Chapter Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 34 (Patreon)

Chapter 34: Triumph & Debacle

(Original Chapter Titles: Triumph, Debacle (as in two separate chapters))

This is a fun chapter in a lot of ways.

The emperor underestimates Ranthia, he assumes she's too much like Dawn (eager to please) and Aurora (a soldier's soldier, always willing to follow orders). He manages to get his own people preparing her, so he assumes he has control over the script and the narrative.

Ranthia bristles with increasing frustration until, at last, she embraces chaos and ruins things.

I feel like this is Ranthia's best improvised speech, possibly because it's so important. She speaks of not just coexistence, but co-acceptance. The strength that comes from welcoming new views, technologies, processes, and cultures. A chaotic harmony that strives to something greater than a single people can ever hope to be. One, truly unified people, rather than stratified suppression.

It isn't a speech she could have made before she went to the Unbreakable Image. There she learned to rely on a brusque dwarf that did everything in his power to keep everyone else alive. Then she was saved by a group that wasn't just the legions. Then, in Coalition City, she fell in love—both with a specific elf and with the glimmer of an ideal. This speech isn't just important for its content, it's important because it shows just how willfully Ranthia is embracing the change she believes in.

It's a speech that causes problems. As those that have read BtDEM might remember, in book 7 Night notes that there were... obstacles to proper integration of other species. Some of them become known here, not that Ranthia even blinked at receiving word that people wanted her dead—equal parts a lack of surprise and a complete dismissal of anyone's capability to carry it out.

Originally, obviously, this was two chapters. But I felt like it became a much stronger chapter by merging it, since it's two parts of a single whole.

Ranthia, forced into a bit of time off, decided to return to her roots—one last Adventurer job before she left Remus again. The plot thread was stronger back when books 1 and 2 were combined (I hadn't decided to split them at this point in the OG draft), but the mysterious monsters was an overarching mystery throughout Ranthia's solo Adventurer career. And she finally finds... a scapegoat, at the very least.

Superficially, it feels like Ranthia makes a pile of assumptions to choose to accept that the fortress is legitimate, but she's actually just kind of wishfully projecting extremely unlikely hopes of a coup or rebellion or something for much of her time in that confrontation. It took only the tiniest sign to make her accept the truth. This was also why Xaoc could indirectly confirm things—she already knew the truth, long before she accepted it.

The Empire was up to something, and it took her fathers from her.

Up until this moment, we saw Ranthia rebelling against her badge of office—against her obligations—yet here we see her choose to follow the path of a Sentinel. She doesn't attack the base, spread word, nor run straight to the Guild—she goes to Ocean.

Ocean... isn't surprised by the facility's existence, which she missed. Even with the distraction of the war, there was no chance that Night had been unaware of what the Emperor was doing out there—but he couldn't pretend to ignore it anymore. Ranthia made a bit too splashy of a mess for that.

[Sentinel's Superiority] was dead; there was a reason Ranthia never got it, and I was glad to find a place where it organically fit to explain why (even if OG draft me did it). [Sentinel's Superiority] was an incredible Skill, one of the most potent we've ever seen in BtDEM or Blind Chaos—and it was potent for a reason. The description wasn't just puffery, it was literal: the Sentinels were the final bastion, the best defenders humanity had for its tenuous survival. But by the time Ranthia became a Sentinel, humanity's survival wasn't in question. The Shimagu wanted humanity to live—albeit as meatpuppets, but humanity wasn't struggling to hold the line against creatures that would have razed them out of existence any longer. They were spreading and flourishing. And the weight required for [Sentinel's Superiority] wasn't there any longer.

And that is actually extremely awesome, for someone that lived through the change.