I spent weeks stuck on Chapter 13.
The hearing was done. Fionn had sat in the throne, made Gregor flinch, bought himself three months. Act 1 was behind us. Now what?
Every writing guide I've ever read says the same thing: Act 2 expands. The world opens up. The stakes multiply. What was personal becomes political. You widen the lens.
So that's what I tried to do.
The first Chapter 13 outline was ambitious. Maybe too ambitious.
Fionn wakes the morning after the hearing. The settlement is active—voices, movement, the sounds of life returning to normal. He walks through the streets in a haze, disoriented, not quite believing yesterday happened. Everything seems almost fine.
Then the horror reveals itself.
Gregor's men banging on doors. Kindling being confiscated. Edge-dwellers shouting, resisting, being pushed back. The flame curfew—one candlemark for cooking, no heating fires. Fionn stumbles through it all, the scope of what Gregor's done becoming clear in pieces.
At the border between territories, he sees men lined up. A barrier. And there's Colm, trying to cross, being held back. Varn intervenes—the men release Colm into Edge-dweller territory just before the announcement comes: no crossings between territories. Colm is trapped on the wrong side.
The prose was good. The slow reveal of horror was probably some of my best work.
I had to throw it all away.
The problem was Fionn.
He walked through the entire chapter observing. Things happened to him, around him, but he never acted. He had no agency. The intimacy we'd built over twelve chapters—the quiet moments, the internal work, the relationship with his father that was finally beginning to heal—all of it vanished behind spectacle.
And worse: the horror was so complete that everyone would blame Fionn. Gregor's cruelty was a response to what Fionn did at the hearing. Every frozen Edge-dweller, every confiscated bundle of kindling, every family shivering in the dark—all of it Fionn's fault.
We were writing ourselves into a corner.
The chapter made dramatic sense. It made thematic sense. It made no emotional sense at all.
I went back to the drawing board.
What eventually became Chapter 14 was my first attempt at a redo. I kept the meeting—Dessa and Kerra visiting Fionn's home—but stripped out the chaos. The flame curfew arrives at the end as news, not as witnessed spectacle.
Better. But still wrong.
In this version, Fionn stayed silent through the meeting. Dessa confessed her failures, Moira and Dessa made their fragile peace, but Fionn just... sat there. The observer problem again. And when the curfew news came, he responded instantly—admitted fault, offered to warm all the homes.
A saint. No time to wrestle with the choice.
The other problem was control. At the end of Chapter 12, Fionn had just discovered he could influence flames. But he couldn't aim yet. The heat went where it wanted, not where he directed it. He wasn't ready to offer warming an entire quarter.
The beats were there, but compressed into moments that should have been chapters.
That's when the current Chapter 13 found its shape.
I needed a scene between Torven and Fionn. Alone. After the hearing, before anything else. The morning after the night their family finally stopped keeping secrets.
Moira leaving to find Kerra (and therefore Dessa) gave me the excuse. Father and son, the dead hearth between them, the wooden block from Year Two finally acknowledged.
"It follows what matters to you. That's not the same thing."
The chapter wrote itself after that.
Torven teaching Fionn to work with his heat the way he'd once taught him the water knot. The connection to the training that had seemed so harsh for fifteen years. The wooden block—hidden behind the kindling pile for thirteen years—finally taken.
"Thirteen years too late. But I'm taking it."
This mattered. The healing between father and son needed space. It couldn't happen in the margins of a political crisis. It needed its own chapter, its own breath.
And by the end, Fionn is ready. Not to offer warmth—not yet—but to understand what his gift actually is. What it follows. Why it works.
Chapter 14 could finally be what it needed to be.
Dessa crossing into Edge-dweller territory for the first time in forty years. Admitting her cowardice to Fionn and to herself. The network of kindnesses revealed: the baker and the rope-maker and all the others who'd looked after him. All of it sanctioned. Silent protection that was still protection.
And Fionn finally asking questions. Pushing. Demanding answers instead of accepting what was offered.
"You could have stopped it. You had the authority."
I'd written a version where Dessa responds to the curfew news with a memory—realizing that Fionn offering warmth instantly was something even she couldn't have done at his age. Her selfishness forty years ago, the binding ceremony, leaving her mother in the cold. Strong moment. I didn't want to lose it.
But it competed with Fionn's arc. If Dessa's realization took center stage, Fionn's decision became secondary. The chapter needed to end with him sitting in silence, surrounded by people arguing about survival, beginning to understand what he could do.
Not deciding yet. Just sitting with it.
The Dessa moment had to go.
Then came Chapter 15.
The problem was Colm. We were at Chapter 15 and we hadn't heard from him since the hearing. His testimony. "Worth it." And then nothing, because the story needed to be elsewhere: with Fionn waking, with the family healing.
He'd been missing for three chapters. That felt wrong.
The idea of multiple POVs within a single chapter had been circling for a while. Ambitious. I had no idea if I could pull it off. But if each section in the chapter was a different POV, I could bring back voices we'd been missing.
The trick was signaling clearly. Section break means POV switch. No confusion. No guessing.
I started listing candidates.
Kerra—but she's been deliberately mysterious, and I needed to keep her that way. The baker—too random, we've never been in her head. Gregor—but his power is working behind the scenes; getting into his head would deflate the threat.
Varn made sense. We'd finally seen his change at the hearing. Time to get inside it.
Torven made sense. The last time we saw him alone, he was watching Renn's binding ceremony from the shadows, ashamed of what he'd become. If his arc was completing, we needed to see the inversion.
Colm made sense. Obviously.
Fionn's POV would frame everything—open and close the chapter, bookends around the others.
Four POVs. It could work. Maybe.
The first drafts were stale.
Varn's section was pure exposition. Dessa asks him to join a coalition, he joins, done. Information delivered but nothing felt.
Torven's section wandered without purpose. He walked through the settlement noticing things, arrived somewhere. Movement without meaning.
Colm sat at his window while his father came in, delivered exposition, and left. Static.
Fionn's sections were better—the lake, the ice, the testing—but they didn't connect to anything.
I had four separate chapters masquerading as one.
The breakthrough was Torven.
I thought about the last time we'd seen him alone. Chapter 7, Year Eight. Renn's binding ceremony happening inside the Council Hall while Torven sat on a crumbling wall outside, eating ash bread in the dark. Ashamed of what he'd become. Unable to enter the world he'd been part of.
This chapter needed to invert that.
Not watching from outside. Walking in. Not ashamed. Choosing. Not the binding ceremony—the hunters' gathering, the Iron-knife brotherhood he'd been part of before everything changed.
Torven walking the path he'd avoided for thirteen years. Through the well where faces used to find somewhere else to look. Into Boneholder territory. To the door that led to the men he'd once stood among.
Dawn spilled through the planks behind him. Torven pushed through, and warmth hit his face like a hand.
That's when the structure revealed itself.
If Torven's section was a threshold crossing, they all needed to be.
Varn had never crossed into Edge-dweller territory. Fifty years of service, and he'd never stepped through one of those doors. His section became about that—not the coalition, not the politics, but the moment he finally crosses Kerra's threshold.
Colm was stuck. Isolated. His father telling him to stay inside, to wait for things to settle. His section became about refusing—the leather strip wedged in the latch, the door drifting open, the choice to step into whatever came next.
Fionn at the lake, hands on ice, heat spreading. His crossing wasn't a threshold—it was a decision. The fish rising to his warmth. The realization that what drew them was what his neighbors needed.
I can warm the homes. All of them.
Four crossings. Four dawns. The structure was there.
But Fionn's decision needed more than structure.
In the failed drafts, he offered warmth instantly. The curfew news arrived, and he responded like a saint—no hesitation, no internal struggle. That was the problem. Saints don't wrestle. They make decisions that readers admire but don't feel.
The three-chapter arc was supposed to fix this. Chapter 13 gives him understanding—what his gift is, how it works, what it follows. Chapter 14 gives him knowledge—the curfew, the suffering, the scope of what Gregor's done. But understanding and knowledge aren't the same as decision. He could know he can help and still choose not to.
So why does he choose to help?
The answer came from the fish.
I'd written the lake scene as a test. Fionn kneeling on ice, pushing warmth through his palms, trying to control it. In early drafts, the ice melted, he confirmed he could do it, done. Functional but empty.
Then I asked: what happens when the ice melts?
The lake was frozen. Fish don't die—they survive winter beneath the ice. But if you melt the surface, if you create warmth in water that hasn't been warm for months, what do the fish do?
They rise.
Not commanded. Not forced. Drawn to the warmth because warmth is what they need. Circling where his hands had been, gathering at the center of what he'd made.
Coming to him. Not commanded, not feared—drawn to the warmth because warmth was what they needed.
And suddenly the metaphor was there.
The woman blowing into cupped hands. The bolt sliding home. Every closed window he'd passed that morning, every sound of cold that had gotten into someone's chest. They didn't know what he could do. They feared him, or blamed him, or simply didn't see him.
But the fish came anyway.
The fish didn't care what he was. They just needed warmth, and warmth was what he had. His neighbors are the same. They'll blame him. They might always blame him. But they're still cold, and he can still help.
That's the decision. Not "I should help because it's right." Not sainthood. Just watching creatures rise toward what he has to give, and understanding that his neighbors—even the ones who closed their windows—would rise the same way if he let them.
The moral complexity isn't in the choice. It's in what the choice costs. He's offering warmth to people who fear him. Who call him Green. Who pulled their children away when he walked past. He's choosing to help a settlement that sentenced him to exile before he could speak.
And he's doing it anyway.
Not because he's good. Because warmth is what he has, and cold is what they have, and the distance between those things is something he can close.
But dawn kept arriving at different times.
In the first drafts, I hadn't been intentional about when the sun rose in each section. Morning happened when it happened. Some characters started in darkness, some in grey light, some already in day.
Then I realized: if everyone crosses their threshold at dawn, the moment becomes shared. The same sunrise, four different places. The crossings become a pattern, a communal choice, even though none of them know about the others.
That meant the chapter had to track time carefully. Each section beginning in darkness, each crossing happening as light arrives.
And if everything was dark until dawn—if the flame curfew meant no fires, no candles—how did anyone see anything?
The moon.
A full moon, low and bright, silver on frost. It grounded every POV in the same visual language. The same light, the same cold, the same night pressing down until dawn pushed it back.
The title came last.
The Moonlit Dawn.
It makes no sense on the surface. Dawn is lit by the sun, not the moon. But in this chapter, the dawn—the crossing, the choice, the threshold—only becomes possible because of the shared moonlight. The night that lets them see. The light that carries them through until the sun arrives.
Dual meaning. The literal dawn, when sun replaces moon. And the figurative dawn, when four people step into something new.
I don't know if readers will catch it. I'm not sure it matters. Sometimes you name things for yourself.
This is what Act 2 needed, I think.
Not expansion. Contraction. The hearing was spectacle. The flame curfew is cruelty. But the response isn't a counter-spectacle. It's Varn crossing a threshold he's avoided for fifty years. Torven walking the path he abandoned thirteen years ago. A boy sabotaging his door latch so he can slip out at dawn. Fionn, alone at a frozen lake, realizing he can help.
Intimate. Parallel. Connected by moonlight and timing, by the choice to move toward instead of away.
I spent three drafts trying to write the Act 2 that writing guides describe. Turns out this story needed the opposite.
Sometimes the pieces just fit. And you try not to question it too hard.