Chapter 193 - Afterword: The Eventide Of Faith

So let me be the first to admit that this volume got the best of me. I tried to bite something that was too large for me at the time. I lacked the skill and more importantly, the passion to write after I was done with my stunt of updating daily during my four-month period while I was in the Minimum Guarantee System. ;

To be quite frank, I realized midway during MGS that I was never going to be able to write anything good at such a ridiculous pace. In fact, I honestly doubt whether anyone can do it. ;

A drained husk, it took several months for my mind to recover from that neverending marathon. And when I finally did get back to writing, I found myself still feeling out of touch. ;

But I am now happy to inform you that I finally feel better in some weird way. Maybe it's just relief that I finally finished this gigantic volume, or that I didn't give up on it, despite my fatigue.

Thank you for putting up with me through all of that. I'm serious. It was a shitshow, but I feel that I came out with a passable (though I will never be happy about it) volume.

But even if I am not fine with Volume 3 not reaching the standards I put for myself, I am still very glad I gave it a shot. I stand by my decision to write it the way I did. Better to do the hard thing than give up on myself and do the easy thing. ;

I did not want this volume to be a simple volume. I did not want a villain that one could easily point to and blame. Nor conflict that was the usual fight against a standard foe like some giant boss character or say, for example, a threatening army of Infested.

A surface-level answer to who the villain might've been would be The Dreaming Council since they were the greatest offenders, but the answer was far more complex than that.

The correct answer is that blame fell upon every person in power at all levels of authority, ranging from the Dreaming Council at the top, all the way down to individual Chosen across the generations since the Dark Age.

The royal families, their noble families, and the top-level executives in the governments created in their name are also included in this giant pyramid of corrupt mismanagement and incompetence — let me make this clear, it is not just Chosen that are at fault, but also the select mortals that played a part in maintaining this whole mess. They're just as accountable in this messed-up circus, too. ;

With no one to hold the top liable for their extreme actions and the added fact that the Goddess gave them the green light to do whatever was necessary to maintain the peace in her indefinite absence, it all went to shit as with any situation where people are given unlimited power and no regulations to stop them from going off the rails. ;

The Dreaming Council, believing that the ends justify the means, did what they saw fit in order to create an eternal peace across Mulia, albeit at the cost of effectively lobotomizing the entire population of Mulia into sheeple with horribly morally bankrupt methods, something that should have struck a horribly similar chord to the poor souls imprisoned by the Outsiders...

So yes, I did not want a physical foe that would be the cause of all the troubles in the story or arc, to put it bluntly. ;

There are an infinite number of novels that will gladly hand you an opponent like this, which is why I opted to not create something like that. ;

But to be real with you, the primary conflict of the volume was something I'd been setting up since Volume 1 — the real conflict for Volume 3 which was Reed himself. ;

There are many supporting conflicts in this volume, but the one that I decided to take center stage was that of Man vs. Self, ; something that I felt appropriate at the current arc. ;

Reed, now a young man almost 20 years old, rightfully needed to mature into an adult. For young people, this means finding himself, his own personal identity, and his purpose in life. ;

That's what you do as a young person, as a teenager — you experiment and find out what you like and what you dislike. You find yourself very impressionable and often times follow the trends and flow of popularity, lost and confused about what you're about and where you're going. ;

And Reed was no different as a teenager. He was a highly impressionable kid who always had a desire for more in life, given his terrible upbringing. ;

So naturally, after he had been whisked to Mulia and given unbelievable powers, he did what any normal person who had been disadvantaged his whole life would have done. ;

He got completely and utterly lost. ;

Whether it was the powers he gained, the extravagance of his supposed destiny, or the people around him, they all contributed to him losing sight of himself, which in turn lead to the many mistakes he made along the way. ;

Not surprising, since making mistakes is to be expected of teenagers, but it all got overblown in Reed's case since he was in possession of a lot of power.

You can pretty much think of Volume 1 as Reed's fall into delusion, Volume 2 being the mistakes Reed made from being in that disorientated state of mind, and...

Volume 3 as Reed struggling to make amends for the mistakes in his youth as he becomes a proper, responsible adult. ;

For a normal youth, this process of making amends and becoming more world-wise would have taken them the better half of their twenties to accomplish, but Reed did not have that luxury due to his cursed destiny.

As with any person born into a position of power, he was forced to grow up faster than his normal peers in order to wrangle the responsibilities that had been thrown unto him. Real-life royalty had to do undergo the same exact thing. The duty of the office they had been born into demanded they become mature as fast as possible.

This ties into the next topic I wanted to talk about... Lu'um. ;

She was to be quite frank, a difficult character to write about in this volume. Not because of her gender, of course, but because of her role. For the longest time, she had been Reed's biggest pillar of support in his world, aside from Lacrima.

This was a girl who knew what he had been through before his arrival in Mulia, of the terrible destiny that awaited him, and of the mistakes he had made in Volume 2 that had come to haunt him. ;

Mind you, she herself was also dealing with the same troubles as Reed, but she had a wealth of hard-earned wisdom and life experience to cope with it all much better than Reed. Though their suffering was equal, their ability to endure it was not. ;

Not even close. ;After all, she had five thousand years of life experience and Reed only had nineteen to spare. They can't even begin to be compared in that regard. ;

So what was she supposed to do? Simply stand beside him and let him continue to sink in his misery? Of course not; not a single person in the world would let their significant other fall into hell. What kind of person would ever neglect the person they love like that? ;

Hence the overbearing coddling, the overprotective nature of hers, and the strong desire to guide him away from his pain. Her intentions were absolutely pure and well-meaning, but they eventually led Reed down a bad path.

Though she was admirably shielding him from his personal demons, she also inhibiting any form of growth on his part as an adult who could become capable of handling difficult situations and life-defining mistakes. ;

He nearly became completely dependent on her to an unhealthy degree, always looking to her for a way out when things got too hard or when things became too painful to bear. ;

There's a word to describe someone who does all of that; a mother. And while it might've eased Reed's pain to have her play that role, it only served to further worsen the internal problems he had in the long run. ;

Had Lu'um possessed a clearer mind, not shrouded by her pity and love for Reed, she would have not let him run away into self-exile. She would have slapped him silly and put him through his paces, but that unfortunately never happened. ;

Thankfully, Reed finally got his shit together in the end, even if took an incoming apocalypse to get him to move his feet forward. Consider that a testament of how bad it got for Reed — the world needed to be in danger and the blame needed to land on his shoulders for him to get his act together.... ;

It's a difficult job that Lu'um has been given, one with many hard decisions to make and even fewer clear answers to discern. I find it easy to point blame on her if one looks at her from Reed's perspective, but once you see the delicate problem she had to manage from her perspective, it becomes much harder to blame her. ;

For Reed, growing up meant admitting his mistakes, trying to atone, and becoming independent of Lu'um, or rather, letting her finally rest — giving her the chance to stop playing mummy, and start being the woman he loves instead. ;

This independence naturally meant that he also brushed off everyone else he had used as a crutch — ;Velvund, primarily, but all others who would have led him by the hand. ;

On a side note, I wanted a stylistic and thematic transformation to occur once Reed shed himself of everything he formerly depended on and I feel as if I hit that mark. This extremely important metamorphosis wasn't just internal, but also an external one, too.

He became something completely unlike his former self, now towering at nearly eight feet tall, far beyond normal human dimensions. His complexion changed dramatically and he turned a sickly tone of dull white — resembling a fresh corpse, in a morbid way. Even his shadow disappeared in the wake of his transformation, giving him a phantom-like etherealness... ;

I was greatly inspired by the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, albeit only in an aesthetic sense. I wanted to do away with Reed's human self and make him into something appropriately haunting to fit the terrible reality of his sins, more importantly, what he perceives himself to be inside — a monster who killed and hurt many people. ;

I really want to commission art for his new form. Design-wise, I always imagined him somewhere between a very young Dracula from the Castlevania series to something as inhuman as the blue-skinned version of Edmond Dantes from Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo.

In any case, there were many more conflicts in this volume. Funnily enough (and also by intended design), the biggest thing in the room, the fissures, were more of a background threat than a center stage conflict. To me, they were just a means to enable me to write about different scenes I need to make across the continent. ;

Man vs. Society was also a type of conflict that I had been setting up for a while, too. Of how utopian Mulia seemed to Reed in Volumes 1 and 2 — being someone starved for a world not filled with injustice or gross inequality. And that was what he got, at least on the surface, in the beginning. ;

Younger Reed only saw what he was allowed to see, from the perspective of his only friends, who I need not remind you were all either extremely high in the aristocracy or straight-up royalty. He was shown a view of Mulia that no normal person would have ever seen, his head clouded by his life as a prince and a celebrity figure, much to his dismay. ;

Once Reed was finally made privy to how such an unnaturally harmonious and long period of peace was created and upheld, through the gross actions of the Dreaming Council, the illusion was shattered for him. As someone greatly accustomed to the taste of injustice, it comes as no surprise what Reed was going to do from then on. ;

It is one thing to bring the Dreaming Council to trial for their crimes but in the end, Reed dared to go even further and brought down the entire damn system to its knees. And if that isn't an accomplishment worth putting on your headstone, then I don't know else I'd put on my grave. ;

In essence, this volume has been all about change and the things that come around it. Not just for Reed or Mulia, but for everyone. There is still a lot that I have not talked about, much of it pertaining to the changes felt by many of the supporting cast, but I assure you that they will get their own time in the spotlight, soon. ;

I have found that children see their parents as akin to gods, who are capable of anything and support their world. And in return, adults see their leaders and the gods they worship as pillars of their world. ;

Parents, kings, and gods, the entire lot have a special relationship with each other in the field of responsibility and governance... and a lot to do with Vol. 3.

I think something that we can all agree on is that all parties involved (parents, kings, and gods) failed to do properly do their jobs across the board in Mulia. But hopefully, now that Reed has taken charge to set everyone back on the right path, things will turn out for the better. ;

In any case, I think I've spoken enough about what I thought about this volume. It was a big task for me to do and now that it's done, I'd like to do something smaller in scale, more personal, and not as ridiculously grand. ;

I'm thinking of doing a side story volume that will roughly be 80,000 - 90,000 words that will not feature Reed or Lu'um as the main characters, but everyone else that has been kept in the background during Volume 3. I'll see how that pans out, but if it doesn't I'll go back to the drawing board. ;

Let me know what you think. I'm always interested to know your thoughts on the matter. Stay safe, wear a mask, and keep hope alive during these trying times. I'm going to go make some coffee now. ;

Yours truly, ;

FattyBai