The World Behind the World
Nick Shepley is a British author, therapist and podcaster (and some other stuff besides) who began building the world of Aestis a decade ago in a Cardiff coffee shop, driven by a fascination with deeply scarred characters haunted by their unresolved traumas — people caught between what they have done and what they cannot escape. His debut series, A Fire in the Heart of Knowing, is set in a realm shaped by catastrophe and held together by fear, where a disappeared Queen left a power vacuum that no one has the moral authority to fill, and where every act of loyalty exists alongside an act of betrayal.
What Drives the Work
The series grew from a single obsession: what happens to a world when the person who held it together simply vanishes? Not dies — vanishes. The Queen of Mordikhaan is gone. Her binding is still in place. Her absence is the wound the world is built around, and every character is, in some way, a response to that wound.
Nick’s influences are the writers who understood that darkness in fantasy isn’t ornamental — it’s structural. Tad Williams, Phillip Pullman, Lian Hearn and Ursula Le Guin (plus a host of non fantasy writers from Le Carre to Arundhati Roy) – writers who earned their darkness by making the world feel real enough to hurt. A Fire in the Heart of Knowing is a contribution to that tradition.
The Series
The Blood of Tharta
Available now in ebook and paperback.
In the Darkness of Dreaming
In progress.
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