Scarlet Vël, Octavia Butler, Fantasy Novels, and My Irish Awakening

Title: Scarlet Vël, Octavia Butler, Fantasy Novels, and My Irish Awakening

When my Delta flight dipped beneath the clouds on December 31, 2024, and the first sight of Ireland came into view, I understood why it was called the Emerald Isle. Even cloaked in fog, rain, and morning mist, the land below shimmered with a kind of verdant magic I’d never seen before. It was like looking down at a story yet to be written. Dotted emeralds spread across the landscape like some divine hand had sewn jewels into the land. And right then—somewhere between jetlag and a second cup of airplane tea—I saw her.

A woman. A warrior. Dark-skinned. Fiery red hair catching wind like flame. She was strong, beautiful, wild. She didn’t have a name yet, didn’t have a story—not fully—but she had presence. And Ireland was her home.

This is how Scarlet Vël began.

I’ve always loved fantasy. Sci-fi. Anything with wonder and otherworldliness that let me leave the reality I’d been handed. Growing up as a Black girl in the South, reading Octavia Butler, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Frank Herbert wasn’t just entertainment. It was sanctuary. It was possibility. It was someone whispering, "Yes, you can imagine another world, and yes, you can create it too."

Octavia Butler, especially, shaped me. This author spoke to something primal in me—the longing to be seen, to be powerful, to survive despite the odds. Wild Seed tore me open and stitched me back up again. Anyanwu didn’t just change form—she transformed pain into purpose. I wanted that kind of power in my writing. I wanted characters like that. Characters who were overlooked, unseen, dismissed—but who went on to do unimaginable things. And when I landed in Ireland, I knew this land could be the birthplace of a world like that.

It was raining when I got to Dublin. 8 a.m., gray skies, and the air thick with that cold Irish dampness that wraps itself around your bones. But baby, that mist made everything glow. The taxi ride into the city felt like entering a myth. Streets curved like stories, cobblestones whispered secrets. My hotel was just a few steps from Trinity College, and as soon as I dropped my bags, I was out exploring like Dora with a pen instead of a backpack.

Walking the streets of Dublin, something cracked open in me. Maybe it was the ancient buildings brushing shoulders with modern life. Maybe it was hearing history from Irish voices instead of American textbooks. These weren’t dry facts. These were tales told with sorrow and pride, with tears and laughter, by people whose roots ran deep into the soil—people who had known famine, colonization, grief, and survival. I saw myself in them. In their pride. In their fight. In their fierce tenderness.

And Scarlet—the woman I had seen from the sky—kept returning to me.

In Galway, as I stood on the rocky coast, I imagined her there on horseback, red hair whipping like flame, cloak soaked in sea mist. I saw her cutting through Irish fog and mountain rain, battling her way through silence and invisibility. I didn’t know her full story, but I knew her *spirit*. She was a woman made to be hidden—told to be quiet, to make herself smaller. She was told the world didn’t need her. And like the Irish, she defied that lie. Scarlet Vël became the girl who would not be denied.

The more I traveled through Ireland—took walking tours, wandered through countryside roads, visited castles and ruins and pubs older than the colonized U.S.—the more Scarlet's story took shape. The land was rough and soft. Kind and brutal. Beautiful and dangerous. It was everything she would be.

And then, one January day, I got caught in an Irish snowstorm.

There I was, Black American woman from Atlanta, standing on the edge of a cliff in the Irish mountains, snow flurries biting at my cheeks, wind howling like banshees. My hands were frozen, my phone was dead, and for a moment I truly wondered: Is this it? Would I be that weird headline? Writer Dies in Snow, Wearing Cute Boots but No Survival Gear.

I stared into the white abyss and thought of Scarlet. What would she do in this moment? What would Anyanwu from Wild Seed do? Would she crumble? Would she fall? Or would she take one more step?

Gandalf didn’t give up. Paul Atreides didn’t give up. Aslan didn’t quit. And neither would I.

I walked. I walked cold, scared, breathless—but I walked.

And I made it.

That storm, like so many moments in Ireland, reminded me of the purpose of fantasy—not to escape reality, but to transform it. To see yourself—the version of you you’ve been told is too loud, too Black, too different—as the chosen one. The hero. The legend.

That’s what I want Scarlet Vël to be.

A story about a girl who should have disappeared, but instead carved her name into the world.

That’s what I want my story to be.

Ireland gave me more than just a place to start a novel. It gave me clarity. It gave me connection. It gave me a heroine. The land itself told me, "There’s power in your difference. There’s beauty in your fight. There’s magic in your story."

And so, I write.

Scarlet Vël is still in world-building stages. She's still becoming. But so am I.

And as Robert Frost said, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by." That has made all the difference.

I chose to walk this unknown path. I left everything familiar behind to find something deeper, something wilder.

And I found it. Right here, in Ireland.

—Stephanie 🌿