Annotated Chapter 17 Cover
Look, a McGuffin!
I’ll have a lot to talk about in this chapter, so before we get started, I want to shout out to John, who designed a lot of brand-new environments and new characters almost completely on the fly. B’ial Vezk was one of our deepest and best “cultural explorations,” I think, and that’s largely due to him.
The alt text is kind of muddled as wordplay, and it springs from expectations we had for this story that never quite materialized. We thought a significant chunk of it would be courtroom drama as a result of Byron’s arrest, but we, much like the wood elves, just ran out of time to do a trial before the invading army showed up.
The next three chapters function as buildup, climax, and denouement, so that one volume (Volume 3) ends with a bang and the next (the planned, unpublished Volume 4) begins with both lingering aftereffects and new beginnings. You see that rhythm in TV series a lot, and we would keep it going through chapters 23-25, chapters 29-31, and chapters 35-37… only dropping it when we finally came to accept that we just couldn’t publish the whole series in six-chapter volumes. Sometimes you gotta choose your dreams.
What’s with the guys with boogers on their fingers?
That is South Korean boy band Seventeen, for the 17th chapter.
Thanks. I’m sure their management would be suicidal to learn I’d never heard of them before this conversation.
Seventeen teen teen! (My girls are total K-Pop goobers, so I know these boys better than I’d like.