Afterword - Book 4 - Chapter 26 (Patreon)

Chapter 26: Blind Retribution I

(Original Chapter Title: Blind Retribution I, Blind Retribution II (pieces from two chapters))

Honestly, the OG draft was so baffling here. You'll note this SINGLE SET OF EVENTS came from two different chapters in the OG draft. Why, past me? Why did you do that?

Ranthia and the base commander have never really gotten along. He's an inflexible man who tries to adhere to overarching strategies without wavering, and he's somewhat brazenly 'humanity comes first' to boot. Ranthia is our lovable ball of chaos and cultural cooperation, so they tend to get along somewhat poorly even at the best of times.

These are not the best of times.

I'm still proud of how the section with Ranthia's nightmares came together. It's horrific enough that it makes me emotional while reading it (definitely probably bleed-through from Ran, admittedly), but I do legitimately feel like it makes the incident that results from the nightmares far more visceral and real. Ranthia's punch was a horrible accident, yet it also was an understandable one. Or at least I hope that's how it feels to readers.

In the aftermath, Ranthia's emotions are a discombobulated mess (one she's a bit more honest about than she'd normally be), but she still puts her game face on and... er, yeah. There's a bit of a mess before she gets out of Remera, with at least some of the help that she sorely needs. Ranthia's not a total amateur at tracking, but I wanted to make it clear that finding a caravan on sunbaked rock is a bit outside of her range of experience.

The winged ogre is a consistent menace, but he isn't a (complete) idiot either. As a rising member of the shimagu twins, he (and his internal partner) are sent across the battlefield, but Remera truly is his preferred target. It's not just his hatred for Ranthia; the base's entire existence is a proverbial black mark on his record—don't forget, his attempt to prevent the base from being established resulted in utter failure. With the base holding strong, even as the shimagu overran much of the region, he's trying to do all that he can to weaken them.

In this case, it's an effort to starve them of supplies—even if he has to risk the ire of the elves to do so. As Ranthia points out, his plan to cover his tracks had a high risk of failure, but she somewhat underestimated how involved he could be while the ornithocheirus rampaged. It wasn't quite as flimsy a plan as it seems.

But Ranthia was there, and then two elves that he was not about to try and mess with showed up.

Honestly, one of my favorite tropes in books and long-running TV series is to see the protagonist(s) grow strong and once again encounter something that nearly killed them long, long ago. It's undeniably gratuitous, but it's an exciting way to show just how far someone's come! I might have pushed my luck doing it two books in a row, but I feel like the winged murderbeasts had a lot more emotional weight for Ranthia than the war goblins ever did.

But at least Caeli is alive; and Avyna even successfully tricked her daughter into assuming she still has a wholly fictional Skill that lets her see through the girl's lies!