On a regular day, Payal Dhar battles evil on Macbeth (that’s what she calls her MacBook), dawdles on the Web and does a good job of figuring out Eternity. It helps that she created it. The 33-year-old is the author of Timeless Land, (Young Zubaan, Rs 295) the final book in the A Shadow in Eternity trilogy, which follows the adventures of young Maya Subramaniam as she is summoned to Eternity and trained to become a Defender of the Sands of Time.

When the Bangalore-based author thought of writing a fantasy series for young Indian adults, she wasn’t interested in “seven-fingered, blue-skinned entities”. Instead, she created Maya, a regular teenager who hates her brother, loves Rahul Dravid and lives in dread of Hindi. That’s till she travels up Portal Road to Halvard Castle for training and finds herself living a double life. By day, she is a young girl in Bangalore and by night, a hero with special powers. Her mentor is Noah Jarryd, an impassive Swede modelled on Star Trek’s Captain Spock.

“Maya was essentially born out of a need to have a ‘real’ female protagonist. As a child I hated how there weren’t any girls that I could identify with in fiction, someone who questioned stereotypes because they didn’t suit her,” says Dhar. The three books in the series, A Shadow in Eternity (2006), The Key of Chaos (2007) and Timeless Land, are fast-paced and have enough twists to keep the reader — and the average teen on a diet of gaming action — hooked. What holds the stories together is Maya, the bumbling teen troubled by her own powers.

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