About this book
Draconim Lacrima Mortis began with a simple question that has stayed with me through much of my environmental fiction: what if the Earth is not silent? What if the damage we do is not just measured in reports, studies, and political arguments, but felt by something ancient enough to remember what the world was before we started taking it apart? I wanted to write a dragon story, but not one where dragons were just weapons, pets, or symbols of power. I wanted them to be witnesses.
This book is about environmental destruction, corporate negligence, political denial, and the way young people inherit crises they did not create. It moves through toxic pollution, ecological grief, Indigenous perspectives, identity, activism, and the uneasy realization that saving the world is not a clean or simple thing. The fantasy elements are there, but they are not an escape from the real world. They are a way of looking more directly at it.
Much of what shaped this story came from watching how environmental disasters are discussed after the damage is already done. There is always a language of containment, mitigation, acceptable loss, and economic necessity. But land, water, animals, and communities do not experience harm in percentages. They experience it as loss. That is the space this book lives in: the place where wonder and grief meet, and where courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision to act while carrying it.
I hope readers come away from Draconim Lacrima Mortis asking harder questions about accountability, responsibility, and what it means to belong to a living planet. For younger readers, I hope it gives shape to the eco-anxiety many already feel. For educators and librarians, I hope it offers a story that can open conversations about climate, pollution, activism, Indigenous knowledge, grief, and resilience without speaking down to young people.
This book is written for readers who still believe fantasy can tell the truth. It is for teens, parents, educators, librarians, and curious readers who understand that dragons do not have to pull us away from reality. Sometimes, they help us see it more clearly.
