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Byzantine historians noted, with evident unease, that the people who arrived from the east calling themselves Avars might not be the actual Avars. The real Avars, some sources suggested, had been destroyed in the east, and these were a different people — refugees, opportunists, or impostors — who had taken the name because the name commanded fear. The historical debate is unresolved. The actual origin of the people who built the Avar Khaganate in Central Europe remains genuinely unknown.

For a fantasy author, this is a premise already written in the historical record: a khagan whose people have been performing an identity for so long that the performance has become the truth — and an enemy who has found evidence of what lies underneath it. iWrity connects this premise with readers who reward identity-deception plots built on genuine historical ambiguity, and whose reviews communicate the sophistication of the premise to future buyers.

The Avar capital, known to Frankish and Byzantine sources as the Ring, was a series of concentric fortified enclosures — nine walls nested inside each other, each progressively more restricted, with the innermost ring housing the khagan's treasury and seat of power. Frankish chronicles record the Ring's capture by Charlemagne's forces in 796 as yielding more gold and silver than anyone had imagined possible. But no source that entered the Ring before the Franks destroyed it recorded what the innermost enclosure actually contained.

A labyrinthine capital whose innermost secret was never written down is a fantasy setting in its own right. Each wall is a threshold with its own rules, its own guards, its own logic. The innermost ring holds something that neither the Franks nor the Byzantines were ever allowed to see. iWrity delivers this premise to the readers who will finish the book to find out what it is, and then tell other readers why they need to as well.

The Avars extracted tribute from Byzantium for over a century. Not as a one-time indemnity but as a recurring annual payment, renewed after each demonstration of military capability. The Byzantine emperor sent gold east to the khagan's Ring, and the Avar army remained on the Danube rather than crossing it. The gold funded the horses, weapons, and client peoples that made the Avar army threatening, which made the tribute necessary, which funded the next army.

For a fantasy author, this is a magic-economic system with a built-in collapse condition: what happens when the gold stops, and who inside the Ring is sophisticated enough to have been preparing for that moment? iWrity's reader pool includes dedicated political fantasy readers who engage with power structures built on interdependence and mutual threat. Their reviews explain the system's elegance to readers who did not know the history and will want to after reading the premise.