On Waking

I knew what this chapter had to do. Close the first act. Land ten chapters of "Later." Launch whatever comes next.

That's a lot to ask of one chapter.

For a while, I couldn't find the shape of it.

Fionn wakes up. Fionn learns the truth. These are the beats. But the chapter kept collapsing into flatness—scene, conversation, revelation, done. It felt like checking boxes rather than building toward something.

The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking of this as a scene and started thinking of it as a fever dream.

Fionn is unconscious for most of the emotional work. He surfaces, catches fragments of conversation through walls, sinks again. And in that liminal space, I found permission to be unreliable—to let wildberries from his father's pocket become wildberries from some lost, half-imagined past. The shape beside him in the dream—Torven? Something older? I didn't need to answer. The uncertainty was the point.

That vagueness let me compress hours into fragments. Names floating past without context. Pieces of arguments he can't quite follow. The reader knows more than he does, and that gap creates its own tension.

And the wildberry dream—I loved writing that.

My prose has been restrained for eleven chapters. Spare. Controlled. Every sentence earning its place, every image pulled tight. That's the voice I've built, and I believe in it. But the dream let me off the leash.

Surreal and poetic. A shape beside him that isn't a face, just warmth, just hands larger than his. The berries staining his fingers, his mouth. The certainty of someone who belonged there, who had always been there. And then the burning—the sweetness turning to smoke, the shape dissolving or becoming the heat itself.

I don't write like that. I've been avoiding it, maybe. The lush, the unguarded, the images that don't explain themselves. But Fionn is unconscious, drifting between worlds, and suddenly I had permission. The dream didn't need to be precise. It needed to be felt.

I came out of that section wondering if I should let myself write like that more often. Probably not—restraint is what makes the release matter. But it was good to know I could.

The fever dream solved how to handle Fionn's interiority. But the chapter had another problem: what happens around him while he drifts?

I needed them trapped. Siege without soldiers. The external world had to stay hidden: Gregor's political moves, the power shift in the Council, all of it happening offstage while this family sits in their leather-and-timber house and waits.

But trapped characters need information. Someone had to come in.

Old Kerra.

She'd been circling the edges of the story for chapters—the baker who left bread, the woman who saw everything and said little. Bringing her in felt right. She doesn't explain. She acts. Treats Fionn's hands. Exchanges a look with Moira. Leaves.

"Go. I've got the boy."

And then she sweeps the wildberries off the table on her way out—the ones Torven picked the day before, while his family was falling apart. Just takes them. No explanation, no asking. Because she's Kerra, and Kerra does as she pleases.

I love what she's become. This wise old woman who has no patience for what others think, who crashes into scenes and leaves when she's done, who sees everything and only says what's necessary. She's earned the right to take the wildberries. She's earned the right to all of it.

In her wake, we understand: the world outside is moving, and this family is running out of time.

Then the question I couldn't avoid: who tells Fionn?

My first instinct was to have Moira force Torven. She's furious—justifiably so. Fifteen years of not knowing while he carried this weight alone. Of course she'd make him face their son.

When I wrote it, the scene died on the page.

It felt punitive. Torven's confession became something extracted rather than given. And worse—it let him off the hook. If Moira makes him tell, he's still not choosing. Still not stepping toward.

The fix was small but changed everything: Moira starts. She opens her mouth, draws breath, she's about to say the words—and Torven stops her.

"No. I'll do it."

Fifteen years of doorways. Fifteen years of watching from the edge of rooms. And finally he moves toward.

That moment unlocked the structure I'd been missing.

Three confessions.

Torven confesses to Fionn. The exile. The sixteen winters. The secret he'd carried since the night he brought him through the gates. His hands shake. He can barely get the words out. But he says them.

Fionn confesses to his parents. He didn't lose control in the square—he chose. He wanted to hurt Niels. He's done it before, at the lake, with the fish. The thing inside him isn't accident. It's him.

Moira's confession is implicit. She holds her son in the dark and admits she made it worse. The Council Hall. Her fury. She'd tried to protect him and exposed him instead.

Three people. Three admissions of failure. Three moments of finally saying the thing that couldn't be said.

But that's what the chapter needed. Not resolution—they're nowhere near that. But the clearing of debts. No more secrets. No more weight carried alone. If this family is going to face what comes next, they have to face it together. And together means no one hiding. No one protecting anyone else from the truth.

Torven's secret kept him at arm's length for fifteen years. Fionn's secret—the heat he'd used before, the intention behind it—would have festered into shame. Moira's guilt over the Council Hall would have turned inward. All of it had to come out. They weren't going to be fine, but they could be unified.

It won't happen overnight. But this is the start. The moment where the three of them finally stand in the same room with nothing between them.

I don't know if it works. The balance is tricky—too much and it tips into melodrama, too little and the emotional beats don't land. But once I found the three-confession structure, the chapter finally had bones.

Even with the structure, I kept fighting myself on the confrontations.

Should they be explosive? Fionn has just learned his whole life has been a countdown. Torven is finally facing the son he's kept at arm's length for fifteen years. These moments should erupt. Part of me wanted that release—shouting, accusations, the dramatic version where everything comes out hot and nothing can be taken back.

I wrote those drafts. They felt false.

Not because explosions don't happen in real life. They do. But I kept testing the lines out loud—actually saying them, in my room, to no one—and the big declarations kept dying in my mouth. Torven delivering some speech about sacrifice and impossible choices. Fionn screaming "You're not my real father." The kind of lines that work in scripts but curdle when spoken by actual humans in actual pain.

Real confrontations are quieter than we expect. Messier. People start sentences and don't finish them. They say the wrong thing, or the small thing, because the big thing is too heavy to lift. Torven's hands shaking so badly he can barely get "exile" out—that felt true. Fionn turning to face the wall instead of his parents—that felt true.

And Fionn's confession—"I wanted to hurt him"—that one I rewrote a dozen times. The explosive version had him raging, defending himself, blaming the boys who cornered him. But that wasn't Fionn. The quiet horror of admitting you chose to cause pain, that the thing inside you isn't accident but intention—that's harder. Scarier. He says it almost flat. And his mother's hand falls away.

The explosive versions were more satisfying to write. The quiet versions were harder to trust. I kept second-guessing: is this too restrained? Will readers feel cheated? Where's the catharsis?

But catharsis isn't the same as volume. These characters don't know how to have this conversation. They've never practiced it. When the moment finally comes, they fumble. They break mid-sentence. They look away.

At least, that's what I told myself. I'm still not sure I got it right.

The chapter couldn't end there.

All through the story, Colm has been the one who shows up. And I wanted this ending to honor that—to make the callbacks land.

Year Six: Fionn drops the dragon-bone crossbow, kneels in the dirt, humiliated. Niels calls him "Green." And Colm—the Boneholder's son, the one who handed him the crossbow in the first place—says two words: "Shut up."

Year Ten: Fionn's frame collapses at the lake, his test ruined, his secret place exposed. And there's Colm at the treeline. Not waving. Just waiting. A bag of stones at his feet because he'd figured out what Fionn needed before Fionn asked.

Year Twelve: The bone alley. Fionn has to walk through dragon bone that makes his skin crawl, and Colm takes the long way around—but he's there at the other end. Waiting. Not making a thing of it.

And at the clearing, after everything: "Worth it."

Two words. The whole friendship.

So when Colm appears in Chapter 11, it had to echo all of that. But this time he can't just show up. The external world intrudes—Gregor's men, the hearing, the political reality Fionn doesn't understand yet. Colm arrives in custody. Knees in the dirt. The one who always appears freely, now dragged in by force.

And Fionn says it: "Shut up."

The same two words. But reversed now—Fionn defending Colm the way Colm once defended him. Nine years later, the callback completes itself.

Then his hands rise. The heat spreads. The air ripples.

He could burn them. He has before. He wanted to before.

But Colm's eyes find his. And the other callback writes itself:

Worth it.

Not Colm saying it this time. Fionn remembering it. What Colm means to him. What he'd lose if he becomes the thing they say he is.

He lowers them.

They don't burn.

This is what the chapter needed to be, I think. The moment where every thread pulls taut. Where the family finally faces what they've been avoiding. Where Fionn has to choose what kind of person he is—and the answer, for now, is not this.

But the world outside is still moving. The hearing is tomorrow. Gregor is in charge. And Colm's knees are in the dirt.

Act two begins. I hope I've earned it.