Why I Built Princes of Avce on Mythology
If you have ever picked up a mythology romance and felt that specific electricity — the sense that the story you are reading is older than the page it is printed on — then you already understand exactly why I built the Princes of Avce around an ancient fictional kingdom. The whole series lives at the intersection of myth, monarchy, and modern love. And honestly? It started with a question I could not stop asking myself late at night while my coffee went cold.
What if the gods and dynasties and bloodline curses we grew up reading about in mythology were not just stories from the past — what if they were still operating, right now, inside the hearts of people who had no idea how to escape them?
What Is Mythology Romance and Why Does It Resonate So Deeply?
Mythology romance is not just romance with a Greek god on the cover. It is romance that carries the structural and emotional weight of myth — the idea that two people are being pulled toward each other by forces older than either of them, that the stakes are not just personal but dynastic, cosmic, ancient. The lovers do not simply fall for each other. They are shaped by lineage, by expectation, by the stories their families have been telling for generations. And then they have to decide whether to become those stories or rewrite them.
That tension is what drives every single book in the Princes of Avce series. The kingdom of Avce is fictional, but I built it with the architecture of real mythology — a royal bloodline that carries both privilege and weight, princes who were raised to embody something larger than themselves, and women who walk into that world with no intention of being changed by it. They always are. That is the magic.
When readers search for mythology romance or mythological romance novels or books that feel like they carry the gravity of ancient legend, I want them to find Avce. Because that is exactly what it was designed to be: mythology dressed in modern royal romance clothes.
The Night I Decided the Kingdom Had to Feel Ancient
I want to tell you the real behind-the-scenes story of how Princes of Avce actually started, because it was not a grand planning session. It was two in the morning and I was reading about the mythology surrounding the House of Atreus — all that tragedy, all that cursed lineage, all those people who were born into a story they could not escape no matter how hard they tried. And I remember thinking: that is a romance novel waiting to happen. Not a retelling. Not a direct adaptation. But something that captured that feeling of inherited weight.
The kingdom of Avce is not modeled on any single real place or myth. I pulled from Greek epic structure, from the emotional architecture of Norse saga, from the dynastic politics of Italian Renaissance courts, and from the specific kind of loneliness I imagine a prince must feel when the crown is a birthright nobody asked for. I wanted Avce to feel like a place that had centuries of stories before our books begin. Like if you went looking, you would find the older myths underneath the modern ones.
That is the goal of good mythology romance, I think. You are not just reading a love story. You are reading the newest chapter of something that has been unfolding for a very long time.
How Mythology Shapes Every Princes of Avce Romance
The series has twelve books now and every single one is built on that same mythological spine. Let me walk you through how it actually shows up in the storytelling — not just as aesthetic flavor but as the real structural engine under every romance.
The Bloodline as Protagonist
In Greek mythology, the bloodline is never neutral. You are not just born into a family — you are born into a set of expectations, debts, and destinies that were incurred before you arrived. The Princes of Avce each carry that. They were born into a kingdom with a specific story about what a prince is supposed to be. Most of them spend the entire book learning that the person they love has no interest in that version of them, and that the version their love draws out is actually better. That is mythology romance at its most emotionally direct.
The Outsider Woman Who Changes Everything
Every great myth has a figure who arrives from outside the existing order and disrupts it — not through violence but through presence, through love, through being fundamentally incompatible with the old story. In Princes of Avce, these are the women. They are not from Avce. They do not owe the kingdom anything. They walked into a contract marriage or a forced proximity situation or a forbidden circumstance and they are absolutely not going to pretend the crown matters more than the person wearing it.
Rossie is my favorite example of this. She is abandoned at the altar in the real world — not by a prince, just by a regular terrible man — and she flees to Paris because going home feels impossible. She enters a contract marriage with Stefano, who is an Italian marchese with deep ties to the Avce bloodline, because it is logical. Strategic. Safe. And of course it is none of those things. In Forbidden Marquis, Rossie becomes exactly the kind of mythological outsider who does not just fall into the existing story — she rewrites it. You can find Forbidden Marquis at victoriapinder.com/books/forbidden-marquis/ on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and more.
Fate Versus Free Will as the Central Romantic Tension
If you look at almost any mythology — Greek, Norse, Roman, Celtic — the central dramatic question is always some version of this: can a person escape their fate, or are they always moving toward it no matter what choices they make? The Princes of Avce are living that question in their love stories. Every fake marriage in the series begins as a choice that feels free — a contract, a strategy, an arrangement that does not require emotion. And the entire book is the two people discovering that what looked like free choice was actually fate all along. That is mythology romance. That is why readers who love ancient stories feel so at home in Avce.
The Princes of Avce Reading Order and Where to Start
Twelve books is a lot and I always want to make it easy for you to step into the kingdom without feeling overwhelmed. Here is how I think about the reading order.
Forbidden Crown is Book One and it is FREE on every single retailer right now — Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and more. It is the perfect first step into Avce because it establishes the kingdom, the bloodline mythology, and the emotional stakes of the whole series. You meet the royal world before you go deep into any individual prince’s story. Get Forbidden Crown free at victoriapinder.com/books/forbidden-crown/.
After that, each book in the series is the story of a different prince. You can follow the internal chronology or you can pick the trope that calls to you most — fake marriage, forbidden love, forced proximity — and start there. Every book works as an entry point because they are all designed to give you the full emotional journey of one couple, with the kingdom as the backdrop that gives everything its mythological weight.
Here is a quick guide to help you find your starting point in the Princes of Avce series based on what you love most in mythology romance:
| If you love this in mythology romance… | Start with this Princes of Avce book | Core trope |
|---|---|---|
| Fated love and ancient destiny | Forbidden Crown (Book 1) | Royal forbidden romance |
| Outsider woman changes everything | Forbidden Marquis | Contract marriage, escaped past |
| Bloodline duty versus personal freedom | Forbidden Prince | Forbidden royal romance |
| Two people who should never fall but do | Forbidden Duke | Forced proximity, forbidden love |
| Political alliance becomes real love | Forbidden King | Arranged royal marriage |
Browse the entire Princes of Avce collection and all the individual books at victoriapinder.com/royal-romance/.
Start your mythology romance journey free: Grab Forbidden Crown on all retailers at victoriapinder.com/books/forbidden-crown/ — available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and more. No cost, no commitment. Just the kingdom, waiting for you.
Why Ancient Myth Makes Fake Marriage Romance Feel Higher Stakes
I want to get a little craft-nerdy here because I think this is the thing that makes mythology romance specifically so emotionally satisfying in ways that straight contemporary romance sometimes cannot reach.
In a contemporary fake marriage story, the stakes are personal and real but ultimately contained. Two people made a deal. The deal gets complicated. Emotions happen. That is wonderful. But in a mythology romance, or a royal romance built on mythological architecture, the stakes are always doubled. There is the personal emotional story of two specific people, and then there is the ancestral story — the dynasty, the bloodline, the kingdom that is watching and expecting and waiting to see what comes next. When those two people fall in love against every strategic intention, they are not just changing their own lives. They are changing what the mythology of this bloodline is going to say going forward.
That is why I built Avce the way I did. I wanted readers to feel that double weight. Every time a prince in this series looks at the woman he married on paper and realizes the contract is no longer the point, that moment lands harder because of the mythology underneath it. He is not just admitting he loves her. He is choosing her over the story his bloodline has been telling for centuries. That is ancient. That is myth. That is romance at its most epic.
Mythology Romance as a Genre: What It Is and What It Is Not
I get asked this a lot so I want to be really clear about what I mean when I use the phrase mythology romance — because it can mean different things in different contexts and I think it is worth defining for readers who are specifically searching for this kind of book.
Mythology romance in the broadest sense includes direct retellings (a modern Persephone and Hades, a reimagined Achilles and Patroclus), god romance (literal deities as love interests), and mythology-adjacent romance (books that borrow the structural and emotional logic of myth without being literal retellings). Princes of Avce lives in that third category. It is not a retelling. There is no specific Greek or Norse myth that maps directly onto any of the books. But if you have ever loved mythology for its emotional logic — the way ancient stories encode the biggest human questions about fate, love, power, and legacy into compelling narrative — then you will find that same emotional logic operating throughout every Princes of Avce book.
The kingdom of Avce is fictional but it functions the way a mythological setting functions: it is a place where the rules are different, where the stakes are higher, where the normal modern logic of how love is supposed to work gets disrupted by something older and heavier and more demanding. That disruption is where all the best romance lives.
If you have been searching for mythology romance novels, mythological romance books, ancient world romance, or even just royal romance with deeper emotional stakes than the average contemporary — you have found your series. And it starts free.
What I Was Thinking About When I Named the Kingdom of Avce
I love this question because the name Avce itself is something I spent real time on. I wanted something that sounded like it could be Central European — that specific part of the world where the real kingdoms are small and old and have mythologies most English-speaking readers have never encountered. Something that felt like it had been pronounced in a throne room for centuries. Something that did not belong to any existing real-world country’s history so I had complete freedom to build the mythology from scratch.
Avce sounds like it has hard history in it. It sounds like a word that was carved into stone at some point. And that is exactly the feeling I wanted readers to get when they first encounter the kingdom — that this place has been here for a very long time and it has seen a lot of love stories, and none of them have been simple.
The princes of Avce are shaped by that history. They carry it. And the women who love them spend the entire book deciding whether the weight of that history is something they can share — or whether love might actually be strong enough to set the princes free from it. That is mythology romance. That is Avce. And I am so glad you found it.
If you love mythology-laced romance with royal fake marriages, forbidden love, and ancient emotional stakes, the Princes of Avce series is waiting for you. And while you are exploring, you might also love the fake relationship romance collection and the mythology-adjacent elements in the Brothers in Revenge saga — a displaced royal family fighting to reclaim a stolen throne, with all the ancient consequence that implies.
Start Your Mythology Romance Journey Today
You have over 100 novels to explore — and mythology romance is woven through more of them than you might expect. But if you want to start exactly where the ancient-kingdom feeling is strongest and most intentional, start with Princes of Avce.
Forbidden Crown is free on every retailer. That is the door into Avce. On the other side of it are twelve books, twelve princes, twelve women who walked into a contract and came out transformed. That is mythology romance. That is the series.
- Forbidden Crown (Book 1 — FREE): Available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and more
- Forbidden Marquis (Rossie and Stefano): Available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and more
- Full Princes of Avce Series: Browse all 12 books on all retailers
DM me the word ROYAL on any platform and I will send you the complete reading order for the entire kingdom. I cannot wait for you to meet these princes. They have been waiting a very long time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is mythology romance as a book genre?
Mythology romance is romance fiction that borrows the emotional structure and narrative logic of ancient myth — fated love, dynastic stakes, bloodline consequence, fate versus free will — without necessarily being a direct retelling of a specific myth. Books in this category make love feel ancient, inevitable, and cosmically weighted. The Princes of Avce series by Victoria Pinder is a prime example: a fictional kingdom built on mythological architecture, where every royal romance carries the weight of centuries.
Where should I start with the Princes of Avce series?
Start with Forbidden Crown, which is free on every retailer including Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Google Play. It is Book One of the Princes of Avce series and establishes the kingdom of Avce, the royal bloodline mythology, and the emotional stakes of the whole twelve-book saga. Each subsequent book follows a different prince and works as a standalone emotional journey with the kingdom as a connecting thread.
Does the Princes of Avce series involve mythology directly or is it original world-building?
The Princes of Avce series is original world-building rather than a direct mythology retelling. The kingdom of Avce is entirely fictional, built by USA Today Bestselling Author Victoria Pinder using the structural logic of Greek epic, Norse saga, and Renaissance dynastic politics. There is no specific myth that maps onto any individual book — instead the mythological feeling comes from the ancient-weight architecture: fated love, inherited destiny, outsider women who rewrite bloodline stories.
What romance tropes are most common in mythology romance books?
The most common tropes in mythology romance are: fake marriage or arranged union that becomes real, forbidden love across bloodlines or kingdoms, forced proximity in royal or ancient settings, fated mates or destined lovers, and the outsider who disrupts an ancient order through love. The Princes of Avce series uses all of these — fake marriages, forbidden royals, contract arrangements, and forced proximity — layered over a kingdom built on mythological foundations.
Are Victoria Pinder books available outside of Amazon?
Yes. Victoria Pinder is a wide author — all of her books including the entire Princes of Avce series are available on every major retailer: Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and more. She is not exclusive to any single platform. You can find all retailer buy links for every book at victoriapinder.com.
What makes royal romance feel different from mythology romance?
Royal romance centers on the social and political power of a monarchy — titles, wealth, public life, protocol. Mythology romance adds a deeper layer: the sense that the love story is fated or cosmically inevitable, that the characters are shaped by forces older than themselves, that the stakes involve legacy and bloodline and inherited destiny rather than just social consequence. The Princes of Avce series sits at the intersection of both — royal structure with full mythological emotional architecture underneath.
How many books has Victoria Pinder written?
USA Today Bestselling Author Victoria Pinder has published over 100 novels across multiple romance series including the Princes of Avce (12 books), House of Morgan (20 books), Steel Series (10 books), Irresistibly Brothers in Revenge (8 books), Hidden Alphas, Virgin Cove, Modern Scottish Lairds, and more. Her full catalog is available on all major retailers worldwide. Browse all series at victoriapinder.com/romance-book-series/.
