When Norwegian fantasy author Siri Pettersen signs on to Zoom from Oslo, she’s framed by a blackboard covered with a network of character names and story elements from her series-in-progress, the Vardari trilogy. “I’m a rabid plotter; I’m the death-metal, parental-advisory plotter type,” she proclaims proudly. She would have to be: The recently published second book, Silver Throat (Arctis Books, Feb. 25), translated by Tara Chace, involves some pretty intricate worldbuilding—make that worlds-building, plural, as these books are set in the same multiverse as her previous trilogy, The Raven Rings.

This new trilogy tells the story of Juva, a young woman with a vendetta against the vardari, long-lived beings who distribute their blood as an addictive substance that causes “wolf sickness”; its sufferers gradually transform into violently insane cannibals. When she learns that the vardari are themselves dependent on the blood of another being, a wolfish but compellingly attractive creature called Grif whom her own family has kept locked up for centuries, she takes it upon herself to let him out. But Juva comes to understand that the city of Náklav depends on the blood of people with wolf sickness, because it fuels the portals that instantaneously connect Náklav with other cities. Silver Throat explores the dangerous consequences of Juva’s actions. We discussed the complexities of the series in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

The middle volume of a trilogy is always tricky; it needs to do more than just answer questions from Book 1 and set up the finale in Book 3. What challenges did you have in writing Silver Throat?

I have a compulsion to have every book be a freestanding, complete story with a resolution of some sort: You’ll feel satisfied by having had an ending to some things, but there are bigger things in play that you still don’t understand. Silver Throat is an elaborate middle; the only purpose it really serves in the larger scheme of things is to show the importance of the portals and how far people will go to own them or to have access to them.

There’s a famous Ursula K. Le Guin story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” in which a city’s prosperity depends on keeping a starved child locked in a basement. Náklav is Omelas all over again, because they’re sacrificing the people with wolf sickness. They’re deliberately addicting them to keep society going.

Yeah, that’s true. There are ways to use the blood that are wrong, that are hurtful or damaging, but Náklav would never survive if it weren’t for the blood or the portals. It’s as if you picked up 15th-century Venice and dropped it out in the North Sea, way north of Norway, somewhere between Norway and Svalbard in the frozen wasteland. You’d have this island that would never function if it weren’t for the fact that they have these easy portals to the rest of the world.

In a sense, there’s a parallel to our own way of travel, because we’ll come to a point where we realize that there’s a cost to doing this. Are we willing to disregard the price that somebody else might be paying for our travel and our convenience and our financial games?

Are the vardari more like werewolves or vampires? You leave the line blurry.

If people think, Are they werewolves or vampires?, I love that, because you get to fill in the blanks yourself. I’m going to answer that one a bit more clearly in the last book.

Initially, Juva thinks she’s experiencing panic attacks when she senses the presence of the vardari or Grif. Where did you get that idea from?

Once I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like my heart was going to beat right out of my chest. I thought, Oh, my God, what is this? I’m going to die, clearly. And then it turned out to be nothing; I was checked up, down, all over the place, and I was fine. It continued for a while, and then, as time went by, it sort of dampened. I remember that I went to the gym and told a trainer about these heart palpitations, and he said, “Well, that’s just your turbo charger.” It was just so beautiful of him to say, because obviously I was worried that I was going to do something I was not supposed to do, or that I would do more damage, or something. It was a thing I feared, and he turned it into a superpower. I really wanted to do that [for Juva]. I really wanted to make her greatest weakness a strength, because I know there are so many anxious fantasy readers out there. Also, it’s just fun; I love the idea of giving the hero a very unheroic quality like panic attacks.

You’ve made most of the characters so morally gray. Juva is sympathetic, and yet she’s done these terrible things. She sees the vardari as her enemies, and they’ve done awful things, but they’ve also accomplished really good things. She’s attracted to Grif, but that doesn’t make him a good person, either. It’s almost impossible to know whom to trust or what side the reader is meant to be on.

I absolutely love that you say that, because you’re right. It’s something I aim to do, because I don’t want people to know from the get-go that this is going to be good and this is going to be bad and this is going to be simple. Juva is damaged by her environment. She really, really wants to trust people, and she really wants to trust herself, but nobody gave her a reason to in that city, nor in her family. So she’s trying to look for what’s good and what’s not good. She’s skeptical.

In the real world, it’s the same. There are a lot of really frightening people out there. But this is one of the reasons why I love fantasy deeply and profoundly. A lot of people call it escapism, but it’s so much more important to me than that, because fantasy does something to us that a lot of other literature doesn’t. Realism absolutely loves to tell us how terrible we are, how helpless, how weak, how selfish, how unable to control anything. But fantasy pulls you out of the gutter and tells you, OK, fine, but this is your potential. This is what you have. Fantasy rips you up but sets you on your feet and gives you hope. To me it’s a genre that shows people how to beat really, really terrible odds. Even when things are terrible [in the real world], there are some displays of insane courage that that you’d never see unless times were really dark—when people stand up and say things that are incredibly brave, when they risk their jobs and their lives and everything to stand up for others. That’s a thing of beauty to behold.

Amy Goldschlager is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.