The Stakes Are Even Higher: A Guest Post by Axie Oh
In the follow-up to Axie Oh’s Floating World, Rex and her friends were able to stop a war from brewing, but there is a larger threat lurking in the royal court, and Rex might be the only one who can save her people. Read on for an exclusive essay from Axie Oh on writing The Demon and the Light.
Hardcover
$16.99
$19.99
The Demon and the Light
The Demon and the Light
By Axie Oh
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$16.99
$19.99
Final Fantasy meets Shadow and Bone in The Demon and the Light, the hotly anticipated follow-up to Axie Oh’s The Floating World.
Final Fantasy meets Shadow and Bone in The Demon and the Light, the hotly anticipated follow-up to Axie Oh’s The Floating World.
The idea for The Floating World came soon after finishing my previous fantasy novel, The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea. Like with that story, I wanted to draw inspiration from Korean folktales and legends, and the ones that intrigued me the most were those surrounding celestial maidens. Celestial maidens, or “seonyeo” in Korean—sometimes translated as heavenly maidens, fairies, or goddesses—are magical women from the sky who come down to earth to bathe in waterfall pools. The most significant feature of these women is their robelike wings, the source of their magic, which they must remove to bathe in the pools. They appear, most famously, in the classic Korean folktale “The Woodcutter and the Celestial Maiden,” about a woodcutter who, discovering three maidens in a pool, steals the wings of the youngest maiden, therefore trapping her on Earth. This story always intrigued me because of the vivid imagery: dark forests, waterfall pools, and women from the sky who bathe beneath the stars, as well as the themes of captivity versus freedom and transformation (without their wings, the maidens are mortal beings, but with them, they’re goddesses). All these themes and more I explore in The Floating World, as my heroine, Ren, is a celestial maiden, and has hidden powers that others seek to exploit. In The Demon and the Light, we dive even deeper into the legend of the celestial maidens as Ren grapples with her legacy as the last of her kind.
From the beginning, I knew the story would be a duology, two halves of a whole, with the story being incomplete without the second part. The stakes are even higher in the second book, and I introduce a new, terrifying villain (who was hinted at in book one). Recently, I discovered the German title for The Demon and the Light is “The Boy from the Kingdom of Shadows,” and I thought that was such a wonderful and fitting title because as much as Ren is my heroine, Sunho is my hero. He goes through his own journey in the sequel, battling both outer and inner demons, quite literally. While Ren brings the light and fantastical elements to the story, Sunho brings the darkness and sci-fi elements (his powers are a result of scientific experimentation). Their meeting is not only a meeting of two people from opposite worlds, but also a meeting of genres. Beyond greater stakes, in The Demon and the Light, readers can expect even more romance and action; characters who hadn’t yet met, or actively despised one another, must team up and work together; there’s also a scene toward the end of the book that I wrote the entire series for; hint: it takes place at a waterfall pool. I’m truly so excited for readers to discover how the story concludes in The Demon and the Light.
