Someone will read this book and wish I'd written more.
More description. More interiority. More hand-holding through the emotional beats. They won't be wrong to want that. Some of the best fantasy prose is lush—dense with imagery, thick with feeling. There's a reason those books find readers. There's a reason they endure.
This isn't that kind of book.
The spareness came from two places.
The first was instinct. When I wrote the early drafts with more ornamentation, something felt false. The Ashens don't speak in flourishes. They live in a place where survival demands economy: of resources, of energy, of words. The prose needed to match.
The second was trust. Trust that you'll feel the cold without me telling you it's bitter. Trust that you'll understand grief without me naming every shade of it. Trust that the white space between sentences carries weight.
This might be arrogance. It might be laziness dressed as aesthetic choice. I've considered both. (Usually at 2 AM, which is when all the worst doubts visit.)
The writers who taught me this weren't fantasy writers, mostly. Cormac McCarthy, who could break your heart with a period. Marilynne Robinson, whose silences hold whole theologies. Kazuo Ishiguro, who shows you everything by showing you almost nothing.
But also: Ursula K. Le Guin, who understood that restraint isn't absence. That what you leave out shapes what remains. That fantasy doesn't require excess to feel real.
I'm not comparing myself to any of them. I'm saying they gave me permission.
The risk is real. Spare prose can feel cold. Distant. It asks more of the reader, and not every reader wants to be asked. Some will bounce off this book's surface and never find their way in.
That's a cost. I've chosen to pay it.
Because when restraint works—when the reader leans in, when they feel the weight of what isn't said—there's nothing like it. The story becomes theirs too. They're not passengers. They're collaborators.
I might be wrong about all of this. The book might need more. The readers might need more.
But I'd rather err toward trust than explanation. Toward silence than noise. Toward the kind of prose that assumes you're paying attention.
You are, aren't you?