History is rich with coincidence. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was ratified. Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler (and King Charles of Sweden) invaded Russia and were subsequently drained of resources and defeated. Mark Twain and Halley's Comet entered and exited the same years.

Most people look at these events, grunt, and go on with their lives. Writers of historical fiction and fantasy, however, see potential to spin a new tale from the facts of history.

My favorite kind of historical fantasy takes the facts of history and puts a new spin on them. Not changing what happened—although alternative history is a rich and wonderful genre—but telling the true events of history through the lens of magic, mysticism, and the supernatural.

Many writers of historical fiction take facts and twist them. Flint, Stirling, and of course, Twain himself, took a modern world and collided it with a past world—be that the Thirty Years War, the Bronze Age, or King Arthur's Court. Even historical fantasy, such as Naomi Novik's excellent Temeraire series, tends to take history and change it: either creating a new nature or incorporating the supernatural into the past.

In one of my stories, "In Defiance of Death" (Unmasked, WordFire Press, 2021), I took the real events of Napoleon Bonaparte's death—an event full of controversy and rumor—and spun a tale of magic and loss.

Madame Fanny Bertrand lived on St. Helena with the exiled Emperor until his death in 1821. There, she had one child and a number of miscarriages. She was a fascinating woman—educated, fiery, passionate—and there was just enough, and just little enough, written about her for me to spin the events into a fantasy.

Instead of being truly dead, Napoleon's spirit is drawn into the death mask, and Fanny Bertrand earns a magical solution to her problem. Research into Fanny Bertrand, Napoleon's death, and the fantastical story of his death masks would find very few places where the story itself diverges from what we can prove of the past. When I think of Fanny Bertrand and her time on St. Helena, part of me imagines a pirate offering her a magical bargain.

For me, as a historian and a lover of fantasy, adding that sprinkle of magic to the past is a delight.

The challenge of this kind of storytelling, of course, is that sometimes the past was slow, uneventful, and boring. Tension falls off for decades at a time and the temptation as a storyteller to slip in just one or two new events, just to liven things up, is strong. But there's real wonder in telling a story about the history of humanity exactly as we would learn in a classroom, but making it magical. Readers learn about the ebb and flow of history while being entertained.

There is great potential in historical fantasy that takes the true events and simply explains them differently. Instead of coincidence, then, we find ourselves seeing history with magic in the cracks.