Chapter 10 is the completion to Chapter 3.
Seventy-four words, I wrote back then. Two people, a truth that's been waiting fifteen years. But that chapter was a flash-forward—a promise of devastation without the context to feel it fully.
Now we have the context. Now the devastation lands.
The hardest part was figuring out how Moira finds out.
This kept changing in my head as I drafted. For a while, it was Torven who cracked. The weight finally too much, a confession that spilled out in a moment of weakness. That felt wrong. Torven has carried this secret for fifteen years. He's not going to break now.
Then I considered the Council summoning them. An official revelation, clinical and administrative. That felt worse. Too passive. Too convenient.
By the time I'd finished Chapter 9, the answer was obvious. I knew who Moira was by then. A mother who acts. Who responds instantly without thought. Who knows what she needs to do when the moment comes for it.
She had to be the one who triggered the truth. Which meant this chapter had to be from her POV.
We needed an incident.
Fionn has been warm for fifteen years—literally warm, radiating heat from his palms. But warmth isn't dramatic. We needed him to be more than the boy who heats glue pots. We needed to see what he could actually do.
But Fionn wouldn't use his powers publicly. Not deliberately. He's spent his whole life trying to disappear, to not be the curse everyone whispers about. So whatever happened had to be forced from him.
Which is where the bullying comes in.
But here's the problem: the bullying scene is a cliche.
Kid cornered by other boys. Powers emerge, intentionally or accidentally. We've seen it a hundred times. Harry Potter and the glass at the zoo. Carrie at prom. Every superhero origin where trauma unlocks ability.
I didn't want to write that scene.
The solution was to not write it at all. Start in medias res. Colm in the doorway, breathless, Fionn already unconscious in someone's arms. The incident has happened. We don't need to see it—we need to see what comes after.
This let me skip the cliche entirely. No slow-motion moment of power unleashing. No drawn-out confrontation. Just the aftermath, and Moira's response to it.
Colm had to be there.
He's too important to this story now, too woven into Fionn's life, to be absent from the moment everything changes. But he couldn't be the one to carry Fionn home. He's a boy. He runs for help.
And he knows exactly who to find.
Not Torven, off gathering wildberries somewhere. Moira. The parent who shows up. The one Colm has watched for years, steady and present while Torven stood apart.
Colm's entrance wrote itself: the doorway, the gasping breath, the fragments of information. He doesn't need to explain everything. Moira doesn't need to hear everything. She just needs to move.
So who carries Fionn home?
My first instinct was Grey-beard. He gave Torven the blanket that night. He's shown small kindnesses over the years. It would complete a circle.
But it was too easy. Too expected.
Then I thought about Varn.
The man who said "leave it" in the prologue. Who walked away while Torven carried the baby through the snow. Who has represented everything rigid and unforgiving about the settlement's rules.
What if he was the one?
I went back to Chapter 2 and added two lines.
Varn, at the door of the Council Hall: "The murmurs will come whether we allow them to or not." And Dessa, ordering silence about what they'd witnessed (the glow, the bones singing) to prevent fear spreading through the settlement.
These additions reframed Varn. He doesn't like the curse talk. He didn't agree with keeping Fionn, but the decision was made, and Varn follows decisions. He's watched this boy grow up from a distance. He knows Fionn isn't the monster the rumors make him.
So when the incident happens, when Varn witnesses whatever Fionn did in that square, he makes a choice. The same rigid adherence to duty that made him say "leave it" fifteen years ago now makes him pick the boy up and carry him home.
Protocol says you help the injured. Protocol says you maintain order. Varn follows protocol.
His hands lingering a moment after Moira takes Fionn's weight. Their eyes meeting. Neither speaking.
Complication, not redemption. And complication is more interesting.
(That sounds like something a writing teacher would say. I'm suspicious of myself when I sound like a writing teacher.)
Moira had to act. That's who she is.
But acting meant leaving Fionn. Unconscious, injured, burned from whatever had happened. A mother who shows up would stay. A mother who acts would go make someone answer for this.
Both impulses are Moira. The tension between them is the choice.
She leaves.
And someone had to stay with Fionn. Enter Old Kerra.
By this point the story was writing itself. (Or I got lucky. Hard to tell the difference from the inside.) All the character work from earlier chapters (Kerra's small kindnesses, her bark-stripping voice, the way she's watched Fionn without judgment) paid off. Of course she stays. Of course Moira trusts her. We've been building to this without knowing it.
"Go. I've got the boy."
Four words. Everything we need to know about who Kerra is.
The Council scene broke three times.
First version: Moira rings the bell, Council appears, she demands answers and an end to the curse narrative. They refuse. She pushes. They remind her, matter-of-factly, of the terms from fifteen years ago. The exile. The glow. What they'd seen that night.
It almost worked. But reading it back, I realized: the Council just revealed their secret. In public. In front of sixty people.
These are politicians. They've kept this secret for fifteen years. They wouldn't just... say it. Not because someone rang a bell and demanded answers.
So I needed them to break. Accidentally. Emotionally.
The question became: how do you make Dessa lose control?
I thought about who Dessa was. Chapter 6 showed us: the Edge-dweller girl who crossed over, who climbed, who left her mother standing in the back of the hall. The blood gem at her throat made from extraction she'd grown numb to. Forty years of performed authority.
And Moira knew her mother.
"Your mother died alone. Did you—"
That's the trigger. Moira, pushed past reason by seeing her son unconscious, reaches for the one weapon she has: Dessa's past. Her abandonment. The thing she can't defend.
And Dessa cracks.
"We let your son live. We could have left him in the snow."
Once she starts, she can't stop. The anger overrides the calculation. Fifteen years of secret-keeping, undone in thirty seconds of wounded pride.
This felt almost too neat when I wrote it. It still does. But sometimes the pieces just fit, and you try not to question it too hard.
The scene does two things now.
First: it shows that Moira isn't perfect. Her need to act, to protect without thought, has consequences. She went to the square to defend her son. She ended up exposing him. The whole settlement now knows what the Council knows. The exile. The terms. Everything.
Second: the Council is exposed too. Their carefully maintained authority, their fifteen years of "mercy"—all of it laid bare. They're not wise elders making hard choices for the collective good. They're people. Flawed, wounded, capable of being goaded into mistakes.
Moira made things worse. But she also pulled back the curtain.
I don't know if that's victory or defeat. Maybe it's both.
Then came the scene I'd been building toward since Chapter 3.
Torven in the doorway. Wildberries in a cloth bag. The smell of wet earth still on his clothes.
"You knew."
This is Chapter 3. The same seventy-four words, now expanded, now earning every one of them. The flash-forward becomes the present. The promise of devastation delivered.
But we're in Moira's POV now. And that changes everything.
She recontextualizes fifteen years. The distance. The training that felt too harsh. The apple rings left where Fionn would find them, never handed directly.
"You were teaching him he wasn't worth staying for."
That line broke me to write. Because it's true and unfair at the same time. Torven was trying to prepare Fionn for exile. He was trying to make the leaving survivable. And in doing so, he made every day feel like leaving.
Love that fails even when it's real. That's always been the heart of this story.
It needed a landing.
"We'll figure it out."
An echo to Chapter 5. The same words Moira said when Torven finally admitted what he'd seen: Fionn's reaction to the dragon-bone crossbow. Back then, it was a promise. Faith that together they could handle whatever came.
Now it's... something else. Fragile. Uncertain. The words unchanged, the meaning transformed.
But the scene's ending had to be "Later."
The word that's haunted this whole story. Torven's refrain. His excuse. His failure. Every time he could have told Moira the truth, every time he could have held his son instead of watching from a distance: Later.
But this time it's Moira who says it.
She stands at Fionn's door. Kerra tells her he'll wake soon, clear-headed enough to hear it. She could tell him now—let him hear it from her before the settlement's whispers reach him.
She lets go of the frame and steps back.
Later.
There's something in that choice.
For fifteen years, we've judged Torven for his "laters." His inability to face the truth. And now Moira makes the same choice.
Not because she's weak. Because she's human.
Tomorrow, Fionn will learn that not all things heal. Tomorrow, the exile becomes real. Tomorrow, everything changes.
But tonight, he's sleeping. His hands are healing. His breath is steady.
Later.
Maybe now we understand why Torven said it so many times. Not because he didn't love Fionn enough to tell him the truth. Because he loved him too much to end the before.
This is the end of Act 1.
Everything that follows will be different. The secret is out—all the secrets are out. Fionn will wake knowing what he is, what he's always been, what's waiting for him. The settlement will never look at the Council the same way. Moira and Torven will have to find their way back to each other, if they can.
But for now: a boy sleeping. A mother at the threshold. A word that carries fifteen years of weight.
Later.
I think that's where this part of the story was always heading. I just didn't know it until I wrote it.