I finished Chapter 15 last week.
Fionn at the lake. The ice melting beneath his palms. The fish rising toward warmth they didn't understand, just knew they needed. And Fionn realizing he could help—not because anyone asked, not because he'd be thanked, but because warmth was what he had and cold was what they had, and the distance between those things was something he could close.
I wrote that scene and felt something click into place. Not in the story. In me.
And then I understood what I'd been writing about for fifteen chapters.
In the summer of 2023, my son was diagnosed with pre-B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Two years of treatment. Hundreds of hospital visits. A lifetime of fear compressed into days that stretched like months, months that stretched like years.
He's in remission now. He's going to be okay.
I am different. Permanently. In ways I'm still discovering.
I didn't know those years were in this manuscript.
That sounds impossible. How do you write fifteen chapters without knowing what's driving them? But I think that's how it works, actually. The conscious mind builds plot and structure. Something else—something underneath—chooses what the story is really about.
I thought I was writing about dragons and exile and a boy who glows. About a father who fails and a mother who stays. About the weight of secrets kept too long.
I was writing about 2023.
Here's what I see now, looking back:
Colm. The friend who keeps showing up. Who tracks Fionn to his secret place and brings a bag of stones because he thought it might help. Who stands in the hearing and tells the truth when it costs him everything.
"Worth it."
I didn't plan him this way. He wrote himself into existence, I said in an earlier entry. That's true. But now I know where he came from.
He came from the people who stayed.
The ones who showed up at the hospital. Who brought food we didn't ask for. Who texted at 2 AM because they knew we were awake. Who sat with us in waiting rooms and didn't try to fill the silence with comfort. Who let the silence be what it was.
Colm is them. I just didn't know it until now.
And the ones who disappeared.
They're in the story too. Not as villains—that would be too easy. They're in the settlement itself. The faces that find somewhere else to look. The doors that close when Fionn walks past. The distance that grows without anyone deciding to grow it.
Crisis reveals what was always there. Some people swim toward you. Some watch from shore. Some have reasons, and some of those reasons are even true. But when you're drowning, you learn the difference.
I wrote that into every chapter without knowing I was doing it. The well scene in Year Two. The training circle in Year Six. Fifteen years of a boy walking through streets where no one would meet his eyes.
I thought I was writing about prejudice, about fear of the unknown, about how settlements turn on what they don't understand.
I was writing about my son.
During treatment, he was immunocompromised. He couldn't be around other kids. Birthday parties, playdates, school—all of it gone. The steroids changed him. Moon face. He lost all his hair. When we did go out, people looked at him differently. They didn't understand what they were seeing, so they stayed away.
He was marked. Visibly different. And the world that used to welcome him suddenly didn't know what to do with him.
Fionn walks through the settlement and people pull their children close. They cross to the other side of the path. They whisper "Green" when they think he can't hear.
I thought I was writing about a curse. About superstition. About how fear makes people cruel.
I was writing about a bald child in a mask, watching other kids play from a distance he didn't choose.
And the extraction.
Chapter 6—the flashback to when dragons were plentiful. Dessa learning the blood harvest. Tubes driven into dying flesh. Buckets filling. The whole economy built on what they could drain from bodies.
The smell hit her—hot metal and char, heavy on her tongue.
I wrote that scene thinking about worldbuilding. About how civilizations rise on resources they eventually exhaust. About the Fading, the slow starvation as the dragons disappeared.
But extraction has another meaning now.
Two years of noodles. That's what we called the tubing—the lines running in and out, carrying blood and poison and whatever else he needed to survive. Two years of blood draws, blood tests, blood transfusions, chemo infusions. Sitting in the same chair, watching the same tubes fill with the same dark red, watching it drain out and pump back in, watching bags of poison drip into my son's veins because poison was what would save him.
You learn to be clinical. You have to. You learn the names of drugs that sound like curses—Vincristine, Methotrexate, Mercaptopurine—and you say them like they're weather. Tuesday's forecast: Dexamethasone and a CBC. You stop flinching at needles. You count the drops. You watch the numbers.
That's how the extraction scene reads. Clinical. Workmanlike. Buckets filling. Tubes draining. The smell of blood, and the people doing their jobs around it.
I thought I was writing fantasy. I was writing the oncology ward.
The settlement survives on blood. My son survived on poison.
Both come with costs no one warns you about.
Torven.
The father who loves his son and fails him anyway. Who rises magnificently to the crisis—carries a burning baby through the snow, defies his captain, takes the scars—and then retreats. Who watches from doorways. Who can't cross the distance even though he wants to. Who keeps saying "later" until later becomes too late.
I wrote about him before. Called him "recognizable." Said he was the hardest character to write because he isn't evil—he's just familiar.
I didn't know why he felt so familiar.
I know now.
The paralysis. The inability to be present even when presence is what's needed. The love that isn't enough to move your feet. I've felt that. Not with my son—the diagnosis shattered whatever distance existed there. But with others. With situations where I should have shown up and couldn't find the way.
The people who disappeared on us during treatment—I've been that person too. In other contexts. Other people's crises. I've watched from shore and told myself I didn't know how to swim.
Torven isn't judgment. He's recognition.
And Moira.
The one who stays. Who shows up. Who takes her trembling hands and does the quiet work of making space for a child the world wasn't built for.
I needed someone like her in 2023. And we had them. People who didn't ask how they could help—they just helped. People who carried weight alongside us without being asked.
I wrote her as a counterweight to Torven. The parent who acts while he watches. Now I see she's something else: proof that showing up is possible. That some people choose presence over paralysis.
A thank-you letter, disguised as a character.
The story I would have written in 2022 was a different story.
I had the bones. Twenty years of thinking had given me the clearing, the baby, the exile. But the emotional architecture—the thing that makes it land—that came from somewhere I wasn't looking.
From watching my son fight.
From learning who stayed and who didn't.
From the 3 AM terrors and the strange ordinary days between crises.
From discovering that you can carry weight you didn't know you could carry. That you don't get to choose what breaks you, but you get to choose what you build from the pieces.
I didn't know I was processing any of it. I thought I was just writing a fantasy novel about a boy who glows.
Turns out I was writing about the worst two years of my life.
I keep saying this story waited twenty years.
But it didn't just wait. It absorbed. Everything I lived through became fuel, whether I noticed or not. The manuscript was a sponge, soaking up experiences I hadn't made sense of yet, turning them into scenes and characters and moments that felt true without my understanding why.
This is what writers mean when they say we don't choose our stories. They choose us. They take what we've lived and make something from it, often before we're ready to look directly at what we've lived.
Fifteen chapters. And only now do I see what's been there all along.
My son is okay.
That sentence holds more than I can express.
And somewhere in the two years it took to reach that sentence, I wrote a novel without knowing what it was about. About the people who stay and the ones who don't. About fathers who love their sons and fail them anyway. About warmth in the cold, and the choice to help even when no one asks.
I didn't plan any of it.
But here it is. Fifteen chapters of something I needed to write, whether I knew it or not.
Twenty years of waiting. Two years of breaking. Fifteen chapters of discovery.
And now, finally, I understand what I've been doing.
Not because I'm wise. Because the story was smarter than I was. It knew what it needed before I did. It pulled from the trauma I hadn't processed and made something I could look at from the outside. Something that might matter to someone else.
That's not redemption. The suffering wasn't worth it—it was just suffering. But meaning is something you make afterward, if you can. If you're paying attention.
I wasn't paying attention. The story was.
I'm grateful for that.