Colm was never in the outline.
I knew Fionn needed an anchor. A best friend. Someone to stand beside him when everyone else turned away. In my head, this character took different forms over the years—always another Edge-dweller, another outcast. Socially awkward, maybe. An outsider who understood what it meant to be on the outside.
He was called Finn before Fionn was called Fionn. I don't remember when that changed, only that it did.
Then I started writing.
I was working on what became Year Two—the well scene. The beat I needed was simple: Fionn's first rejection. His first encounter with the world that would spend fifteen years pushing him away.
But as I wrote it, I realized the rejection couldn't come from a child. Not directly. Children don't hate instinctively. They learn it. They inherit it. The cruelty needed to come from a parent—a mother who saw something wrong and pulled her son away before contamination could spread.
So I wrote a small scene. Edge-dweller children playing with a Boneholder boy in a dragon-scale vest. A mother's sharp voice. "Colm. Away."
The name came without thinking. So did the detail that followed:
The boy didn't care who he played with, too young to know he shouldn't.
That line changed everything.
I'd been planning a best friend who was like Fionn—another outsider, another victim of the settlement's cruelty. Two outcasts finding each other. It made sense and it was safe.
But Colm wasn't an outcast. He was a Boneholder's son, wearing dragon-scale at four years old. He was born into the world that rejected Fionn. His mother was the one who pulled him away.
And yet.
Too young to know he shouldn't.
What happens to a boy like that? A boy born on the right side of the line, who keeps reaching across it anyway?
The answer came in pieces, across chapters I hadn't planned.
In Year Six, Colm offers Fionn his crossbow. Dragon bone—the pale material that sings in Boneholder hands. He's trying to help. He doesn't know what will happen. When Niels calls Fionn "Green," Colm says two words:
"Shut up."
In Year Ten, Colm appears at the lake with a bag of stones. No explanation. No announcement. He'd tracked Fionn to his secret place and brought what he thought might help. Just that.
By Year Twelve, they're running through the settlement together, finishing each other's sentences, betting on who has to apologize to Widow Maren. The friendship is easy now, lived-in. But underneath it, Colm carries his own weight.
"He looks at me sometimes. Trying to find himself. And I'm not there."
His father—a Boneholder, a hunter—wants Colm to be something he isn't. The eye for tracking. The instinct for the kill. Colm has the skills, but not the hunger. He's supposed to inherit a legacy of dragon death, and he doesn't want it.
This is what I mean when I say characters write themselves.
I didn't plan for Fionn's best friend to be a Boneholder struggling with his own inheritance. I didn't plan for the symmetry—two boys, both failing to be what their fathers need them to be, finding in each other what they can't find at home.
But once Colm existed, it was obvious. Of course Fionn's anchor would come from the other side. Of course the boy who couldn't hold dragon bone would be best friends with the boy who could but didn't want to.
The outline had a placeholder: best friend, outcast, like Fionn. The story gave me something better.
I think about that mother sometimes. The one who pulled Colm away at the well.
She was protecting her son. From contamination, from association, from whatever curse the strange baby carried. She was doing what mothers do—keeping her child safe from things she didn't understand.
But Colm kept reaching across the line anyway. Kept waving when no one else would. Kept saying "shut up" to boys who called his friend names.
Some inheritances you can refuse.