Calgary-born fantasy writer Fonda Lee possesses the unique skill of making the magical relatable in her novels. Untethered Sky envisions the classic animal companion tale in a heartfelt and epic way.

Fonda Lee is a Canadian American science fiction and fantasy writer. Lee is a three-time Aurora Award winner, including best novel for Jade City and best YA novel for Exo. Jade City also won the World Fantasy Award in 2018.

Untethered Sky is about the lengths we go to for the ones we love, even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice. When Ester's mother and brother are killed by a manticore, she becomes obsessed with finding a way to bring justice and some semblance of peace to what's left of her family. Her quest leads her to the King's Royal Mews where she pairs up with a roc, a flying beast known to hunt manticores, in order to participate in the hunt. The journey could cost Ester her life, but there's no turning back now.

Lee spoke to The Next Chapter summer edition's Ryan B. Patrick about her love of creating fantasy worlds.

The story began with the monsters — the rocs and the manticores. I really wanted to play with these mythical creatures that are underutilized in fantasy, relative to say, dragons and unicorns. I began researching rocs and manticores, both of which originate from Persian mythology. So that's how the kingdom of Dartha came to be. I wanted to set the story in the natural habitat of these monsters. The landscape that surrounds Ester is very much that central base in Central Asia. I wanted it to feel like a recognizable time and place in our own world, but of course, also its own thing as a result of the fact that there are these giant monsters in it.

This is a very interior story, unlike the Green Bone saga which has a lot of thought machinations going on. This story is very much about the emotional journey of one person. Ester is driven largely by this early childhood trauma that she has, but also by her love of the wild and of rocs. As the story progresses, she really discovers who she is through this relationship with a wild animal. It's largely a story about finding who you are, but then also striving towards something that's all consuming, and in the end, it's about being able to let it go and to be okay.

There is a really important career cast of people in this society, ruhkers, who train birds of prey to fight manticores. The problem is that these birds of prey are monstrous, and so they are incredibly dangerous to work with. The conceit of this world is around the existence of these big creatures, but I wanted to make them feel as grounded as possible. So many of the fantasy novels that I've enjoyed with animal companions have dragons that people ride, or animal companions that are cute, benevolent or telepathically bonded with their human trainer. These creatures are not like that. They're very much wild animals that are dangerous and difficult to deal with. I think that's just something that I tend to like to do in my fantasy – to make it feel very real. One of the things that was really satisfying for me was in a recent book launch event, one of the audience members was an actual animal trainer who worked at the Oregon Zoo and he complimented me on having captured a lot of the nuances of actually working with big dangerous animals.

I used grief as this window into how people channel loss into either a personal productive means, or into not so productive avenues. With Ester, it's a little bit of both. Her grief is a great motivation because she is really driven to become a ruhker. She knows the pain of losing people to a manticore attack. But in a way it's also harmful to her because of this obsession that she has. She has to eventually realize that there's more to her life than this one thing that has taken over so much of her heart and her mind. I'm not sure I'm trying to say anything in particular, but really just to create a nuanced portrait of how people deal with grief and how it can build them up in some ways and break them down in others.

I like to write what feels authentic and real but with a speculative twist and that has sort of been my motivation across most of my work. There's this science fiction and fantasy setting and conceit to my stories that is very speculative but at the end of the day, what I enjoy is writing about people who feel like real people. The way that characters interact with either the magic or the high tech in that world should feel very realistic and recognizable to us.

There's a whole range of ways that speculative fiction can engage the imagination. I often find that I'm most satisfied in writing the smaller moments and things like in Untethered Sky where she's training her roc. That's what makes the fantasy world feel tangible. It makes it feel like a world that's just one degree removed from our own.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.