Afterword - Book 1 - Chapter 16 (Patreon)

Chapter 16: A Void of Her Own Making

(original chapter title: Adventurer I)

The chapter launches with a fun bit of character moments (and I may or may not have giggled when I wrote the bit with Ranthia's entry into Sardonia). The Adventurer Names thing was... weird. I'd established it in the OG draft and gave Pupius Whirling Edge (sometimes written as Whirling Dervish, because I was terrible at consistency), yet he was the only one it ever came up for? So I expanded on it and established more lore!

This will totally never have consequences for Ranthia, honest.

The fight with the dinosaur (formerly nonspecific) and what happened with Ranthia (more on that in a bit) was in the OG Adventurer I chapter. The dinosaur fight was even shown, albeit briefly! I expanded on it and named the species they fought; it was always intended to be a hard earned victory so hopefully I captured that adequately for the readers.

As an actual behind the scenes aside? I hate writing about Ranthia getting headaches. I'm intimately familiar with them; I suffered severe headaches most of my life until I learned it was a sensitivity to a commonly used ingredient. I still get them sometimes, but they're anywhere near as common or severe. But just writing about them always gives me like the ghost of a headache for lack of a better way to phrase it.

Suffering for your art is a terribly romanticized thing, but I don't think it was supposed to be quite that literal.

As for what happened afterwards... this is fairly close to being verbatim how it went in the OG draft. Ranthia leaves her warm bed and girl to experiment with her new skill, things go poorly, and ultimately she ends up trapping herself. I'll speak more about this in a future chapter's afterword, at the moment just bear in mind that it happened.

And rest assured, Ranthia will be completely normal about these events.