Where Fire Meets Fantasy: A Q&A with Grace Allen, Author of The Flame That Stayed

What happens when the fire that drives you is shaped by more than strength alone?

In The Flame That Stayed, Grace Allen introduces readers to Seraphyne Vireth, a fierce and complex heroine at the centre of a dark fantasy world filled with magic, danger and the scars of the past. Beneath the battles and fantastical elements, however, lies a story that explores grief, resilience, trust and the connections that can change us when we least expect them.

We caught up with Grace to discover what inspired The Flame That Stayed, how she approached creating its characters and world, the themes that matter most to her, and to get to know a little more about the author behind the story.

The Flame That Stayed is an evocative title. Where did it come from, and what does it represent to you?

The title came quite late in the process, but once I found it, it felt inevitable.

Fire is woven through the whole story, both literally and emotionally. Seraphyne begins the book carrying this enormous, destructive fire inside her, fuelled largely by grief and vengeance. But the story gradually becomes less about the fire that destroys and more about the fire that survives.

For me, The Flame That Stayed represents the part of us that remains when something terrible has happened and changed us completely. Not necessarily untouched or unbroken, but still there. It’s love, hope, memory, stubbornness and that little ember that refuses to go out.

There’s another meaning to the title too, connected to Seraphyne’s younger brother, Elyas. Although he is gone, he hasn’t simply disappeared from her life or from who she is. The love between them, the things he taught her and the person she was when he was alive continue to stay with her and shape the choices she makes. I don’t want to say too much more without straying into spoiler territory, but that idea of someone remaining part of us after death became very important to the story.

Seraphyne loses so much, and for a long time she thinks vengeance is the only flame keeping her moving. What she eventually discovers is that there were other flames still burning inside her all along.

What first sparked the idea for the story, and how did it grow from that initial idea into the world we see in the book?

It started with Seraphyne, but she actually existed before the novel did.

I originally created her as a Dungeons & Dragons character to play in one-shots with my children. She was this purple-skinned Tiefling paladin with enormous black horns, red hair and a fairly impressive amount of attitude. I knew some of her history, her personality and the things that drove her, but she certainly wasn’t created with the intention of writing a novel around her.

Then I started wondering more about her.

Who had she been before the character on my sheet? What had happened to make her so angry? Who had she loved? What had she lost? Why was she carrying this particular sword?

Once I started answering those questions, the story grew very quickly.

I’ve always loved fantasy and TTRPG-style storytelling, so Seraphyne became the doorway into Elyndraen. From her came the Emberfold, the Weave, different cultures and regions, religions, magical creatures and histories. Eventually I realised I wasn’t simply building enough background for one character anymore. I was building a world I wanted to keep exploring.

I love that something which began around a table with my children became The Flame That Stayed.

Seraphyne makes an immediate impression as a protagonist. What did you most enjoy about creating her?

Her contradictions.

Seraphyne can walk into a room and terrify everyone in it without really trying, but underneath that intimidating exterior, she is profoundly vulnerable. She’s angry, stubborn, occasionally brutal and capable of doing things that I absolutely don’t expect every reader to approve of.

But she also loves incredibly deeply.

That was important to me. I didn’t want her strength to mean she had to be emotionally untouchable. In fact, a lot of her ferocity comes precisely because she feels things so intensely.

I also really enjoyed allowing her to be a physically powerful, sexually confident woman without either of those things cancelling out her capacity for tenderness, grief or fear. She doesn’t need to become softer in order to heal. She has to learn that softness can exist alongside the fire.

Fire runs throughout the novel as both something powerful and something deeply emotional. What drew you to that imagery?

I love fire because it is inherently contradictory.

It destroys, but it also warms. It can devastate a landscape, but ash can eventually feed new growth. It can represent rage, passion, comfort, survival, purification or complete destruction depending on how it is used.

That made it perfect for Seraphyne.

At the beginning of the story, she thinks of her fire almost entirely as a weapon. It is vengeance, anger and pain made physical. As her relationships with the other characters develop, the meaning of that fire begins to change as well.

One of the central ideas behind the book is that healing doesn’t necessarily mean extinguishing the parts of yourself that were forged by pain. Sometimes it means learning what else they can become.

Seraphyne never stops burning. She simply learns what she wants to burn for.

Seraphyne is fierce and formidable, but there is also a great deal of vulnerability beneath that strength. How important was it to you to show both sides of her character?

Extremely important.

I’m not particularly interested in strength when it means never being frightened, never needing anyone and never falling apart. Characters like that can actually feel less human, Tiefling or otherwise, to me.

Seraphyne’s strength is meaningful because there are moments when she isn’t strong. She grieves. She doubts herself. She makes mistakes. She needs other people, although she spends a considerable amount of time being deeply irritated by that fact!

A huge part of her journey is learning that allowing herself to be loved doesn’t diminish her independence or her strength.

She begins the story believing she has to carry everything alone. What changes her isn’t somebody arriving to rescue her. It’s discovering people willing to stand beside her while she does the rescuing too.

That distinction mattered to me.

The world of the novel is filled with its own magic, creatures, places and history. What was your favourite part of building that world?

The dangerous answer is: all of it.

Worldbuilding is one of those things where I can disappear down a rabbit hole remarkably easily. A place needs a name, then obviously it needs a history, then I need to know who lives there, what they believe, what creatures evolved there, what they eat, what their architecture looks like... and suddenly I’ve created several thousand words of information that may never appear in the book.

The Weave is probably the part I find most fascinating. I wanted magic to feel less like an unlimited resource people simply draw from and more like something woven into reality itself, something that can be damaged, stretched, bruised and eventually broken.

I also love creating the creatures. Some are terrifying, some are beautiful and some have considerably more personality than is convenient.

But my favourite thing is probably knowing that there are corners of Elyndraen the characters haven’t seen yet. The world should always feel larger than the particular story taking place inside it.

Grief and resilience sit alongside the fantasy and action throughout the story. What interested you about exploring those themes within a fantasy novel?

There’s definitely something personal underneath those themes.

I lost my mum, and working through my own grief has taught me that grief isn’t really something you complete and put away. It changes shape. It becomes part of the person you are afterwards, and I think some of that inevitably found its way into Seraphyne.

Resilience is personal to me too. I have been a single parent for twelve years, with ever-increasing mobility issues, and I think that taught me a lot about the less glamorous version of resilience. Not dramatic acts of bravery, but simply carrying on, adapting, looking after the people who depend on you whilst you yourself are very close to breaking. Through it all, still finding ways to build something good even when life hasn’t gone remotely according to plan.

Fantasy gives you an extraordinary vocabulary for exploring those emotions. Grief can literally become fire. Trauma can fracture magic. A damaged world can mirror damaged people.

I also didn’t want grief to be something Seraphyne simply “gets over”. Her resilience isn’t about returning to the woman she was before everything happened. That woman no longer exists.

It’s about learning how to carry what happened without allowing it to decide everything that happens next.

There is a varied cast of characters surrounding Seraphyne. Did you have a favourite character to write aside from her, or one who surprised you as the story developed?

Drenn. Without question. 💚

He’s very easy to dismiss initially as the chaotic goblin with too many knives and a questionable understanding of ownership, and I certainly enjoy writing that side of him.

But it isn’t actually why I love him.

My favourite Drenn moments are the ones where the performance drops.

He has spent most of his life surviving by being useful, funny, slippery and difficult to pin down. So when he becomes quiet or unexpectedly reflective, those moments carry a lot of weight for me. You occasionally glimpse the person underneath all that bravado, someone who has experienced far more than he generally allows anyone to notice.

I particularly love his relationship with Nyssa because neither of them really demands that the other explain themselves. There’s this odd, fierce sibling-type understanding between them.

Drenn surprised me because I originally thought I knew exactly what role he would play.

Drenn disagreed.

Away from writing, what do you enjoy doing, or is there something about you that readers might be surprised to discover?

Creativity tends to leak into most areas of my life.

When my children were younger, I made all of their World Book Day costumes, which sometimes became considerably more ambitious projects than they probably needed to be! I also enjoy baking and decorating cakes and building miniatures, basically anything that involves making something with my hands and inevitably covering the house in supplies.

Outside the creative hobbies, most of my favourite things are much simpler.

I practise yoga; it helps my mind and my body equally. I love exploring natural remedies and homeopathy and have a few homeopathic and alternative wellness qualifications under my belt. I enjoy survival-craft PC gaming love.

But mostly, I love spending time with my family and my dogs. Family is enormously important to me, which probably explains why found family keeps sneaking into my fiction as well.

I’m happiest when the people I love are content, the dogs are causing some kind of low-level chaos and I have something interesting to play, make, read, watch or obsess over.

What do you hope readers take away from The Flame That Stayed, and where can they follow along with your journey as an author?

More than anything, I hope readers care about and relate to these people.

Of course, I hope they enjoy the magic, the creatures, the battles and Elyndraen itself, but the thing I would most love is for somebody to finish the book feeling as though they have travelled with this strange collection of damaged people. I want readers to recognise pieces of themselves in them, perhaps not in the horns, swords and magical catastrophes, but in their grief, their insecurities, their relationships and the ways they keep trying anyway.

There is darkness in the story, but I don’t think The Flame That Stayed is ultimately a hopeless book.

It’s about what survives.

It’s about allowing yourself to love after loss, finding family in unexpected places, and understanding that being changed by what happened to you does not mean everything that comes afterwards has to belong to it.

As for following my journey as an author, readers can find me here on the Partnership Publishing UK website or at one of my socials, https://linktr.ee/Grace.Allen, where I’ll be sharing updates on The Flame That Stayed, Elyndraen, future books, character artwork and probably far more worldbuilding than anyone reasonably requested.