A Beacon in the Darkness: A Guest Post by Nikita Gill

By Nikita Gill / September 19, 2025 at 12:01 am

An iconic myth is reimagined through the eyes of a young Goddess. As the heroine comes to power, she sets out to uncover the truth of her past while grappling with her divine destiny. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Nikita Gill on writing Hekate.

Hardcover $16.99 ~~$19.99~~

Hekate (Deluxe Limited Edition): The Witch

By Nikita Gill

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Hardcover $16.99 ~~$19.99~~

In a stunning reimagining of Greek myth for fans of Circe and Lore, Nikita Gill showcases the underworld and its chthonic deities in all their glory in this first book in an exciting trilogy, weaving a gripping story about the young goddess coming of age within their midst.

What do a hound, a silver key and the crossroads have in common? Each one of these is a symbol of the Goddess Hekate – the Titan Goddess of the crossroads, keys, witchcraft and necromancy. Whenever I first start dreaming of a story, I pay attention to the symbols from that story that show up in my life. This is how Hekate began. It arrived in the form of a dream one day in 2019, like a film in my head. I saw it so clearly, that all the next day, Hekate’s symbols kept showing up.

Not long after I had my dream, I took my notebook and went for a walk through the forest and ended up at an old graveyard. There, amongst the sleeping dead, the story of Hekate slowly began to take shape. I considered writing it in prose, and I tried it in third person, too. But it didn’t take me long to see that the easiest way the story flowed from my fingers was through verse. All stories have voices, deep, powerful and resonant ones that begin at the core of the tale. Hekate’s tale lay inside the bones of her lineage. I knew when I was researching about the Titanomachy, the ten thousand year long war between the Titan Gods and the Olympian Gods that this story would be born from the wreckage of a family.

Hekate for me has always been a guide. A beacon in the darkness, and when crafting her character it struck me that she could become a light for others. She herself knew how cold the Underworld was when she first got there as a young child fleeing war, her home destroyed. As a grown Goddess, she becomes fiercely protective of children and women, but it was her journey getting there that kept my pen to paper.

One of my favorite characters in the book is Styx, the river of the dead, who ends up becoming Hekate’s reluctant foster mother. The growth of their relationship was one of my favorite aspects to explore, as well as Hekate’s friendship with Charon, the ferryman. It was important for me to showcase how no one, not even a goddess, can grow in isolation – we all grow in part due to the relationships we build around us.

Whenever I begin writing a story, I start with a series of questions I want to have answered. With Hekate, I wrote the longest series of questions I have ever written and as I wrote her tale, I referred to this list often as the soul of the story. One of my central questions was: What happens when a child is raised in a brutal, but beautiful place like the Underworld and has ghosts, skeletons and a three headed dog for playmates? If you read Hekate, you might find out.