About
What happens when two brothers are loved by the same family, marked by opposing forces, and forced to decide whether blood is stronger than fear?
Demi Pendakis is a British author of Greek heritage who writes mythic coming-of-age fantasy from Hertfordshire. As a parent, he is drawn to stories about what families try to protect children from, what children understand before they are told, and how love can be both shelter and pressure.
His writing is shaped by a lifelong fascination with mythology, classics, and ancient history: old gods, sacred objects, hidden orders, inherited wounds, and the dangerous line between fate and choice. In his fiction, the ancient world is never quite past. It presses against the present through symbols, stories, bloodlines, and the things families leave unsaid.
Echoes of the Forge, the first book in The Veilforge Chronicles, began with a question that would not let go: what happens when two brothers are loved by the same family, marked by opposing forces, and forced to decide whether blood is stronger than fear?
The world of the Veilforge lived quietly in the background for years before personal loss brought its deeper themes into focus: grief, memory, brotherhood, inheritance, and the need to bring light into places that have learned to live with shadow. Rather than writing about loss directly, Demi wanted to build a fantasy world large enough to hold what loss leaves behind - silence, anger, loyalty, longing, and love.
Set against the texture of 1980s Britain, with Greek family warmth, storm-lit windows, hidden myth, and ordinary rooms made strange, Echoes of the Forge reflects Demi’s belief that fantasy is not an escape from real feeling, but a way to make it visible.
Demi is currently developing The Veilforge Chronicles as a multi-book fantasy series.
What do we owe the dead,
and what does it cost to inherit what they leave behind?
“In my own words”
I like fantasy most when it feels close enough to touch: a mirror in a hallway, a song on the radio, a family argument in the kitchen, a brother saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
The Veilforge lived with me quietly for years before it became a book. It stayed there through grief, through fatherhood, through the loss of people who shaped me, and eventually it became the place where I could write about light and shadow without pretending either one is simple.
I am British, of Greek heritage, and I have always been drawn to mythology, classics, and ancient history. Not only the gods and monsters, but the human questions underneath them. What do we inherit? What do we owe the dead? What does it cost to carry a story that began before us?
The Veilforge Chronicles grew from those questions. I wanted the myth to be huge, but the wound at the centre to be human.