When we started brainstorming the book cover concept for Divna with the artist Teodora Dimova, I ran into a nagging problem that turned tricky; we couldn't just blindly put “a pretty girl with red hair who looks mysterious” on the cover.

As the author, I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

I knew who Divna was; I knew what she didn’t know about herself; I knew what the water had done to her, and -perhaps worst of all - I knew what the water brought out in her. But the reader wasn’t supposed to understand any of that - or at least not yet.

So how do you paint a secret?

And in such a way that you reveal it all right before someone’s eyes, and yet they still don’t recogniсe it?

That’s exactly where the conceptual idea for the cover began.

Teddy also read the manuscript to get a sense of the characters and what we wanted to convey. We worked together on the image, under a particularly amusing circumstance - at the time, I had no idea that Teodora was the illustrator for LitDesign magazine.

All I knew at the time was that we were looking at a red-haired woman, a stream, a mountain, and a secret that shouldn’t be thrown in the reader’s face right off the cover, the way a watermelon vendor at the market shouts to everyone within earshot about how juicy and sweet his melons are.

We had to leave that secret there, woven in, visible - yet still locked away.

Let's take a look at the cover now. What do you notice first?

Probably the woman’s face at the top. Her copper-colored hair flows around her face, her skin is warm, her eyelids are lowered, and her whole body seems to be leaning toward whatever lies on the other side of the water’s surface.

You’re right in your assumption - this is Divna, just as she sees herself. A human being. A rural woman who has a clear sense of who she is and absolutely no reason to suspect that, in the world she lives in, she’s missing a rather significant detail - Divna doesn’t know that she’s a wondrous creature.

And for me, that very detail was the most interesting thing to paint, since the cover doesn’t depict two women, but a secret.

Now slowly move your gaze downward. Don’t rush.

Between the two faces, you can make out the water surface, the shoreline. That line is a boundary. It is the place where one world literally ends. Above, on the surface, Divna still breathes the air of the familiar, of the human.

She looks so much like her that your first reaction is almost automatic, isn’t it - it’s just a reflection!!!

But if this reflection were just an ordinary reflection, it would be incredibly boring. And the water in this folklore series has no symbolic meaning at all.

Yes, you’re right that the woman below is Divna again.

But somehow she isn’t, is she? She’s different; she’s what the heroine becomes after her own drowning, but at the same time, she’s also what was already latent within her, without her even suspecting it.

This is her conception as an otherworldly being. The moment when death and birth come so uncomfortably close to one another that we cannot tell at all where one ends and the other begins.

That is why the eyes of the woman in the water shine with a special light.

You’re probably asking yourself other questions as well. Is the woman in the water dead? Is she drowning? Is she asleep? Is this her rebirth?

It is precisely this ambiguity that I wanted to preserve in the image in the lower composition, because Divna’s drowning is not merely an accident; the water does indeed kill her in one form, but it also returns her to us in another. Her transformation does not follow the fantasy-established pattern of passing through a portal - which she consciously steps through with a bundle on her shoulder - or with the help of a potion; no one has given her a map of where to go. No one has explained the rules of the other world to her. Circumstances lull the human side of her own nature to sleep, only to awaken her from the other side.

And so, if someone were to ask me what the cover actually represents, the simplest answer I could give would be “Divna and her reflection.”

But that statement isn’t entirely true. It’s more accurate to say that Divna is looking at herself in what she doesn’t yet know she actually is.

But which of the two is the real one?

That’s the point I wanted to convey with the cover concept right from the start.

I didn’t want to present things in a way that would make people ask, “Who is that beautiful woman?” or give explicit hints about some romantic novel, much less make readers wonder what kind of incredible monster might leap out of the dense mountain forest. Strandzha, by the way, provides plenty of candidates for the imagination even without my help. I wanted to achieve something else.

Which of the two is the real one?

The full-blooded woman above the water’s surface, who belongs to her human life, or the female creature in the water, who looks as if she has just surfaced from the depths she inhabited long before the girl leaned over it? And finally comes the question that confuses the whole thing.

A r e t h e y e v e n t w o?

If Divna has believed her whole life that she is human, and then discovers that she possesses a second nature, does that mean the previous Divna was not real? Or was she just as real as the one born in the water?

I’ve never been interested in the simplistic scheme of pitting human against monster, which so conveniently organises the reader’s world. Here we put the human, and on the other side - the inhuman; we draw a line between them, and everyone can sleep soundly.

But “Divna” is a story born of a restless night. Wouldn’t you be more interested in finding out what happens when that line runs right through a person?

Who tells the story on the cover without being human? Water. Water knows. Divna still knows nothing. And the reader suspects.

I like this imbalance.

Let’s now focus on the water’s surface. It has its own place in the composition and its own logic. We see a shore; there is land across the way; there is a clear sense of a world above it and a world below it. There are no abstract blue mists, which are usually used as a device - a universal conceptual glue - to bind two incompatible images together.

This is where one world ends. This is where the other begins.

Above the water, the colours are different. The upper part of the composition radiates warmth; the tones are coppery and brownish; the skin is rosy; the air is saturated with the pink haze of the setting sun. Gradually, the colours shift and cool; the skin becomes cold, wet, and almost otherworldly, while the water strips the image of everything familiar.

You can almost feel the temperature of the change.

And this is important, because the water in “Divna” is an action. A verdict. A passage. A mirror. The place where the heroine loses one existence and gains another, without having consented to it (quite rude on the part of Mrs Fate, but let’s not forget that she is rarely known for her good manners).

What I like most about the concept that crystallised for the book is that the water does not show Divna the face she expects to see.

An ordinary mirror doesn’t have much imagination. You stand in front of its surface and see a reflection of yourself, with some variations depending on the lighting and just how merciless the night has been to you.

But water as a mirror in the concept behind the cover of DIVNA serves a different purpose. Divna stands above it like a human being.

The water shows her the image of an otherworldly creature. So which of the two is telling the truth?

Let me tell you how we made the cover with Teodora

When designing the cover, we didn’t approach the idea as simply checking off a list of individual decorative elements - for example, “a red-haired woman - checked; water - checked; a flower in her hair - checked; some decorative elements in the corners - okay, great, we’re done.” We can’t piece together a visual narrative that way.

Instead, a whole bunch of questions popped into our heads.

How do we show the transformation without telling the story? How do we show that Divna and the creature are one? How do we turn drowning into both death and rebirth? How could we incorporate the Strandzha Mountain into the image without turning the cover into something that looks like a tourist brochure?

The question that gnawed at me the most was: can an image reveal the book’s secret without the reader realising they’ve just seen it?

That’s where the decision came from: to have the two versions of Divna stand facing each other across the water. To make them almost like a single, interrupted whole, just like the title itself (more on the structure and font later). The woman on top leans toward the one below. The one below doesn’t respond; she is cold, indifferent. Between them stands the only thing that knows of their connection.

The water’s mirror.

At that very moment, the concept fell into place.

And Teddy no longer had to paint “Divna Before” and “Divna After.” The artist painted for me two truths that exist simultaneously, even though one of them has not yet reached the heroine’s consciousness.

And then the rest of the details began to fall into place. There’s a flower in the hair of the woman in the water. It’s a Strandzha greenflower. A protected plant. A fairy flower.

This detail is small and delicate, and that’s exactly why I like it. It doesn’t jump out at you. You might not even notice it right away, but then you’ll come back to it and realise that its presence there is by no means accidental.

Because “Divna” belongs to the Strandzha Mountain. The mountain is part of the very fabric of the story.

Strandzha is an ancient mountain range (it even hides an extinct volcano - Golyama Papia), having accumulated layer upon layer of human presence, cultures, beliefs, religious practices, pagan rituals, and monuments over the millennia. There, the new has not completely supplanted the old; rather, they blend and build upon one another. Strandzha hides well-buried secrets. This is the Strandzha I need for this series.

That is why the image of the other Divna - the woman underwater - bears the green hue. Having lost her human form, her image fuses with the special place. I love this paradox immensely - she becomes more ethereal, and that is why she belongs even more deeply to this land and this space.

Now let’s return to the title. It deliberately does something that a designer would otherwise likely consider risky.

The title “DIVNA” is positioned between the two female figures and looks as if it's split in two. I didn’t want the reflection to have a fleeting, decorative effect - one that people would instantly recognise as a design element and then forget. I wanted the viewer to wonder for a second: What exactly are they seeing? Are they two words? Is it just one? Which one is upside down?

And that’s fine - let them wonder. It’s the same question posed by the faces of the two women looking at each other through the watery mirror - which one is the original, and which is the reflection?

And if you’ve gotten this far in the analysis, you already know how suspicious I am of the very word “original.”

Because if the woman in the water is Divna’s true nature, then which of the two should we actually call the reflection?

The one on top? The one on the bottom? Or do both reflect different aspects of the same being?

This is why the title is woven into the conceptual framework. The very word “DIVNA” undergoes the same dual reflection as the protagonist.

And if it confuses you for a second, then it’s done its job.

We placed silver decorative elements at the four corners of the cover. They, too, are part of the design’s conspiracy.

I wanted them to resemble the frame of an old mirror. I didn’t want the viewer, upon seeing it, to immediately think, “Ah! Mirror symbolism, I get it!” because then we’d be done with the artistic part.

They’re meant to nudge the viewer’s thoughts, to create the sensation that the entire scene is enclosed within some kind of reflective frame. And inside this large, metaphorical mirror lies a second one—the water.

A mirror within a mirror.

A reflection within a reflection.

Except that one shows a face, and the other—nature.

The picture can get even more unsettling if one dwells on it long enough. Because the reader, too, looks at the cover as if in a mirror. They observe Divna, who is observing her reflection - which is, in fact, her truth, to which she herself does not yet have access.

Who, then, knows the most? The water? The reader? Or the creature with otherworldly eyes that has surfaced?

I couldn’t just move this story to another setting and expect it to unfold the same way.

Before us, in this place at the foot of the Strandzha Mountain, other people lived; they believed in other things, prayed in other ways, and left behind enough traces for us not to be entirely certain what exactly time has swallowed up and what still surrounds us.

The millennia-old cultural layers, the ancient religious practices, the ancient solar rites, and the monuments to sun worship transform the mountain into much more than just an extraordinary backdrop for a fantasy story. For me, it works the same way as the water on the cover - it has a visible surface, beneath which something lies, unfathomable below.

But just because something is hidden doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t there. And so we return once again to Divna.

The man on the surface.

The creature beneath.

What do you see when you look at the cover now?

As the author, I don’t see it as an illustration of the novel. To me, it’s something like its first silent prologue.

The story hasn’t begun yet, but the end of one Divna already lies before our eyes.

And the beginning of the other one, too.

She’s leaning over the water and is so close to the answer that she can almost touch it. The reader sees it. We see it. The water obviously knows what it’s doing. Only Divna has no idea.

That’s why this cover resonates so deeply with me. It reveals the hidden transformation of a heroine. It also captures that moment before recognition, when the truth is right there, out in the open, whole, shamelessly laid bare before our eyes, yet we still lack the insight to name it.

Look at it again - the woman on the shore. The waterline. The shore. The duality in the name.

The Strandzha flower in her wet hair. The cold face beneath.

The silver frame surrounding the entire scene. And tell me, which of the two do you think is the real one? I know the answer, of course.

But are there even two? For the cruel, impartial water does not show Divna some unearthly monster or enemy she will one day have to defeat; it shows her, precisely, herself.

And the truest mirror does not distort the reflection; it does not return a distorted image to us, but presents it exactly as it is - with all its imperfections and beauty.

Yours, the author

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