We are often told that true love is blind. We are taught that to love someone deeply means loving them despite their flaws.
I think that is a beautifully packaged lie.
Loving someone despite their darkness is actually a conditional arrangement. It requires a quiet compartmentalization. It asks the broken person to keep their monsters locked safely away in the basement. It essentially says, “I love you, but please keep the ugly parts out of sight.” It’s a safe and sterile kind of love. The tragic result is that it leaves the person feeling that their darkest self is still fundamentally unlovable and isolating.
In Volume 2, Chapter 7 of The Blood Song Chronicles, I wanted to write the exact opposite of that conditional love.
Varek has spent four thousand years holding back a world-eating corruption known as the Zerru. But in this chapter, he absorbs a lethal dose of that corruption to save the very people trying to kill him. The dam breaks. He retreats to the Undercroft, the deepest, darkest, wettest foundation of his cursed castle. He is leaking. He is fracturing. The Beast is pushing through, and his eyes have gone black.
When Zemira finds him there, his first instinct is to protect her from his own darkness. He tells her with a multi-tracked voice… run.
Zemira does not run. She walks into the sweltering rock of the foundation. She sits down on the wet stone floor, three feet away from the monster.
She doesn’t find him despite the corruption. She finds him inside it.
She doesn’t stand at the top of the stairs and wait for him to conquer his demons before offering her presence. She wades into the literal muck of his curse. She sits in the deafening noise of his pain and connects with his core right in the middle of the war zone. She listens to the roar of the Zerru until she finds his human heartbeat buried underneath, still there, refusing to stop.
This distinction is everything to me as a writer. It’s the ultimate antidote to human shame.
We all have an Undercroft. We all have a place inside us that is cracking, leaking, and terrifying. Our deepest fear is that if someone truly saw the fragile, crumbling foundations of our souls, they would turn and run. We are so afraid of being “too much” that we build massive walls and push people away to protect them from our mess.
The cure for that deep, foundational shame is not a love that waits for us to get clean. The cure is a willing presence in the dark. It’s someone who looks at the terrifying worst of us, recognizes the mess, and chooses to sit down anyway.
A love that finds us inside our corruption doesn’t demand a sanitized version of who we are. It’s a love that proves our absolute worst state is not a barrier to connection. It’s the exact place where the most unbreakable bonds are forged. It’s the difference between a love that merely tolerates our brokenness and a love that actually has the power to heal it.
That is the love story I wanted to tell. Not a love that shows up when the war is over, but a love that shows up in the middle of the battlefield and says:
I found it anyway.
The heartbeat. Still there. Refusing to stop.
🖤
The Blood Song Chronicles is a dark romantasy series rooted in ancient myth: Nimrod’s bloodlines, a pact that split humanity, and a plague that rewrote history. It’s about a tithe who was never meant to survive, a monster who was never meant to be saved, and the sound they make when they find each other in the dark. If you are tired of love stories that only love the light, I wrote this for you.