By: Eric Johnson
In Shadows & Kings, part of Jennifer Aitken’s Legends of Light & Shadows saga, the battles may unfold across fantastical worlds, but one of the story’s most important conflicts is strikingly human: learning to believe in yourself when doubt insists that you can’t.
For Aitken, that struggle is not simply something she created for her characters. It is personal.
Looking at Lucius, the central figure whose journey has unfolded throughout the series, Aitken can now recognize pieces of herself in the character she created.
“Lucius’ crisis of confidence is a reflection of myself,” she says.
Self-doubt, Aitken explains, has accompanied her both as a writer and in her personal life. It is something she continues to work to shed, and something that has found its way into the emotional foundation of her fiction.
That connection offers another way of looking at Shadows & Kings. Beneath its magic, mythology, and larger-than-life stakes is a story about something far more familiar: what happens when the person we thought we would become collides with the person life is asking us to be.
Fantasy is often described as an escape from reality. Aitken uses it as a mirror.
Lucius may inhabit a universe filled with extraordinary forces, but his uncertainty is recognizable. Aitken has been deliberate about portraying someone who struggles with identity, lacks confidence, and sometimes fears making the changes necessary to take charge of his own life.
“We have all experienced moments or periods in our life where we feel like we’re drowning in a life that doesn’t belong to us,” she says.
Strip away the kingdoms, powers, and mythology, and the emotional questions become surprisingly familiar: Who am I? Am I strong enough? What happens if the life I imagined for myself is not the life I am actually living? And what am I capable of becoming?
For Aitken, the answer does not arrive through a sudden transformation. Lucius’ evolution reflects her belief that confidence can be built incrementally.
“It takes little steps, tiny changes, to begin to see how much strength and confidence we all already possess,” she says. “We sometimes simply forget it’s there.”
That idea extends beyond Lucius. Aitken believes there comes a point when many people must reconcile the future they once imagined with the reality of who they have become.
As children and young adults, she says, we often carry an idealized picture of our lives, the success we will achieve, the person we will become, and the path we will follow. Then life intervenes. Experiences change us. Relationships change us. Unexpected events redirect us.
But Aitken does not necessarily see that divergence as failure.
“Just because the picture of your life or yourself changes, it isn’t always a bad thing,” she says.
This philosophy fits naturally within Shadows & Kings, where identity is not fixed. It is tested, challenged, and ultimately shaped by the choices characters make when circumstances refuse to follow the plan.
Aitken’s own journey with the Legends of Light & Shadows saga has required a similar willingness to move through uncertainty. If she could sit down with the version of herself who first dreamed of writing the series, her message would be remarkably simple.
“I would tell her not to be scared.”
That sentence carries much of the emotional truth behind Aitken’s journey as a writer.
Early on, she worried about how readers would react to her ideas. She questioned whether she was writing like other fantasy authors and wondered what people would think about how she chose to tell her stories. Looking back, she sees how those worries did little except hold back her progress.
“There is an audience for everyone,” she says, “but the most accomplishing feeling is writing the story you want to read and being happy with the end result.”
It is advice about writing, but it could just as easily belong to Lucius: stop measuring yourself against someone else’s version of who you are supposed to be. Trust the strength that is already there. Take the next step.
Yet confidence is rarely built entirely alone.
One of Aitken’s favorite moments in Shadows & Kings comes when Elowen agrees to help Lucius shoulder the Universal energies writhing within him. She knows the burden will eventually become too much for her, but she takes it on anyway because she sees what Lucius may be capable of accomplishing.
“She sees his potential, sees where he is weak, and she can help and doesn’t think twice about the sacrifice,” Aitken says.
The scene resonates beyond its fantasy setting because it captures another recognizable human experience: sometimes someone else believes in our potential before we can fully believe in it ourselves.
For Aitken, those people have been her parents.
She describes them as her rock and the foundation of her thinking. Throughout her life, they supported her ambitions and led by example. When other people suggested a dream was too difficult, unrealistic or a mistake, her parents gave her a different answer: “Go for it.”
That unwavering support, she says, helped her build the confidence and courage to create the life she had imagined.
The parallel with Shadows & Kings is difficult to miss. Lucius has people who see where he is weak without defining him by that weakness. Aitken had people who encouraged her to move forward before she knew exactly where the path would lead.
For all of its epic scale, Aitken does not want readers to finish the story having simply followed an adventure. She wants them to find themselves somewhere inside it.
Her hope is that readers connect deeply enough with one of the characters to recognize something from their own lives, their struggles, relationships, fears, or aspirations. She wants them to see themselves, as she puts it, “fighting to keep shadows at bay.”
Those shadows do not have to be supernatural.
They can be insecurity. Fear. Other people’s expectations. The belief that we are somehow not capable of becoming the person we want to be.
Aitken knows something about those shadows because she has confronted versions of them herself. The author who once worried about whether people would accept her ideas now says she would tell her younger self not to be afraid. The writer who has wrestled with self-doubt created a protagonist wrestling with his own crisis of confidence.
And somewhere along the way, the boundary between creator and creation became a little less distinct.
That may ultimately be one of the most compelling things about Shadows & Kings and the larger Legends of Light & Shadows saga. Lucius may be fighting battles on a scale most of us will never face, but the battle underneath them, the struggle to recognize our own strength, accept that life may not unfold as expected, and find the courage to become who we are capable of being, is considerably closer to home.
For readers drawn to epic fantasy with a deeply human core, Shadows & Kings offers more than a journey through Light and Shadow. It also reminds us that sometimes the most formidable shadows are the ones we carry within ourselves, and overcoming them can begin with something as small as believing we already have the strength to take the next step.
Shadows & Kings by Jennifer Aitken, part of the Legends of Light & Shadows saga, is available through Amazon and major booksellers.
