Fate’s Wager began with a question I kept returning to: What does a man do with survival when he doesn’t feel like he deserved it?

Jonathon Rourke has been living with that question for five years by the time the story begins. He stood at Bulger’s Rift and came home. Thousands didn’t. That kind of guilt doesn’t announce itself — it seeps in quietly, through the gambling, through the drinking, through every bad decision that keeps him just close enough to destruction without quite finishing the job. I knew men like John long before I wrote him. I suspect many readers will, too.

The Scarlet Archipelago arrived as the perfect crucible for that story. A place where the world’s civilised rules don’t reach, where the only currency that matters is what you’re willing to do to survive. I wanted John’s external journey — the treasure hunt, the monsters, the betrayal — to mirror exactly what was happening inside him. Every obstacle the island threw at his crew was, in some way, a version of what he was already fighting.

The fellowship that assembles around him was one of my favourite parts to write. Unlikely groups forced together by circumstance produce the best kind of tension, and I tried to honour that while making each member feel genuinely distinct. The dwarf, the Elven ranger, the Namites — they are not decorative. They carry their own weight, their own wounds, their own reasons for being there.

Fate’s Wager is ultimately a story about whether a broken man can choose to be something better than his worst decisions. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether John manages it.

I hope the journey was worth the cost.