Introduction
There is a moment, early in Requite of the Fates, when Marly wakes from a dream she cannot fully understand. Wood and white marble. The uncomfortable brush of pressure against her breast. And above everything else — the smell of jasmine, sweet and insistent, cutting through the stale air of her New York studio apartment like a warning she doesn't yet know how to read.
That detail — a scent, not a vision — is the first signal that this story operates on a different frequency than most. I don't announce the mythos with thunder and spectacle. I, as is my want to do, announce it with fragrance. In doing so, I build a world that doesn't just ask to be seen. It asks to be experienced.
Requite of the Fates lives in two atmospheres simultaneously: the gritty, fluorescent-lit reality of 2040 America, and the lush, overwhelming sensory landscape of ancient Minoan Crete. What makes the novel extraordinary is how seamlessly — and how physically — it moves between them. I aim for this book to communicate something most fantasy and sci-fi forgets: the extraordinary doesn't arrive with a fanfare. It arrives on the air.
Concrete Reality
I root my modern world in the details that feel almost aggressively unglamorous. Stale office air. A cheap motel room with 1990s brown curtains flickering above a humming air vent. The overpowering aftershave of a boss who doesn't listen. These aren't throwaway details — they're load-bearing walls.
Marly's Los Angeles is a city of asphalt heat and rental car tags and migraine pills grabbed from a toiletry bag on a bare bathroom counter. Nate's movie set existence is built from ninety-nine-cent spring water and wardrobe-wrinkled Dockers, a life so thoroughly constructed for public consumption that there isn't a trace of him left in it. The near future is painted with an almost unappealing, cynicism that confronts the reader with the weight of ordinary life before the extraordinary intrudes. It is a signature of the stories from this world, and those who read To Desire the Stars will be familiar with this contrast.
When I was a young single mom, I took my five-year daughter to L.A. We didn’t have lots of money or resources to do much there—the cost of the plane tickets outweighed all other costs—but we stayed in a shabby rundown hotel across the street from the Santa Monica pier. 1990’s drapes over the window and a slowly dying air conditioner became our home for a week. The imagery and scent of the room stuck with me for years, not because it was mundane but because my daughter and I slowed down to really see the city around us. Bus rides, days on the beach, amusement rides, cinema. In those mundane physical artifacts lay one of the most experiential and memorable experiences in my life. And I wanted to share the impact of my experience through contrast.
This sensory tool was a deliberate craft choice. By making the contemporary world feel trivial yet alive —cramped apartments, stale air, the hum of fluorescent lights — I aimed to ensure, when the mythic does arrive, it doesn't feel like an escape. It feels like an invasion. The contrast is the point. The ordinary world is rendered precisely so that the reader, like Marly, has nowhere to hide when something ancient and overwhelming pushes through.
The Scent of the Gods
If the modern world smells of chemistry-lab aftershave, burnt rubber and stale coffee, the mythic world announces itself through jasmine.
Jasmine appears again and again in Requite of the Fates as a kind of olfactory lodestone — not comforting or decorative. Significant. It rises from incense plumes in an ancient temple. It threads through Marly's half-remembered dreams. It floods the air at moments when something beyond ordinary human experience is pressing close. I use scent the way other writers use visual imagery: as a carrier of meaning, a signal that the rules of the world are about to shift.
This is not accidental. The book's mythic presences — the Consets, the gods of ancient Crete — don't announce themselves with grand visual spectacles. They announce themselves through the body's most primal sense. A sudden warmth. A temperature shift in a room that should be temperate. The overwhelming sweetness of honeysuckle where there are no flowers. The reader learns, alongside Marly, to read these signals as warnings — or invitations, depending on the moment.
The ancient world of Knossos operates on the same sensory logic, but amplified. Where the modern world smells of cleaning solution and convenience store coffee, Minoa breathes ripe olives and frankincense and the salt-heavy air rolling off the Aegean. The contrast isn't just atmospheric — it's psychological. Each world has its own scent signature, and moving between them is disorienting in exactly the way it should be.
How Environment Shapes the Inner Landscape
What I understand — and execute consistently — is that environment is never just backdrop. It is character. The way Marly's body responds to her surroundings tells us everything about her internal state: the tightening in her chest in John's stale office, the involuntary relaxation when ocean air reaches her through a car window, the nausea that rises when she is somewhere she doesn't belong.
Nate's Malibu house exists as a counterpoint to his movie-set trailer — one is a fabrication, the other is the only space where he can hear himself think. The sound of surf. The cool color of tan sand. These aren't luxuries for him; they're the only sensory anchors that feel genuinely him. I use this contrast to reveal character without any direct exposition. The best stories do this too, I’ve found.
The ancient world operates in much the same way. Areadne's chamber, with its frescoed ceiling of dolphins and fish, its clay pitcher of water, its hard-packed stone floor, tells us readers about the beauty and the constraint of her existence. The labyrinth below Knossos — cold, airless, dark — is not just a physical challenge. It is a psychological one, designed to make the person inside it feel the full weight of their own mortality. And for me, that is heartbreaking.
In my research around the Theseus and the Minotaur myth, and more accurately rooted history of Greece, I returned to the commonality of the jasmine scent. In versions of the Theseus story and in documented history, as well as in contemporary documented experiences, jasmine pervades the island air. It grows in gardens and on plots of land that have existed for millennia. Jasmine is such a light whimsical scent, a flower so feminine, I wondered how I could ground the story in its beauty. Because jasmine in its various forms is also so abundant around the world today, it seemed a useful tool for connecting readers to the story. Would readers have jasmine perfume or maybe it lines the side of a road near the reader? Or maybe the scent recalls for us readers memories of our mothers hugging us to their chests or our grandmothers window boxes. Connecting Requite of the Fates’ sensory experiences with what we readers find familiar is the point.
This is world-building at its most sophisticated: not the construction of elaborate systems and rules, but the careful curation of feeling. The reader doesn't need a map of Knossos. They need to smell the frankincense and feel the cold stone under their feet. I give them both.
Conclusion
World-building, at its most powerful, is not about what a place looks like. It is about how it breathes — how it presses against the skin, what it puts in the air, what it does to the body of someone moving through it. Requite of the Fates understands this in its bones.
I wrote a story where the scent of jasmine is both warning and invitation, where the smell of ocean air is the closest thing to safety, and where the difference between ancient Crete and modern Los Angeles is felt before it is understood. If this analysis of the book's sensory architecture has made you curious about what it actually feels like to inhabit these worlds — to follow Marly through the stale air of her ordinary life and into something ancient and overwhelming — then the book is waiting for you.
What is a scent that instantly transports you to another time or place? Drop it in the comments — and consider whether, like Marly, you've ever wondered if that pull toward a particular fragrance might be something more than memory.
