Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 17 (Patreon)

Chapter 17: Three Lessons

(Original Chapter Title: Three Lessons)

Something is going wrong when I look at a 3.7k word chapter and go "this is a short chapter."

Fun fact: when I started editing this chapter (the OG was even shorter (1.9k words!), believe it or not) to elaborate the Sentinel Meeting the entire expansion on the smoke and mirrors was not planned. This was literally just 'Ranthia started fantasizing about cutting someone's nose off and panicked,' which resulted in a conversation I had no plans to write. Fortunately for all of us, it was a good conversation!

I do, however, quibble a bit with a few of Swarm's classifications of which category their names are in. For example, Toxic doesn't really spell out what he does, because his name leaves out his stealth and archery. I'd say he's more like Seeking and Grace.

But here's a secret to my 'success' (rational minds may wildly disagree): I don't correct characters when they're wrong.

Also, it's a quibble.

Honestly, I hesitated a bit when editing the next bit. Bringing up the plant in the heart of the Nostrum at this stage feels so, so premature. But... at the same time, Remus is exploring beyond its borders. As BtDEM heavily implied in book 7, the empire is poking around the ruins of Nolgrod (the wood dwarves' destroyed nation). There's the shimagu offensive. And likely at least scouting done in other directions. It wasn't going to take long for someone to go 'wait, we should make a map of that weird effect'.

Also, with how many layers of decisions and debates will be involved about the plant, it's not like a decision of whether or not to kill it will come tomorrow.

Oh, and that bit about Ranthia putting distractions on a list of distractions? One of my beta readers flagged it when I first put this chapter up. It felt incredibly Ranthia, so I kept it and added a line of her noticing.

Everyone knows teachers work best with a ton of wine and an all-nighter.

Her grabbing a blank scroll was in the OG draft though, and the lessons are largely unchanged from it. I try not to edit Ranthia's stream of conscious dialogue too heavily, lest I lose any of the charm or personality from it.

I don't hate her three lessons though, even if the entire staff of the Academy plainly did for at least one of them. As a behind the scenes thing, Remus was kind of planning to keep the whole Dead Zone thing under wraps outside team leadership candidates again... up until Ranthia dumped a large number of triple classed feral legionaries on them. So, once again, Ranthia has avoided getting into trouble by causing entirely different trouble!