Behind the books
Behind the Pages
How Cyborg Unclaimed Actually Got Made
Honest answer? It started with a question I couldn’t shake.
What happens when ancient faith runs headfirst into modern warfare? What happens to the people caught in the middle of that collision — the ones who are half ritual and half machine, who were handed an identity by gods or governments and then had it blown apart?
That’s where Morrigan and Luke came from.
I wanted a world that held both things at once. The mythic and the mechanical. Wings and wiring. A warrior priestess tradition that goes back centuries sitting right next to cyborg soldiers and post-war politics. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and honestly figuring out how to make it work was most of the fun.
For Luke specifically, I did a lot of reading. Veterans’ accounts, medical literature on prosthetics, essays on identity and augmentation. Because it would’ve been really easy to make the cyborg thing cool and leave it there — the metal arm, the enhanced strength, whatever. But what I actually wanted to write was the psychological weight of it. What it feels like to not recognize yourself. What it costs to keep going when you’re not sure what’s even left of the original person.
Morrigan was a different kind of research. More mythic language, more psychology of ritual and devotion. When you build your entire identity around a faith and a calling, and then that gets taken away — that’s not just a plot point. That’s a grief. I wanted it to feel like one.
The Colony itself I built as a place that could go either way. Think small town energy — everybody knows everybody, gossip travels faster than the news, and there’s nowhere to disappear to even if you wanted to. Except it’s in space, and the only thing between you and a very hostile desert environment is a dome. Not a punishment, not a prison — just the thing keeping everyone alive. Humans and Novians trying to figure out coexistence after a war that hurt everybody, all crammed together under that dome with no real option to leave. It’s not a utopia and it’s not a disaster zone. It’s somewhere in between, which felt more honest — and honestly, more interesting to write.
The hardest part was balancing the external plot — the threats, the danger, the history chasing both of them — with the internal one. Because the real stakes were always Morrigan and Luke. Whether they could get out of their own way long enough to choose each other.
I think they do. Eventually. Messily.
Which is really the only way worth doing it.
