Here it is! The cover of Return to Illur, the fourth and final book in the Divine Land of Illur series.

To explain why this is the cover, I need to go back seven and a half years.

In my very first blog post on April 11, 2019, I wrote about how this crazy journey started. At the time, I had been listening to the Trench album by Twenty One Pilots and trying to understand the lore hidden throughout the music.

I eventually found the Dema website and started reading the messages and letters written by Clancy, a character within the lore. I wrote:
“Reading Clancy’s journals sparked something inside my brain. I made up a saying (song) and really felt like I should write it down. It did not stop there, I kept on writing.”

The music provided little nuggets of information, but the videos for Jumpsuit, Nico and the Niners, and Levitate gave me inspiration for the world forming in my head. In the videos, Clancy runs from Dema, is captured, rescued by the Banditos, and eventually captured again. The letters detail the lies being told to the people of Dema and Clancy’s attempts to escape. Those videos were filmed in Iceland, and the incredible landscape became the visual basis for Illur.

At the end of the same original post, I wrote:
“I am not sure where this is going, but I think it could be a novel.”

Well, apparently it was four novels. So many years later, we have come all the way back around.

When Michael created the cover for Return to Illur, he took the Icelandic landscape that originally inspired me and combined it with the landscape I had created in the book. The cover isn’t one photograph or one real place. It is made from many, many, many different images of Iceland put together to create what I described in the story.

The steep rocky landscape, the opening in the mountainside, and the person standing in front of it all come from what is happening in Return to Illur. At the same time, there is a little piece of the imagery that started this entire journey seven and a half years ago.

I absolutely love that.

The world of Illur has become something entirely its own, filled with characters and places that have lived in my head for years. Still, there is something incredibly nostalgic about looking at this final cover and seeing a hint of where it all began.

Even writing this post sent me back to watch those Twenty One Pilots videos again. It brought back so many memories of trying to decipher the lore, staring at the Icelandic landscape, and having absolutely no idea what the little story forming in my head would become.

Now, I can’t wait for you to read Return to Illur and understand exactly what you are looking at on the cover.