Afterword - Book 5 - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Chapter 1: Prima

(Original Chapter Title: A Professional Caravan Guard)

Only a few chapters left that'll have afterwords with this formatting!

I'll have more to say when we're done with the OG draft content, but yes, we're still momentarily on it. Sort of. There were a lot of changes here.

One funny thing about the editing process is that [Divine Eyes in the Void] actually predated Ranthia's curse. Well, the curse existed before Ran unlocked the Skill, but it had been long planned—which left me in a weird position.

I didn't want to hand Ranthia a perfect 'cure' to her curse so quickly. The System can potentially override White Dove's curses; nothing she does prevents it (I actually confirmed this with Selkie, because I'd expected her to be more vindictive than that). It's possible to build Skills or classes that undo it. But I didn't want a "pre-existing" Skill to just automatically do it.

Ranthia disagreed, for some weird reason.

The compromise I found is described in this chapter: her Skill can give her sight, but it's extremely difficult. Mechanically this can't be from White Dove's meddling (no matter how Ranthia attributes it), though that's easy enough to work around. It probably won't come up in the prose, so I'll say it here: it's challenging because Ranthia's trying to force the Skill into, more or less, functioning in reverse while her curse affects her. It's outside the intent, so it takes a dangerous amount of concentration and focus.

A lot of this chapter was expanding on what I'd already written, to add clarity (or to fix a paragraph that was almost nonsensically brief). But one of the actual new things that wasn't in the OG draft is the recitation of Ranthia's Covenant and the explanation for why it affected her behavior. That I added due to reader feedback; I've had a few people that found Ranthia's views regarding the shimagu to be nonsensical.

Her Covenant has always guided her, but past me never called it out explicitly. I had counted on the reader to bear it in mind as they watch her interact with the world. In part because I'd never liked the moments where Elaine stopped what she was doing to explain to the reader why her own Oath applied to situations—I enjoy contextual puzzles while reading.

...I might be a bit unique, or at least in the minority, in that respect.

So I'm compromising. Ranthia can call these things out, but only when she's indulging in retrospection. Like all good compromises, it won't fix the comments and complaints made as they come up, it's barely within my own comfort on handholding the reader, and—in this case—it doesn't even come up in the right book.

But hey, it exists!

So, anyone have any bets on how long Ranthia can keep up a bubbly persona?