close to the heart of the trilogy and is a true representation of many of the wonderful people I’ve worked with, alongside or known and loved myself.

“Larkspur wasn’t built with you in mind, was it, Captain?”

He glanced back at the arch. “The town and I occasionally disagree about how much room a man ought to have.”

— Lantern in the Fog, Book One of The Dawnshield Order

Serenya: Love Without Possession

Serenya’s journey approaches the same themes from another direction. She loves deeply, but love does not make her uncritical.

She understands that caring about someone does not mean agreeing with everything they do, protecting them from every consequence, or treating their choices as extensions of your own. Her relationships continually require her to hold contradictory feelings at the same time.

She can love and be furious. She can understand why choices are made without believing every choice made is justified. She can love without needing to control, and she can be afraid while still respecting another person's agency. That balance matters enormously to her character.

Serenya’s compassion is not passive softness. It demands difficult judgement. There are moments when mercy means tending a wound. There are moments when mercy means listening. There are moments when mercy means refusing to hate someone. And there are moments when loving someone means allowing them to make a choice you desperately wish they did not have to make.

Her journey asks whether love can remain generous when fear would prefer possession.

Kaelen: Becoming More Than What Happened to You

Kaelen’s story brings the theme of choice into perhaps its most personal form. His childhood gives him every reason to distrust people. He learns very early that dependence is dangerous, affection can disappear, and vulnerability can be used against you. Those lessons keep him alive. They also become a prison.

Meeting Evander does not magically erase any of that. Kaelen does not suddenly become trusting because someone is kind to him once. Instead, trust is built slowly, repeatedly, through patience and consistency. Through the strange discovery that Evander continues showing up even when Kaelen is difficult, frightened, defensive, angry, or deliberately impossible.

And that creates an important choice for Kaelen. He can continue behaving according to the rules his childhood taught him. Or he can gradually risk becoming someone else.

Kaelen’s grin broke through properly. “Captain Drake. Beaten by the tide.”

“Mention it again and I’ll stitch your sleeves shut.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Evander raised one eyebrow.

Kaelen’s grin widened. “You would.”

— The Beacon and the Raven, Book Two of The Dawnshield Order

His story is not about discovering that his past did not matter. It mattered enormously. It shaped him, and it gave him skills that extend beyond anything Evander taught him. But his past does not own him. Kaelen eventually learns that survival taught him certain habits, not eternal truths.

And one of the most important relationships in the trilogy emerges because two people choose one another over and over again: first as captain and squire, then increasingly as something much dearer.

Darian: When Love Becomes Anger

Darian is one of the characters who complicates the trilogy’s morality most for me. Because Darian’s anger does not come from nowhere. He has witnessed real suffering. He has seen people harmed in the name of Solaris. He has watched institutions speak about righteousness while committing acts he believes are indefensible. His disillusionment is understandable. So is his rage.

The danger is what happens next. Darian’s love for ordinary people gradually becomes tangled with anger at those responsible for hurting them. That makes him an important parallel to Evander.

Both men are compassionate, both recognise injustice, and both are willing to place themselves in danger for other people. But they do not always respond to suffering in the same way.

Darian’s journey asks an uncomfortable question: When your anger is justified, how do you stop it from deciding everything for you?

Because righteous anger is still anger. And sometimes the hardest act of mercy is not forgiving someone else. It is refusing to let hatred become the only language you have left.

Love Is Not Always Gentle

One thing I never wanted the trilogy to suggest is that love solves everything simply by existing.

Love can make people brave. It can also make them terrified. It can make them generous. It can make them reckless. It can become the reason someone stays. It can become the reason someone leaves.

Evander loves deeply, which means every person under his protection can become another person he fears losing.

Serenya’s love creates vulnerability because there are people whose suffering she cannot simply observe from a safe emotional distance.

Kaelen’s love eventually gives him something he has never had before, and therefore something he can lose.

Darian’s love for the people he believes have been abandoned becomes inseparable from many of his most painful choices.

Love does not make the characters’ decisions easier. Very often, it is precisely what makes them difficult, but it also gives those decisions meaning.

Duty Has to Be Chosen

The trilogy is also deeply interested in the difference between duty that is imposed and duty that is chosen. Titles appear throughout the story.

Captain, commander, paladin, rebel, healer, brother, sister, father and son.

Some roles are given by institutions. Others emerge through relationships.

And the story repeatedly asks which obligations matter most when those roles conflict. Someone can outrank you and still be wrong. A sacred institution can betray the principles it claims to defend. A law can be lawful and still unjust, but rejecting corrupted authority does not mean rejecting responsibility.

If anything, it often creates more responsibility.

Once someone decides, I cannot obey this, another question immediately follows: Then what will you do instead?

That second question is much harder.

Choice Is The Thing That Remains

Perhaps the simplest way I can explain the trilogy is this:

The characters do not always get to choose what happens to them. They do not choose every war. They certainly do not choose every loss. They do not choose every wound, betrayal, political crisis, death, responsibility, or impossible circumstance placed before them.

But they repeatedly get to choose what they do with those things.

Sometimes badly, sometimes courageously, sometimes too late and sometimes at terrible cost.

That is where I think character and humanity truly live.

Not in whether someone has suffered, but in what they decide suffering permits them to become. Not in whether someone possesses power, but in what they believe power is for. Not in whether someone loves, but in what that love asks of them. And not in whether someone is loyal, but in whether the thing receiving that loyalty still deserves it.

So What Is The Dawnshield Order Really About?

It is about soldiers, faith, rebellion and war. It’s about a kingdom struggling with the consequences of corruption. But beneath all of that, it is about people trying to remain human inside systems that encourage them to become something simpler.

It is about refusing easy answers. It is about the difference between goodness and compliance. It is about choosing mercy when cruelty would be understandable. It is about loving people without owning them and it is about letting yourself be loved when you have learned not to trust it.

It is about discovering that duty means very little unless you understand whom that duty is meant to serve. And above all, it is about choice.

The choice to stay gentle, to speak, to resist, to forgive, to protect, to trust, to change and to love.

Because the world of The Dawnshield Order may place swords in its characters’ hands. But the story has always been far more interested in what makes them decide whether to draw them.