Afterword - Book 1 - Chapter 56 (Patreon)

Chapter 56: In the Defense of Others

(Original Chapter Title: Loss and the Last Stand)

This chapter's quite an emotional journey, isn't it?

Thank you, internet, for managing to make 'loss' a title I needed to avoid. At least I like the new title more.

You might have your doubts, but seriously: I hate writing sad moments in Ranthia's journey. She shares enough of my headspace that her moods—especially misery—affect me hard. She wasn't bffs with Hylla, but she was growing to like the kid—not like that, sicko—and losing her like that hurt. It's possible to make no mistakes and still have something go horribly wrong, but when you shouldered the responsibility, it's even harder to accept that. Surely there was something you could have done to avoid that outcome, right?

This is actually one of the things I love about the Digimon series, at least before it gets sanitized for US children who must be kept sheltered at all costs (...okay, avoiding the rant, sorry). The Digimon series loves dealing with failure. Where everyone does exactly what they're supposed to, but not everything comes out as cleanly or happily as anyone would have liked. There's always a cost, and trying hard doesn't always change that. It's important stuff—the world is not so benevolent as to cater to your whims simply because you tried. I've always felt strongly for media that actually dared to show this. I hope my own efforts to manifest this do it justice.

There weren't any other shimagu present—at least as far as Ranthia could find. I vaguely remember debating that at the time, but for plot reasons I didn't want to give Ranthia an outlet for revenge. The story works better with her to keeping her hatred of this newfound enemy fresh in her heart.

And so the journey continues. I could have told entire chapters of Ranger Team 6 resolving minor incidents and trying to heal, but I ultimately decided to keep it similar to the OG draft—a series of short summaries and overviews. Prolonging misery isn't fun to read (and gets harder to emphasize with, especially in a serialized fiction), so pacing necessitated some time passing.

I (think) I've mentioned this before, but Aquiliea barely factored into the OG draft. In it, the only scenes that took place there (or near there, I suppose) were Ranthia's chaos with the pigs when she was a kid and this. But Aquiliea is important to readers that have read BtDEM first, and I wanted to build the importance of the town up a bit for my own readers. It's a town that Ranthia can't seem to visit without some flavor of trouble. I'd like to think her not getting into trouble this time setup some degree of foreboding for someone.

The trouble just found her shortly after she left.

The ornithocheirus are a horrific threat to Remus, but they're something Elaine only tangentially experienced. Which is why I've tried to show a breadth of the threat that they pose through Ranthia's own journey. No matter how strong she gets, they're a pack of suicidal murderbeasts—they're dangerous in the extreme.

Ranthia out-leveled any single member of the flock by a fair margin. And yet she lost. Badly. She had the Skills to offset her defeat, but if the swarm had been much larger she would have still been overwhelmed. She would have died a hero, had anyone had some way to divine what her motives for fighting were after her death.

But she held out by the skin of her teeth and her raw stubborn tenacity. Then she retreated back into the pile of shredded meat that had once been her true body.