Hannah J Boddy

Okay, so, Lily was originally meant to be the protagonist of Hell Forged, Heaven Sent but the thing is

She’s kinda boring? She is very much meant to be the archetypal main character in a YA fantasy, which is a great character to have, but I just couldn’t bear to write from her perspective the whole way through, so when I shifted the POV to first person, it made so much more sense to have Rowan watch this Main Character Energy person just flounder and flap.

Her narrative arc contains all of the things that you would expect from this archetype: she’s the chosen one, she’s quirky, she’s ’not like other girls’ (she is), there are guys falling for her left, right and centre, just all of this is happening in the background.

Lily is a person with a heart that is too big for her own good, and an oracle. She can see aspects of the future and memories, but she isn’t very good at telling which is which yet.

Fun fact: when the narrator is feeling particularly annoyed with Lily, she goes hard on the description of her as mousey; she has mousey brown hair, big mouse-like eyes, when she’s nervous she twitches like a mouse… Rowan is not at all flattering, but also knows that she cannot possibly say anything critical out loud yet, because their friendship is not there.

Yet.