Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 8 (Patreon)

Chapter 8: Changes Were Made II

(Original Chapter Title: The Price of Fourteen Words)

I love this chapter. Pretty much every bit of this chapter is new and wasn't in the OG draft, but the new prose cements something that I had merely stated in the OG draft: just how close-knit the base became.

The chapter starts out with Ranthia's heartfelt reunion with her Adventurer's armor and a decision to embrace chaos, not that tipping the tower over on top of the troll mattered much. As an aside? In the OG draft I gave one of the legionaries a large battle axe. ...I'm honestly not sure what I was thinking, the metal scarcity had been addressed! Ranthia would have never signed off on that!

Helvia and Ranthia were a fun dynamic to write. The woman is more than a little Ranthia-esque, and I enjoyed giving Ranthia moments of role reversal here. She may still cherish chaos and embrace it where she can, but she is also the woman in charge! Leadership has its own stifling requirements, and she finds herself being stodgy more than once—even if she's encouraging her people to be more chaotic.

As an Xaoc-sent class, her third class' class ups have an unpredictable element to them. They're not like her standard class ups, and I'm sure someday I'll come to sincerely regret this decision as I run out of novel ideas. But that day hasn't come yet (and there may or may not still be some even Adventurer tier haven't seen in the OG draft)! So far we've had flying attack class option and oops all the same class options. What will come next?!

One thing I was surprised by was that some readers were under the impression that Ranthia and her people would eschew class ups while they were under siege. Sure, nobody's eager to try mid-combat, but class upgrades offer major advantages—especially against opponents of the tier that they've faced so far. They have a system in place (the minorest spoiler: it gets addressed in a coming chapter), but they're not going to leave any asset unclaimed. They need every edge they can get!

We'll see how RR comments go, but I've always been a bit surprised at how my beta readers and patreons seemingly shrugged off Ranthia butchering her old armor for parts. I mean, I know how hard it was for her, which definitely colored my expectations—but it's the death of a cover 'character'. It's a loss, claimed by the war. There was real grief there for her, but maybe I didn't do enough to convey it? (See also, Crim overthinking minor things.)

The true face of Ranthia's curse is laid bare in this chapter. She got lucky once, but she doesn't get to keep getting lucky. It's an odd balance for her—all things being equal, Ranthia would have taken to the field blind. ...And likely gotten herself killed. But, (un?)fortunately, she's accepted responsibility for every man and woman in her base. She chooses to preserve herself (as Green advised) so she can continue to be there for her people. But that choice is horrible, and the guilt literally has her tearing herself apart.

The weight of being blind was even worse than she expected. She can hear everything, which leaves her imagination to fill in the blanks in her senses.

In lighter news, Ranthia's knife woes are resolved! One thing I wanted to do with my elaborations on these events was to show that making her knives wasn't an instant process. Things start crude, as they should—Ranthia's no [Blacksmith].

And, of course, the chapter concludes with something that I realized my edited prose desperately needed: their base receiving a name. It made no sense for it to stay nameless, especially as she and her people came together. A name had to come about. I struggled with what to call the base though—all I really knew was that I wanted it to reference mirrors, somehow—and went with The Unbreakable Image at the last second. I'm glad that so many people have expressed that they liked the name!

But we're also seeing time start to pass, and this arc isn't done yet.