Twinn Swan

When I began writing The Heart of Shiva, I did not set out to follow a singular faith tradition. What naturally unfolded was a weaving together of myth and mysticism across Hindu Shaivism, Mahayana thought, and Tibetan visions of the afterlife.

At the centre of the story stands Tara, called to a vocation typically reserved only for men. She offers libations to Lord Shiva, she reads the passages between death and rebirth, and she hears the whisper of souls seeking their passage back into the world. As a priestess, Tara does not merely serve the ritual role of mediating between the living and the dead; she lives in the tension of that threshold.

Yet, she is not defined solely by her role as priestess. She is woman, a potential mother. The story asks: what does it mean to embody a sacred threshold while being pressed with the very human question of motherhood? What if this role, sanctified and glorified in tradition, is at odds with her own inner reluctance to bring forth a child?

The Heart of Shiva is not a tale about divine maternity. It is one where the journey of motherhood is confronted as a difficult and contested calling. It is framed not as inevitability, but as a struggle and as a choice that demands discernment.

In my story, the unborn soul is not a passive presence. It is active and inscribed with its own destiny. It arranges the constellation of circumstances that will guide its own soul back to a body, back into life. It becomes almost a mischievous architect, an afterlife matchmaker, watching from a liminal space and tugging at the destinies of two people so that it may claim its new beginning.

Through Tara’s eyes, we witness this choreography of a soul’s return. The unseen presses itself into the fabric of human desire, the way the soul seeks a home, not only in a womb, but in a life worth fighting for. The Heart of Shiva is my offering into that conversation: between mother and child, between priestess and the divinity, between the living and the deceased.

The book, the second in The Guardians of the Lore series, dwells in that space out of which both ritual and birth emerge, asking for a deeper perspective of what it means to be reborn.