Hello again dear reader or listener, I am back with another Breakdown of a Chapter, this time with bestselling Fantasy and Sci-Fi author Richard Swan.Whether you only know him from his debut trilogy Empire of the Wolf, have read everything he’s written (self and trad published) and just can’t get enough of how those writerly skills are honed, or you’re just following along with this segment to find new authors to add to your TBR, I thought to bring you this treat given the recent release of Steel Gods, book two in his The Great Silence Trilogy. I thought we could pick the author’s evil mind a little about this badass first entry of the series, Grave Empire, as indeed, to open this new trilogy, Swan brings together horror fantasy, flintlock, espionage, a sprinkling of steampunk, wolfmen, mer-men, necromancy and so much more.
Settle in then, dear reader or listener, for we are about to have some more storytelling craft fun!
Book Blurb
Blood once turned the wheels of empire. Now it is money.
A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.
But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse.
Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days – the Great Silence.
It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save …
Grave Empire – Chapter 15
Given this book’s multi-POV nature, and my wish to not actually fully spoil the well woven plot for those who may not have read it yet, we’ll only be focusing on one character’s storyline. In fact, like I say in my full review of Grave Empire (that you can find here if you’re curious), each separate storyline is utterly compelling in its own way and for various reasons. Two of them ring so true in the protagonists’ reactions to their situations in ways that are somewhat unexpected for epic fantasy heroes. Truly, the horrors are many and, sure, the characters do try to get through them with some bravery and stubbornness, but in point of fact they are actually terrified the whole time. Which brings me to why I specifically picked this chapter, and that is Peter, my favorite reluctant hero who deserves better and yet Swan seems to hate in particular fashion. Unfortunately we can’t work on three chapters to be able to dive into each POV character individually but luckily we have lots to break down even with just the one!
[This is your official warning for mild spoilers going forth!]
Short recap of events prior to this chapter:
Peter Kleist, a lieutenant on a bought commission with the Sovan army, finds his posting to be at the so-called “fort at the end of the world” frontlines, as it is on the very fringes of the empire, and rife with rumours of spirits, witches, and ghosts. Upon his arrival at Fort Ingomar, and to his great dismay, Peter learns that an unknown enemy is plaguing the forests, leaving dismembered bodies of soldiers in grotesque displays, as well as haunting screams and wails being heard every night from an unknowable source. With the fort undermanned and the soldiers almost at their wit’s end due to the harrowing circumstances and ongoing hallucinations, Peter is out of his depth among the hardened veterans around him and struggles with his authority. When he is, ostensibly, tasked with thwarting the enemy from setting up an outpost fort further into the wilderness and prevent them from creating better footing for their forces, he is actually sent to try and figure out these macabre events that might have to do with outlawed sorcery. Stalked by something terrifying that is somehow always just out of their sight and reach, Peter and his command finally get to engage the (human) enemies they were sent to deal with and effectively win the day and take over their fort. With the prisoners telling of monsters and an upcoming attack from the north, Peter is forced to investigate the claims regardless of how reluctant they all are to go. And thus, he and a small detachment of men undertake the trek further into the wild north, where they finally come face to face with whatever has been stalking them this whole time.
Let’s start from your writing process for this book a little more in general:
For those completely new to your work and to Grave Empire , how did this story first come about?
The seed for Grave Empire came about because I wanted to write a story about a vicious mermaid society, in which they rode great white sharks and orcas and used them to kill one another. The way I pitched it was Game of Thrones meets The Little Mermaid.
Anyway, Orbit didn’t want that, I think they were worried that it was too much of a departure from the Empire of the Wolf. I went back to the drawing board, determined to include mermaids somewhere; that was when I had the idea of making the Empire of the Wolf a trilogy of trilogies, with several hundred years passing between each series. I’m a huge reader of historical non-fiction, and I’ve always had a keen interest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (especially the Napoleonic wars), so doing a flintlock fantasy series that read almost like an alternate history with fantastical elements was very appealing to me.
I think I can speak for everyone that picked this up when I say we’re definitely glad you persevered with the warrior mer angle! And, speaking of a trilogy of trilogies, The Great Silence follows Empire of the Wolf in that it’s set in the same world but 200 years later, so it’s clearly not a direct sequel. How did you decide how much of the previous series to pepper into the current story?
I decided very early on that the two series should be completely distinct. I loved the depth of worldbuilding that came with connecting them, and I spent weeks building out the intervening history and maps. But in terms of the actual story, I wanted the two trilogies to be read independently of one another. This was not just a creative decision; commercially, it’s a harder sell to get a reader on board if they have to do three books’ worth of homework beforehand.
That’s not to say I didn’t sprinkle some Easter eggs throughout, which is of course a huge part of the fun for long-time readers. But I think it would have felt like a strange contrivance to start loading it up with references; after all, how often do we talk about the 1820s in our day-to-day lives?
The real opportunity for continuity came with the immortal, elemental creatures of the afterlife. The idea is that between all of the series and various connected books there is an ongoing war in heaven. The time obviously runs differently there, and so there was much greater scope for recurring characters, locations, et cetera, in that part of the worldbuilding.
That makes sense! And, if nothing else, those small connections only help to pique our curiosity further.
Given that this is a Multi-POV narrative, more specifically three different plotlines that will need to converge eventually, how do you decide chapter order/sequence? Do you write everything out in order individually and then weave them together, or skip over sections to get back to later?
I plan it all out ahead of time. I love the planning process, it’s a huge part of the fun and creativity for me. There’s no question of writing it in chronological order, I would find anything else almost impossible.
In terms of chapter order and sequence, it’s of course a balancing act, and getting that balance right comes simply with practising the craft of writing. Over time you get an instinctive feel for the sorts of things— “we haven’t heard from [x] for a while, time for an update” sort of thing. Colour coding a plan certainly helps!
I’m with you there, I’d be lost without color coding whenever I have to keep track of multiple things.
Is there something special about this chapter in particular that you can remember thinking or doing while writing it?
Poor Peter. I’m not quite sure why I’m so horrible to him across the trilogy, and I’m sorry to say my treatment of him does not improve in book 3 either.
(This poor man deserves a stiff drink or two… or ten)
The original seed of inspiration for this chapter came from the movie The 13th Warrior, and I think once you know that, you can see the parallels quite clearly. The 13th Warrior is a bafflingly-maligned movie. I’ve never understood why it was considered a box office bomb when it is an objectively good film. It scared the absolute shit out of me as a child in much the same way a bootleg VHS of Alien: Resurrection did; and, in much the same way Alien: Resurrection did, it also subtly rewired my preadolescent brain and helped to create a lifelong obsession with all things sci-fi and fantasy.
So I was certainly trying to capture that sense of people a very very long way from home, out of their depth, with no help for hundreds of miles in every direction, faced with a terrifying and extremely unknowable enemy.
I know what movie to watch tonight!
Did you plot out the story beats necessary for it or did you just have a general goal in mind and “let it happen”? Furthermore did this chapter make it to the end of the writing and editing process intact or did it go through significant changes throughout drafts?
This is more or less the first draft and generally speaking I’m a rigorous plotter. I know some people loathe that mode of writing, but I’ve always loved it.
That said, when it came to the catman storyline of Grave Empire, I didn’t know where I was going to go with it. I knew what the ultimate outcome had to be, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. Normally this causes my novel writing progress to screech unceremoniously to a halt, but in this case I can remember just having a few shots of espresso and letting the wheels come off.
I love where it went, and the profound fuckedup-ness of it, but it certainly created a headache for books two and three.
And now for the deeper dive:
What are the key elements you wanted this chapter to have?
The tension, fear, dread, and ultimately the chaos, followed by the fresh fear of facing an entirely new, unanticipated, unexpected variable.
And was there a favorite scene/section in it that you were particularly looking forward to writing?
The whole scene itself was one of what I call my “tentpole” scenes. These are random thoughts for scenes that I have jotted down often months or years before, pieces of a creative vision which I absolutely want to include in a given novel and which form the bedrock of the planning process. They are the ‘tentpoles” upon which the plot is hung. In this particular instance, having men frantically preparing to weather an attack by unknown monsters was inspired by watching The 13th Warrior as a teenager and I just knew that at some point in the future I wanted to include it in a book. And so I have included it here!
That “aha! I can finally fit this here” moment must’ve been very satisfying, I bet!
What is this chapter’s importance in regards to the wider narrative, then? Why was it important for your story telling pace for these events to happen at this moment in respect to everything else occurring across the story?
The chapter is important because it finally breaks the tension that was building in Peter’s storyline. We tip over from dread to horror—not only the horror of the catmen themselves, but horror of the fresh unknown. If you look at the book, this chapter is at almost exactly the halfway point, which is when, structurally, we want to start ramping things up a little bit.
Let’s talk a little more about Peter. He is very much the unwilling protagonist as he didn’t answer the proverbial hero’s call as much as he was dragged by the scruff into it. In what specific way has his point of view informed this chapter?
I wanted Peter to be a mixture of things. Not necessarily cowardly, or rather outwardly cowardly, but instead very much driven by a sense of inescapable duty. Peter isn’t a coward because he is not allowed to be a coward. It would be too embarrassing and shameful to be a coward, even though all he wants to do is run away. Peter is therefore, like most young officers of the eighteenth century, a contradiction of many different aspects.
I also wanted to capture a sense of the value of life. One of my favourite books is the Thin Red Line by James Jones, and one of the themes he tackles is how men were willing to die so as to not be labelled a coward, and how objectively extraordinary that is if you really think about it. It’s a theme that I’ve tried to bring into a lot of my recent writing, especially in Peter’s storyline as a military man. One of the things Peter realises in this chapter is how he would be willingly branded a coward and leave in disgrace if it meant he could just go home; how so much of their social mores are just absurd contrivance.
That was definitely one of the aspects that drew me to this character the most, personally! The contrived absurdity of dying for honor or duty and so on is a very nuanced theme and I think you tackled that very intelligently in this.
So, even though the full extent of this chapter’s consequences can’t be seen by the end of it, for this project, I like to pick chapters that will lead to some level of transformation for the protagonist(s). How, then, is Peter different entering this chapter and then exiting it? Aside from the obvious “having a truly terrible time and yet not as bad as it’s about to be”.
I think it’s a resignation, in many ways. In the first part of the chapter, Peter is desperately rallying the soldiers to defend the old pagan lodge against what looked like monsters. By the end, they have failed, but he is still alive and being transported even further away from everything he ever knew. For the reader there is a sense of dread excitement to find out what comes next; for Peter himself, I think the character suffers from a sense of resignation, a loss of hope. They have lost men, supplies, and their weapons, and he is many hundreds of miles from the very closest Sovan outpost. It is a boundary between fear of the unknown, and now grappling with the unknown, and there comes with that a certain hopelessness which I think suffuses him.
That must be special for you as well in a way, for where you can take this character next, right? As you’ve got the anticipation/fun of playing with the reader’s expectations, I’d imagine.
What eventually happens to Peter is a rare example of me pantsing part of a story. Normally because of the complexity of my plots I tend to plan books carefully (and I love that part of the process) but with Peter’s I just sort of let my imagination run wild. I loved the result but it did create a few headaches for me in the sequels!
Finally then, what is the core of this chapter for you?
It’s the tipping point between fearing something and then grappling with the horror of its discovery without any fixed point or frame of reference. It’s a rational fear of an irrational thing; having to grapple with an unknown unknown.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me! Are there any future projects or news you would like to share with us to wrap up?
I’m pleased to report that book 3 of the Great Silence, which is called Blood Dynasty, has now been edited and finished and will release early in 2027. In the meantime, fans of my work can look forward to The Infinite State, my new blockbuster sci-fi series releasing in August this year. I also have a Warhammer 40,000 novel releasing with Black Library in September!
You’ve been busy and we love to see it! Even though at the time of writing this I am only midway through Steel Gods, I am already feeling that same dread excitement you’ve mentioned for book 3!
Thank you!
Until next time, dear reader,
Eleni A.E.
Richard was born in North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. The son of a schoolteacher and a fighter pilot, he spent most of his early life on Royal Air Force bases, and attended St Peter’s School in York as a boarder. From 2007 – 2010 he studied Law at the University of Manchester, and spent the following ten years as a commercial litigator in London.
Between 2015 and 2018, Richard self-published The Art of War trilogy, a sequence of epic military space operas, as well as a number of prequels, novellas and short stories.
Richard’s traditionally-published debut fantasy trilogy, The Empire of the Wolf, sold to Orbit Books in a pre-empt in August 2020 for a six-figure sum. The first instalment, The Justice of Kings (2022), was an instant Sunday Times bestseller (5) and has been translated into nine languages. The second and third volumes, The Tyranny of Faith and The Trials of Empire were released in February 2023 and 2024 respectively.
In 2024 Orbit Books announced that they had bought a second trilogy from Richard set 200 years after the events of the Empire of the Wolf series: The Great Silence. The first book, Grave Empire, was released in February 2025 and was another instant Sunday Times bestseller (7). It is currently being translated into German and Czech. The sequel, Steel Gods, was released in March 2026.
In 2025, Tor Books and Gollancz announced that they had acquired the North American and UK & Commonwealth rights to Richard’s new blockbuster science fiction novel The Infinite State (Book 1 of the Decurion Saga), for global release in summer 2026.
Richard is a keen wargamer and has written three short stories for Black Library (Tears of Raphaela, Blood Harvest and Ash and Steel), with an unannounced Warhammer 40,000 novel to come in summer 2026. He has also written short fiction for Grimdark Magazine (A Reputation for Prudence) and The Scour: An Empire of the Wolf Novella (October 2025).
Richard married his wife Sophia in 2016 and together they have three small boys. They currently live in Sydney, Australia.
For more contact details and updates on his work you can find him on his website here
