Azure (Drowning In You) (35 page)

Author’s note

Thank you very much for reading AZURE. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Check the Azure page on my blog for more info, photos and tidbits:

http://chrystallathoma.wordpress.com/azure/

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About love and mermaids

This book is a project close to my heart in many ways. Aspects of it resonate with my own life, or are drawn from my own experiences.

Take for instance the lightning speed of love. Now, I’m not an advocate of love at first sight, and I believe that love takes time to grow. But that lightning stroke of lust/affection/need you feel when you have met a soul mate, who is more than that, who is your other half, who ‘gets’ you, sees to the core of your soul, and can complete your body so perfectly, too, that I have experienced and can confirm to be true.

From the spark to the flame, it can take only days. It didn’t take me more than two weeks with a certain man to go from friends to becoming so much more, and we have been together for fifteen amazing years now.
  

As for magic and mermaids... the sea has always been close to my heart and features in many of my stories. The sea is the first goddess, the Sumerian Tiamat, the sea dragon of chaos — a living body of water obeying the tides and deep currents, eating up land and spewing new continents, wrecking ships and sometimes spitting out marvels.

The Greek sea — the
Aegean
in particular — is often wracked by violent storms and swept by strong winds in the late summer. Stories of gods and goddesses with fishtails have been around for what seems like forever — tritons and nereids haunting the waves and inhabiting the blue depths of the sea.

In later, historical times, the old form of the mermaid goddess was conflated with the Virgin, as protector of those at sea. Panagia Gorgona (The Mermaid Virgin) has been venerated on the islands of
Greece
, as for example on Mitilini (
Lesvos
), where she has a chapel and is portrayed with a fishtail and a trident, surrounded by dolphins and fish.

About
Crete

Crete
is the largest of the Greek islands, with a history that echoes through mythology.

The island has been inhabited since ancient times. Paleolithic finds (from 130,000 years ago) were uncovered in one of the gorges of this mountainous island and Neolithic many finds have been uncovered, leading up to the time of the great Minoan palaces (5.000 years ago) with their red pillars in the form of lotus — as you can tell, the influence of nearby Egypt was tremendous. That was the time Crete ruled the seas and terrorized the other city-kingdoms, like mighty
Athens
who was forced to pay a tithe. Myth has it that it was a number of young men and women every year, to be fed to the Minotaur — half man and half bull — in the sacred underground Labyrinth (temple of the Labrys, the two-edged axe). But more likely these cities paid
Crete
in kind — grain, wine, oil, fruit, gold and copper.

The Cretan power didn’t last forever. The island became a province of the Roman and later the
Byzantine Empire
, and was Christianized. Then it was captured by the Iberian Muslims and became an emirate for pirates. The Byzantines re-conquered it later (921 AD), but it was taken from them during the fourth crusade, when the Venetians captured the island (1212 AD) and held it until 1669 AD, when the Ottoman Turks managed to make it part of their empire. And so it remained until 1858 when the Cretans, after many bloody revolts, regained their freedom and in 1906 were united with
Greece
.

The Cretans are a hardy, proud folk. They never stopped fighting against all conquerors, and I think they retain a lot of the magic of their mythical ancestors...

I love
Crete
and have been there a couple of times. It’s very close to
Cyprus
and Cretans and Cypriots share a lot, from similarities in their history and dialect of Greek, to character and cuisine. We have considered ourselves brothers for a long time and setting a story on
Crete
made me happy.

I actually lived in
Germany
for many years, and traveled to
Crete
from there a few times. Flights can be very cheap and
Greece
is a favorite destination for Europeans.