How Amberlight Valley Started as a Feeling Before It Became a Place
Before there was a mountain, or a manor, or a lake with light in its depths, there was just a feeling.
Three feelings, really, tangled together so tightly I couldn't have told you where one ended and the next began. Grief. A longing for home. And underneath both of those, stubborn and glowing, the kind of wonder you only carry as a child, before the world convinces you to set it down.
Grief Looking for Somewhere to Go
Grief doesn't always arrive as a single loss. Sometimes it's quieter than that. Sometimes it's the ache of things ending that were never going to last forever, of versions of yourself you've had to leave behind, of people and places and chapters that close whether you're ready or not.
Long before Amberlight Valley had a name, it was the place I built in my mind for grief to go when it needed somewhere soft to land. Somewhere it could be witnessed instead of hurried past. A town where loss doesn't get fixed so much as tended, where a woman who has lost everything can find a Grimoire, a greenhouse, and a reason to keep going.
I didn't know I was writing my way through my own losses when I first imagined it. I just knew I needed a place where grief was allowed to be expressed, and feel beautiful, instead of only heavy.
The Longing for Home
Underneath the grief was something else: a longing for home that had nothing to do with an address.
I think most of us carry that longing, whether or not we can name it. A wish for a place where you're fully known, where the people around you have seen your worst nights and stayed anyway, where the community holds you even when you can't hold yourself. I wasn't picturing a map when that longing first showed up. I was picturing a feeling. Warm light in a window. Tea already steeping before you knock. A found family gathered at the Starlight Lounge, a bar built of memory and magick, that only appears to the people who need it most.
Amberlight Valley became the place where that longing finally had somewhere to rest. Not because it solved my need for home, but because it let me practice believing home was possible. That belief had to exist somewhere before it could exist anywhere.
The Wonder That Refused to Leave
And then, underneath all of it, quietly refusing to be talked out of existing, there was wonder. The specific, stubborn kind you have as a child, when tingling fingertips might mean magick and standing stones might remember more than they let on, when Christmas carols drifting down from a mountain feel less like a fairy tale and more like a fact you simply haven't proven yet.
I never lost that wonder, even when life gave me every reason to set it down. Amberlight Valley is what happened when I refused to. It's the place where the child in me who still believes got to build a whole town, a whole mythology, a whole magic system, just to prove that wonder was allowed to survive growing up.
From Feeling to Place
It took years for that tangle of grief, longing, and wonder to become an actual valley, with a mountain and a manor and a lake full of secrets. But every stone of it started as something felt long before it was something written.
The Asarligt Woods exist because I needed somewhere to walk through my own darkness and come out the other side.
Rathcroghan Manor exists because I needed to believe that even the most broken-looking things can bloom, if you know how to look at them.
The Christmas Witch lineage exists because I needed to believe that healing could be passed down like an inheritance, instead of a wound.
If you've read the trilogy and felt like Amberlight Valley was somehow familiar, even though you'd never been there, I don't think that's an accident. I think you recognized the feeling before you recognized the place. That's how it started for me too.
Dalea Faulkner is an author, filmmaker, and creative living in the White Mountains of Arizona. Her Amberlight Valley trilogy is available now. Her world is always, in some way, the mountains.
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