When I first sat down to sketch the manuscript of Heretic Knight: Harbinger of Light, I wasn’t aiming to write just another medieval tale of swords and sieges. I wanted to breathe life into a moment of history often shrouded in dust and dogma. What did it feel like to stand in the shadow of Béziers in 1209 AD, with smoke curling over broken ramparts? What did loyalty, conscience, and survival mean to a knight caught between the authority of the Church and the cry of the oppressed?

The process has been anything but simple. Research took me down rabbit holes of papal bulls, chronicles of Cistercian abbots, and first-hand accounts of the Albigensian Crusade. I traced the genealogy of knights, pored over maps of Occitania, and studied the way armor clanked and suffocated under the summer sun. Every fragment had to be weighed—was it authentic? Was it vivid enough to place a reader inside the dust and blood?

Character creation was its own battle. John de Ontivero began as a shadow—half Norman, half Iberian, carrying the scars of crusades past. Sir George, Sir Hugh, and young Reggeye grew beside him, drawn from real bonds of feudal loyalty and friendship. Ysabeau surprised me—she was never meant to be a leading figure, but her resilience demanded a place at the center, so she was revealed to be a major character in the Occitan struggle to maintain their autonomy. Even the villains—Amalric, Renhard Galt, and others—carry a weight of truth, for history shows us that cruelty often marched under banners of faith.

Writing itself meant long nights. Paragraphs sprawled, collapsed, then rose again, hammered into a voice that felt fragmented, urgent, alive. I wanted the prose to smell of sweat and horsehair, to ache with conscience, to ring with steel striking steel.

But behind it all was the question of light in the darkness. Could a knight—a man bred for war—stand as a witness for liberty of conscience when all around him demanded blind obedience? That question became the spine of the book, the thread tying every character and every battle together.

So when you open Harbinger of Light, know that what you’re holding is not just a story. It’s years of research, nights of wrestling with words, and a labor of love to bring a forgotten chapter of history alive.

And this is only the beginning.