Pretverse Themes: Death is an Illusion

In the Pretverse, death is an illusion. Everything and everybody is immortal due to reincarnation being a big part of the verse. The demons and angels in the series are in a fixed form and can’t die and reincarnate, so they are the exception to the rule. (The angels will be introduced to in book 3: The Catalyst.) However, humans, vampires, and therians (werecreatures) reincarnate. Typically a therian stays therian, a human stays human, and a vampire goes back to being human since that’s the root of who they were.

It’s true that vampires are “part demon”, but that’s not enough to make them physically immortal. (sunlight and stakes anyone?)

My world has a lot of literal soul mates. Characters who have been together in previous lives finding each other again, or who for some reason couldn’t be together in previous lives but now are able to rectify that. I like the drama of characters who have these deep roots and connections to each other, rediscovering those connections. Of course, not every book will address whether or not characters have a pre-existing connection if it isn’t germane to the book.

Another side effect of this is you never really know if a villain is dead. In the case of demons, you can’t really kill them, you can just magically bind them. In the case of other types of villains, they die, but they come back. Luckily they don’t usually remember who they were. Either they continue being evil assholes in their new incarnation or they make a change for the better.

Some books in the series happen in a future dystopian society in which the humans all know about the preternatural world. (fun, fun). Who shows up again in this world, and what side they’ll be on may surprise you when we get there.

For now, we’re still in the books that are introducing the world and allowing you to meet the different factions and key players in how the world unfolds.

One of the challenges with writing a world with reincarnation as well as truly immortal characters (like the demons and angels) is creating a sense of drama out of that. The fact that most of the humans don’t realize they are immortal does part of the work there. Also, never knowing who you’ll have to deal with again at a future date is fun to play around with as well.

I also like the set-up of taking a character who goes through all these lifetimes and fixing them in one state for awhile or forever as is the case when a demon is created or someone is turned into a vampire.