Interview: Gael Ashen on mythology, older protagonists, and the long game

With the release of A Pact of Ash and Thorn, the first book in The Unmarked Courts series, we sat down with Gael Ashen to talk about dead gods, living cities, and the particular difficulty of writing a love story between two people who have been alive long enough to know better.

Your debut blends Celtic and Norse mythology in modern London. That’s an unusual collision. Where did it start?

With a coroner’s report. I was reading about how forensic pathologists talk about the dead, the clinical language they use, and I thought: what if someone who used to be a Valkyrie spoke that way? What if she traded the battlefield for the morgue and found that she was better at this version of the job? The rest grew from there. Once Bryn existed, she needed an opposite, and the Wild Hunt walks through every mythology I grew up reading. Kern was always going to be Celtic. The tension between their traditions is the spine of the series.

London specifically, though. Why not a secondary world?

Because the contrast does the work. A Valkyrie is impressive in a fantasy kingdom. A Valkyrie standing in a fluorescent-lit autopsy room in Southwark, wearing nitrile gloves and dictating into a recorder, is something else entirely. The mundane world makes the mythological feel heavier. And London has layers. Two thousand years of people building on top of each other. That felt right for a story about old powers hiding beneath a modern surface.

Bryn and Kern are notably older than most protagonists in this genre. Readers have responded to that. Was it a deliberate choice?

Completely. I wanted to write people who have already made the big mistakes. Bryn gave up immortality. Kern has led the Hunt for centuries. They are not discovering who they are. They know exactly who they are, and that knowledge is the problem. When you have lived long enough, your defenses are not walls you built in a panic. They are architecture. Careful, load-bearing, and if you remove the wrong one, the whole thing comes down.

That changes the romance. These are not two people falling. They are two people who see the fall coming and try to negotiate terms.

You studied cultural mythology. How much of the academic work shows up in the fiction?

More than I expected. Less than I feared. The Unmarked Courts borrow structural concepts from multiple traditions, and there is a framework underneath the world-building that comes directly from Slavic cosmology, though most readers will never need to know that. The goal was always to use the scholarship as foundation, not decoration. If I have done my job, the mythology feels inevitable rather than educational.

There is a concept in the book called “The Pale” that some early readers found confusing. How are you thinking about that going forward?

Honestly. They are right. The Pale is clear in my head because I built it, but clarity in the writer’s head does not automatically become clarity on the page. Book two handles it better. I spent time finding ways to show the Pale through action rather than explanation. The concept is not actually complicated. I was overcomplicating the delivery.

What is your writing process like?

I outline extensively, then ignore the outline when the characters tell me I am wrong. The outline is a safety net, not a rail. I write in long sessions, usually starting early in the morning when the analytical part of my brain has not fully switched on yet. I find I write better romance and mythology when I am slightly too tired to second-guess the emotional logic.

I also keep a notebook. Physical, paper, pen. The screen is for drafting. The notebook is where I figure out what I actually think about a scene before I write it.

Who are your influences?

Laini Taylor for how she handles mythology as a living system rather than a reference library. Susanna Clarke for the weight of her world-building and the way Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell makes magic feel bureaucratic and real. Neil Gaiman for the trick of making gods feel small and human without diminishing them. Holly Black for the fae politics. And honestly, crime fiction. I read a lot of Tana French. The way she handles atmosphere and unreliable perception shaped how I write Bryn’s scenes more than any fantasy author did.

The slow burn between Bryn and Kern has gotten a strong reaction. How do you pace that kind of tension within a single book?

By making it cost something every time they get closer. A slow burn only works if the distance is earned, if the reader understands exactly why these two people are not together yet and agrees, reluctantly, that the reasons are real. The moment the separation feels manufactured, the tension dies.

With Bryn and Kern, the obstacle is structural. Their mythological traditions are in conflict. The closer they get personally, the more they destabilize the system that holds the Unmarked Courts together. So every step toward each other is a genuine risk. Each book in the series is a different couple in a different city and a different time, so the romance has to be complete within that book. You get one story to build everything, earn everything, and land it. That constraint is terrifying and I think it makes the books better.

Some readers expect romantasy to follow a formula: the fated mates, the mating bond, the explicit scenes by act two. You did none of that. Was that a risk you thought about?

I thought about it constantly. I chose to do it anyway.

Here is what I believe. The genre is not the formula. Romantasy is a fantasy story where the romance is load-bearing, where the love story is not a subplot but the thing that drives the plot forward. That is all it has to be. Fated mates is one version of that. It is a good version. But it is not the only one, and I think readers are hungrier for variety than the market gives them credit for.

Bryn and Kern are not fated. They are stuck with each other because of a Blood Pact neither of them wanted, and they have to figure out what that means while the world is falling apart. The romance is slow because these are two people who have very good reasons not to trust anyone, and centuries of practice at keeping distance. If they fell into bed in chapter twelve, it would be a lie. The reader would feel it even if they could not name it.

As for explicit content, I write the heat that the scene earns. Book one is not that scene. The tension is the point. I would rather a reader finish a chapter at two in the morning and lie in the dark thinking about a hand almost touching a hand than write a sex scene that arrives on schedule.

I know that costs me some readers. I also know the readers I keep are the ones who will follow the series for ten books. That is the trade I made. I am comfortable with it.

What do you want readers to feel when they finish A Pact of Ash and Thorn?

Like they walked through something old. I want the book to feel heavy in the good way, the way a long walk through a city at night feels, where you are tired and the light has changed and you are not quite the same person you were when you started. And then I want them to be slightly furious about the ending, in the way that means they need the next book.

What is next?

Every book in The Unmarked Courts is independent. Different couple, different city, different century. You can read them in any order. But there are linking elements and side characters who move between the stories, and the world gets larger with each book. The Unmarked Courts are old. They have a lot of doors.

Book two, A Crown of Hollow Bones, is in typesetting now. A Greek death goddess and a Slavic immortal who has been avoiding her for approximately eternity. St. Petersburg, 1882. It is funnier than book one. It is also worse.

Book three is in final editing. I am not saying anything about it yet except that it takes place somewhere warm and the mythology is not European.

And I am writing book four. It is going badly in the way that means it is going well. The characters are fighting me, which usually means I have found the real story underneath the one I planned.

Thank you, Gael.

Thank you. Go read the book. Tell me where I am wrong. I mean it.