I planned Chapter Six extensively.
The outline was pages long. Beat by beat. A golden age chapter: the hunt, the return, the ceremony. Dessa would kill her first dragon, come back to the settlement, get pulled into blood running, return again, and finally receive her binding stone amid glory and adulation.
Some of that survived. Most of it didn't.
The hunt remained largely intact. Borderline action-adventure, the kind of scene that belongs in genre fantasy. Crossbows and coordinated tactics and a dragon screaming as it falls.
That was intentional. The golden age needed to feel like a golden age. Competence and triumph and the rush of doing something well. I wanted readers to feel what Dessa felt: the satisfaction of a clean kill, the camaraderie, the whoops echoing off valley walls.
It's the only scene in the book that reads like that. That was the point.
This is who they were before the fall. This is what the settlement built itself around: the hunt, the kill, the rituals that followed. To understand what they lose, you have to see them at their best. To understand how the system breaks people, you have to show it working first.
So the hunt stayed. What came after didn't.
In the outline, the blood extraction was visceral. Dramatic. The horror of what they do laid bare. Dessa would be shaken by it, disturbed, transformed.
But as I wrote it, something else emerged. Fill, swap, pour. Fill, swap, pour. The rhythm of routine. Buckets counted and measured. Filters cleaned. Bodies tipped for better drainage.
Dessa wasn't disturbed. She was numb.
Twenty-two and a half buckets. She knew the yield because she'd done this before. Many times. The obscenity of it had become invisible to her—not because she was cruel, but because this was just work. What they did. What they'd always done.
I hadn't planned that. But it was right.
This is what systems do. They don't need people to be monstrous. They just need people to stop seeing. The routine obscures the horror. The familiar becomes invisible. Dessa isn't complicit because she chose to be. She's complicit because the work became ordinary, and ordinary things don't require justification.
That's more frightening than visceral horror. That's how it actually works.
And once I understood that about her, the ceremony couldn't stay what I'd planned either.
In the outline, Dessa reveled in the binding. Finally a Boneholder. Finally someone who mattered. The glory she'd worked ten winters to earn.
I wrote that version. It felt hollow: the wrong kind of hollow.
What emerged instead: her mother standing with the Edge-dwellers. Not in the front rows. Not where a Boneholder's mother should stand. The memories surfacing uninvited: Dorthe who minded her as a child, faces from a life she'd left behind.
Dessa crossed a line. Not a moral one—a social one. She climbed out of the Edge-dwellers and into the Boneholders, and that climb cost her something she can't name. Her mother's position in the hall says it: you can rise, but you rise alone. The people who made you don't get to follow.
The gem at her throat was made from blood she drained that morning. The system that elevated her is built on the same extraction she's now numb to. She earned her place by becoming someone who doesn't flinch at twenty-two and a half buckets.
The binding words: Iron to bone. Blood to stone.
And then the smile. Ambiguous. Unreadable. Is it triumph? Relief? The beginning of something she doesn't yet recognize as grief?
I don't know. Maybe she doesn't either. Maybe that's the point.
The structure broke too—and this one surprised me most.
My outline had Dessa returning to the settlement, then going back out for the blood work, then returning again for the ceremony. Three movements. It made sense on paper.
It made no sense on the page.
When I merged the extraction into the hunt—one continuous sequence before she ever reached the gates—suddenly the procession became something she witnessed from outside. She wasn't walking through those gates in formation. She was watching her empty spot pass by.
Her return through the side gate, anonymous, smelling of death. The crowd that didn't part for her.
None of that was in the outline. All of it was necessary.
Because that's the truth of what she's become. The hunters march through the bone gates to cheering crowds. The blood runners slip in through the side, unseen, doing the work that makes the glory possible. Dessa is both now. She killed the dragon and drained it. She earned the triumph and did the labor that everyone pretends doesn't exist.
Watching the procession from outside let me show that split. She's looking at her own empty spot in the formation—the place where she should be, the place she earned, the place she couldn't occupy because someone had to count the buckets.
I don't know what this means for how I'll write future chapters. Maybe I'll plan less. Maybe I'll plan the same amount and accept that the plan is just a starting point, a direction to push against.
The outline got me to the page. The page told me what the outline got wrong.
Maybe that's how it's supposed to work.