Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 46 - Reflection

So, you know how these Reflection pieces have been getting longer and longer? Well, for reasons that are likely self-evident, I have a LOT to say about this chapter. Buckle up, grab some water, and make sure you're out of the sun, because this is gonna be a long one.

As always, MASSIVE Spoilers for the entirety of the chapter.

I know this is true for every Reflection, but this was a really big chapter. I have no idea how caught up everyone is, and just to be safe, I made sure to ramble a bit just to give you time to back out.

You've been warned!

I'm going to be splitting this Reflection into two general pieces: the first will be a more free form conversation about the broader narrative, including my thoughts on various storytelling tropes in media, while the second half will focus more on the mechanical, moment to moment writing of the chapter.

So, yes. Without further ado:

CHLOÉ'S BACK BITCHES!!!!

I've been keeping that secret under lock an key ever since I wrote the ending of Book Three all those months ago. Based on many of the comments I received, I know that most people were expecting her to come back, so this isn't a complete curve ball. Personally? I think a good story is one that feels cohesive, and good "plot twists" are often foreshadowed in such a way where attentive readers can predict them coming. That's good! That mean the story is tightly edited and works as a complete story!

This entire chapter is intimately rooted in Chloé's POV, from the moment the portal closes around her to the moment she regains her memory.

I left quite a few hints that Chloé wasn't actually dead, and quite a few people picked up on them. The most obvious was the exact nature of her "death" at the end of the third book. I believe I had a comment on one of my public sites that called the moment an "anime death" and, yeah, that fits. If I had genuinely wanted Chloé to die at the end of the book, I would have structured it differently. There would have been a body, for one thing, and she probably would have fallen to a more generic attack, likely from Brandon or a reaper.

The second clue was the mug that fell down in the first chapter of Book Four. I tried to build a bit of ambiguity into the scene, but I know most people saw through it.

The last and biggest clue was when Chloé just flat-out reappeared in front of Amara. Like the mug incident, I again tried to structure it with some ambiguity to keep people guessing. It was the first time Amara had purposely explored the Dreamscape, I didn't say whether or not she was actually dreaming, stuff like that.

Of course, there was a secret fourth clue. One that I seeded before the end of Book Three, even.

Any of you ever watch Steven Universe? I absolutely loved it, even if it wasn't always perfect. I'm about to spoil a slightly bigger plot point for you, so read on with caution!

Anyways, in Steven Universe, there was a character named Lars. He was literally some random guy that worked in a donut shop, and he had absolutely no relation to the larger alien story. At a certain point in the series, after seasons of happily doing his own thing, he gets captured by one of those aliens and travels together with the main character to the alien home world.

Now, before all that happened, we had quite a bit of time to learn about Lars. He was kind, he had hobbies he was passionate about, but he had issues with self-confidence and assumed that other people didn't think very highly of him.

Once Lars is on the alien home world, he inevitably gets caught up in the drama of the main series, and finally has a big triumphant moment where he saves everyone from the bad guys. However, just as he's finished saving the day, he dies. This was a huge shock, as the show never shows this happening, especially for humans.

Now, thankfully, because of the main character's magic, he comes back to life a few seconds later and everything is cool.

But that moment really stuck with me. The idea of a random everyperson pulled into a world greater than they can understand, but still finding a way to adapt and save the people that matter most to them.

Anyways, there's another character in that show who pretty iconically calls everyone a clod. Which, coincidentally, is what Chloé calls Brandon when she finally swoops in and saves the day.

Is this a pretty blatant homage? I mean, yeah. But I want to be up front about it because: 1) no story is completely original and 2) Pretty much every author struggles with seeing their work as new and interesting. They look at something they wrote and think "Well this thing is just a cobbled together patchwork of all my favorite bits from other stories!"

I think originality is overrated. My goal in these reflections is to show the creative process, and maybe through reading my thoughts you might be inspired to try something creative of your own! Creativity can feel really intimidating sometimes, especially when you're comparing yourself to the works of accomplished writers who have been at it for decades, but it's shockingly easy to get started on something you're passionate about.

Anyways.

In my original outline for the script, Amara's entire arc for the first half of the book was going to be a refusal to accept that Chloé was gone. There likely would have been more sightings of strange things, and every chapter would have built on Amara's paranoia while everyone around her tried to convince her that she was wrong. Obviously that's not what happened in the final draft, and I'm happy I changed the structure of the narrative.

The start of the book ended up focusing much more on Amara's anger and detachment from everyone around her. I think this is a stronger narrative through line, especially since Amara's never been a very paranoid person. She's often quite literal, sometimes to a fault, and I think it makes more sense that she only starts to suspect Chloé might still be around after she momentarily manifests in front of her. That's a good reason to suspect something is up, but it's also vague enough for the rest of the cast to not believe her, which makes for some nice, juicy drama.

So why bring Chloé back? Or, for that matter, why do this whole death fake out at all?

For that, I'd like to go on a bit of a tangent: Let's talk about death, and the way it's commonly portrayed in media.

As I'm sure most of you have intuited, I enjoy thinking about storytelling. I like examining the different ways stories can be told, and the various fluctuations that can make a story good or bad. In my opinion, it's pretty common wisdom that good stories present narrative stakes for their characters. Will the hero stop the bad guy? Will the ragtag team of misfits win the championship against the reigning champs?

However, a very important part of storytelling is knowing how to create believable stakes that fit the scope of your story. It's very easy to write a scenario where the stakes are SO high that failure is narratively impossible. This is often the case with broader reaching stories. As a quick, easy example, there are quite a few Marvel movies that do this.

"Oh no! If our heroes fail, the entire universe will explode and all life will be over!"

Now, obviously that can't happen. Even if whichever movie you're picturing didn't exist as part of a multimedia franchise, there's no way anyone would end a superhero movie with the mass extinction of all life.

Let me be clear, though. I'm not saying this is bad writing, far from it. There are tons of really great stories where the main plot falls flat on cursory inspection. Sometimes all you need is a generic bad guy that gets the plot moving, and then all the interesting stuff can dance around that one, somewhat bland tentpole villain. Heck, I've done this myself! I personally don't think Sebastian Wellington was all that interesting as a villain. His presence in the story, however, served as a driving force for the more interesting character drama between Vee, Amara, and Tessa.

Death can work in a very similar way, narratively speaking. How many times has an action scene in a movie fallen flat because it's threatening to kill the main character? It's not quite the same thing as "the extermination of all life everywhere," but it might as well be. If I'm watching, say, Indiana Jones, it's safe to assume that Indiana Jones isn't going to die to a random bullet fired off by generic background Nazi #47.

You may be familiar with the more popular name given to this trope: Plot Armor.

If a character is too important to the plot, they are functionally invincible. Killing them becomes impossible because the only way to keep the story going is to keep them alive.

Like most narrative tropes, Plot Armor isn't inherently a bad thing. Bad writing can certainly make Plot Armor seem bad, but that's not always the case. After all, when I watch Indiana Jones, I'm not actually scared that he's going to die. However, the other side of the coin is that, even if the world creates a scenario where he can die, the story fundamentally changes. If he dies halfway through the movie, the story suddenly gets much worse because it no longer has Harrison Ford being a fun, exciting Archeology professor swinging around and punching nazis. When I root for Indiana to not die, I'm also rooting for the story to continue to be good.

Or, even if there's a good story where the main character dies halfway through, that might change the story in a way that ruins it for me, even if the story continues to be functionally just as good as it was before.

Some people think the way to fix plot armor is to create a world where "anyone can die." Think of early Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. Important characters die all the time! Being central to the plot is no guarantee of survival! However, that can only be true for so long. Typically you can start a story by killing off important characters, but if you keep doing it, eventually there's just no story left anymore.

On the other hand, sometimes too much death has the opposite effect. I purposely avoid bringing up comparisons to similar stories in SaS, but let's talk about Supernatural for a moment. It's a series that ran for ages, and the main characters have died over and over and over again. In that world, death becomes meaningless specifically because it happens too often. Plus, not only does it keep happening, but we also know that they won't continue the show without Sam or Dean. Their relationship is the whole point of the show! Obviously they're not going to keep one of them dead!!

So, why the tangent? Well, I think plot armor is only a problem when you have bad writing. If the only thing you're doing is threatening a character's life, and I know they're not going to die, than there isn't any tension.

Sometimes that's not a problem: action movies do this all the time, but it doesn't matter because most people just want the spectacle of cool actors doing cool things.

So how do you get around plot armor? Well, I think one way is to make your stakes more believable. Death isn't the only consequence! Think of any one of a million inspiring sports movies, and you've got a great example. The stakes are simply "Will the heroes win the big game?" and the answer isn't always obvious. I've seen movies in that genre where the team loses, but all the players come to important realizations about themselves and fulfill their personal character arcs.

It's easy to have small, more believable stakes in slice of life stories like that, though. Many stories, including Suddenly A Succubus, are tackling bigger ideas. Monsters and magic abound! Demons and Angels are lurking around the corner to try and kill you!

In the past, I've tried to avoid plot armor by always writing multiple different stories into each book. Book One, for example, follows both Amara and Vee as they wander down paths that inevitably lead to them fighting each other. Now, Amara presumably has some plot armor there, as she's the main character, but if she wins the fight, does that mean Vee dies? That would be terrible! Personally, I wouldn't want to read the story where Amara is forced to kill her best friend based on a misunderstanding, that sounds like a pretty depressing read.

However, I also make it pretty clear that we don't want Vee to win. She's only attacking Amara based on her own flawed perception of demons.

So what's the answer? Well, I wrote the best possible outcome: Amara wins the fight but doesn't kill Vee. This creates a space for the story to continue, and we get to learn more about both sides of the conflict.

In Book Two, we follow the girls as they try to take down the evil cult. As I mentioned above, I think these villains are pretty generic, but I don't mind that. The juicy part of the story is seeing Vee return to campus, trying to wrestle with her conflicting feelings about Amara. It's about Amara trying to make up for her actions on Halloween, struggling with the ramifications her demonic biology might have on her personality. In the end, the main question isn't "Will they stop the cult?" it's "Will Vee change her mind about Amara?"

In Book Three, the mechanical conflict is that Amara and Vee are stuck in Purgatory and they don't know why. The interesting story, however, is whether or not they can finally set their differences aside and come to an understanding.

I know that was a big ramble, but hopefully it sets the stage for what I'm trying to say about Chloé. See, throughout Book Three, we're following Chloé as she attempts to navigate her day-to-day life. I make it clear that she has issues with self-confidence, and she's quick to believe that people don't like her. She then learns that her friends are lying to her, and has to wrestle with the idea that her insecurities are correct: she doesn't have friends, everyone is lying to her, and she doesn't matter.

This sets the stage for the final chapter, where the story gives her a chance to be the hero. Despite being told to sit on the bench, Chloé shows up at the last minute and saves the day. That's great! She gets to prove to the world that she does matter, she's not worthless, and the world is better with her in it.

Sadly, this action backfires on her. In a last ditch effort to be a bastard, Brandon pulls Chloé into the portal, and it closes on her before she can escape. She bursts in a brilliant corona of light, and is presumed dead.

If this were truly the end of her story, I think it would work. It would be a believable, effective tragedy, and it would create a narrative world in which death feels tangible, even for important characters. However, if I end Chloé's story here, I also rob the larger story of her impact. All of her hopes and fears, everything she fought to achieve, it all vanishes. Killing a character means robbing the world of every single interesting thing that character might ever do.

So, as an author, what stories do I want to tell? What is the point of writing Suddenly A Succubus? Well, at the risk of showing my hand somewhat, I'd like the share the main, overarching theme of the series.

Identity.

Amara starts the series by learning a revelation about her real identity, and she wrestles with the implication of that identity. She's scared that being a demon means she has lost agency over her future. After all, the entire world is telling her that demons are evil, manipulative murderers, but she doesn't seem to want that for herself.

Vee has always known her identity, but the sheer magnitude of her angelic heritage has her in a stranglehold. She feels that her status as an angel is SO important that it eclipses her entirely. Does she matter because of who she is? Or is she nothing more than this label?

Tessa is also sure of her identity, but she views it as a curse. She pushes people away because she's convinced that being a witch guarantees her a random, pointless death. Why bother planning for the future when your identity means you'll never have one?

Chloé, however, has already won this battle. She's figured out her identity, she's out and proud as a trans woman. She's already changed her name, she's on hormones, and she's working on building a new life for herself away from her awful hometown. However, despite all of this, she still lacks the confidence to stand up for herself. She isn't assertive enough to look at the world and say "Hey. I matter. You can't treat me like shit just because of who I am."

All of her scenes in Book Three emphasize that theme. I show how scared she is to voice her concerns, to stand up to the people in her life that take advantage of her. She ends the book in triumph, not only by saving the day, but by confidently standing up to the biggest asshole of them all: Brandon.

But that's a different story, isn't it? Standing up to Brandon doesn't really fit in with Chloé's core narrative of finding the confidence to stand up for herself. Brandon had no beef with her, he was just a power hungry jackass that wanted revenge against a world he wrongly thought was cruel and unjust. Chloé grabbing the knife and saving everyone is a tremendously important moment, don't get me wrong. She gets to prove that the world is better with her in it, and that's huge. In my opinion, however, a single moment of bravery is not the same thing as healthy, sustained confidence in who you are and what you stand for.

And that's why I didn't kill Chloé.

If I can be open for a moment, I'd like to talk about what this chapter means to me. Just like Chloé, I'm a transgender woman. I'm incredibly happy with who I am, but I'm constantly aware that the world at large doesn't think very highly of me. Hateful people all over the world want my literal existence to be erased, and they fight tooth and nail to make that happen. They raise money, they pass laws, they protest, all in the name of telling people like me that we don't deserve to exist.

I wanted to write a story for Chloé that felt authentically trans. Standing up for yourself, learning to be confident in who you are, those can definitely be facets of transgenderism, but they can apply just as easily to other situations.

By writing this chapter, I give Chloé a chance to fight against a literal existential void. As she travels around campus, she's haunted by all the terrible things people have told her over the years. She's heard the hateful rhetoric, she's intimately familiar with the idea that people don't want her to exist, purely because of who she is. Those fears follow her, and she's constantly repeating them to herself because on a certain level, she's internalized that rhetoric. She believes that she is nothing, that she doesn't matter. In spite of that, in spite of her memory being erased, in spite of being haunted by a void of literal nothingness, Chloé clings on to what matters. She clings to her relationships, to the feelings of positivity that her friends brought her, and those relationships inspire her not just to be better, but to be.

She's haunted by her previous name, her literal dead name, as she vaguely remembers all the terrible emotions tied to it. It was a name she hated, and when she briefly believes that name is still hers, she fails to see the point in living. By the end of the chapter, thankfully, she rediscovers who she really is. By reasserting her real name, the name she picked out for herself, she pushes back against the existential void that sought to erase her existence.

By finding her real name, by being true to herself, she proves that she deserves to exist, just the same as everyone else.

I'll admit, this chapter hit me a lot harder than I was anticipating. I've cried dozens of times in the past because of this book. I cried when Amara and Vee first apologized to each other, I cried when Amara finally managed to fly again.

This chapter, though?

Oof.

It's not like I didn't think it would be a powerful story. I knew going into this chapter that it was going to be huge and impactful. That being said, when I started the last page? When I pictured Chloé clawing back from the edge of nothingness and screaming "I am not nothing?" I fucking bawled my eyes out. I cried harder than I've ever cried when writing this story, and it really caught me off guard. I think I got so wrapped up in the mechanics of the story that I briefly forgot just how personal it was.

All stories exist in conversation with their readers.

Some stories treat their readers like enemies, and go out of their way to craft a narrative that no one could possibly predict. That's when you get stories that make no sense, that purposely ruin the narrative because they value the shock of the twist more than telling a good story.

Some stories treat their readers like idiots. Through the way the story is told, they punish people for caring, for bothering to get invested in the first place.

All stories, however, are saying something. Maybe it's something small like "Friendship is magic." Maybe there's no broader message, but the subtext of the story encourages people to think a certain way. I mentioned Supernatural above, and that's a story that says over and over "Death doesn't matter," and so people internalize that.

Many of the best stories are written in a such a way as to encourage their readers to engage with the story in the best possible mindset. No story can perfectly tie up all of its story threads, but good ones can hint which story threads matter. A character might look at a specific plot point and go "Huh, that's weird. Maybe we should look at that," and their comment encourages readers to pay attention to the thing that matters.

Other stories might subtly hint that certain plot points just don't matter. Think of all the sci-fi stories that have faster-than-light travel. Certain types of readers might accuse these stories of being inauthentic if they don't explain how space travel works, but often that's not the point. Stories like these might be written in such a way as to say "Hey, FTL travel just works, don't ask why." This, hopefully, encourages people not to waste their energy on parts of the story that aren't going to get explained.

(You could easily do the opposite! I'm imagining a story in which the characters constantly bring up "Hey, isn't it weird that we don't understand how this FTL tech works?")

So, if we assume that stories train their audiences, what am I saying with this chapter? Well, I think that's ultimately up to you. Maybe you read my chapter and walk away thinking "All main characters are guaranteed to never die," and, you know what? I'm fine if that's something you think. Personally, I'm not interested in writing stories where death is the only interesting consequence. Even if you 100% believe that no one well ever die, I think my writing will still be just as enjoyable.

Will Amara give in to her demonic tendencies? Can Tessa overcome the abusive nature of her Coven? Will Vee find a way to be free of the shadow of her heritage? I think those are all super interesting questions, and none of them involve the possibility of death.

Now, am I literally saying that I will never kill anyone? No, I would never make that promise. I don't really think it matters what I say, though. You're free to believe what you will, and I'm just going to keep writing the best story I can.

With all that out of the way, though, how did I actually write this chapter?

That's right, folks, we're only halfway done with this Reflection! I told you it was going to be a long one!

Let's start at the beginning and work our way through things, shall we?

The entire first page was honestly pretty easy to write. All I did was write a vague stream of consciousness that felt representative as to what Chloé was thinking in the very first moments after the portal closed. It was initially a real sentence, the words made sense and flowed together.

However, much like Chloé, the words were then scattered and all connections between them vanished. I split the opening paragraph into three sections, then pasted each section into a word scrambler and randomized the order of the words. There's still a bit of sense in there, we see Chloé thinking about the cold concrete, the wind, the flames from Amara's hellfire.

In the second third, the thoughts break apart a bit more, and she's focusing more on the pain, the darkness slowly coming for her, and the portal that scattered her into pieces.

Fun fact! Whenever she thinks about the portal closing around her, she mentally refers to it as "the air being wrong and painful."

The last third shows Chloé breaking further apart, and slowly falling back onto her most foundational thoughts: the idea that she's nothing, worthless, a failure. Those words all flash through her thoughts one last time, with a final burst of activity, before she's finally

.

.

.

.

gone.

.

.

.

.

The second page is awfully straightforward, isn't it? Above all else, I wanted this chapter to evoke the overwhelming sense of nothingness that pervades Chloé's existence. There are huge gaps in between her thoughts, and for a while, she's quite literally non-existent. No thoughts, no feelings, no sensations, she's just gone.

That's why I needed to put this chapter out as a PDF. The only way to evoke blank, open space in Patreon is to put something on each line, like I did above. In the PDF, I'm able to make an entire page that just says a single word.

The third page is the first formation of Chloé's thoughts, and the writing is structured to look like a slow breath. She's simply meditating on the nature of nothing, what it can mean. It has both positive and negative connotations, after all.

The fourth page continues to show Chloé's progression. Her thoughts slowly grow more coherent, she can think in sentences now, but she still thinks she's nothing. She's drawing a connection between herself and all the vague connotations she's listing off, but she finally thinks that she might be wrong. After all, she's thinking, isn't she?

I'm very proud of the joke in page five. It's not exactly a joke, but it feels very much like something Chloé would say, and I think it adds a tiny bit of levity while we finally approach the main point of this chapter.

What am I?

For the first time, Chloé starts to look outward for answers. That question, Who am I, haunts the rest of chapter, and underscores absolutely everything we see and hear.

From here on out, we start to get proper prose. We're no longer exclusively seeing Chloé's thoughts, but I still needed to showcase how exactly Chloé is seeing the world. I had to put myself in a very specific mindset for this chapter, as I had to break everything down into extremely literal terms, almost as if we were seeing the world through the eyes of child. That's what I spend an entire page describing a thing that ends up being a regular-ass tree.

The point I was trying to stress was that all of the connections, the memories, have vanished from Chloé's mind. As she explores the world, she slowly acquires small pieces of recognition, but she has to fight for every single piece.

For the rest of the chapter, I have a few moments where I scramble Chloé's thoughts again. This always happens during times where she's exerting energy to do something, and the stress causes her form to literally scatter, as indicated by the scattered thoughts. For most of this chapter she literally has no body, no form, and is just a vague collection of thoughts and ideas.

As she pulls more memories together, she forms more connections, and her sense of self begins to materialize.

We follow her as she begins exploring campus, remembering what windows and people are, and she starts following Amara around. This is the point where I first cement exactly what events Chloé is watching, and I had a lot of fun skimming through older chapters to find all the events that Chloé was secretly around for. As she follows Amara around, however, she realizes that she's the only person here that seems to be able to phase through walls, and that's where we get the first refrain of the most prevalent idea:

Being wrong.

We hear that chorus over and over again: I'm wrong. Chloé is constantly learning new things, but every time she does, whenever she looks for an explanation, she keep coming back to the belief that she's wrong.

Above all else, I wanted to show just how deep her insecurities ran.

Then, once I've planted those two core ideas ("What am I?" and "I'm wrong."), I get to the main threat of the chapter.

The Void.

Everywhere Chloé goes, she's followed by the end of everything. A massive, tiny void that hides in between the crevices of the world, and silently asks for Chloé to join it by simply following her around. After all, Amara and Vee were in Purgatory for a while, but they never saw this void. This is something else.

The main threat, then, is whether or not Chloé will decide to keep living. Without her memories, without the connections she's formed, she's lost the best arguments people normally make to fight through their lives.

If she truly believes she's nothing, worthless, nobody, why wouldn't she enter the Void?

Initially, it's curiosity. There's a tiny itch that bothers her, that tells her she hasn't figured everything out yet, and she wants to learn the truth before vanishing forever.

As we continue through the chapter, we see Chloé watching more and more events that we've already seen. She sees Amara meeting Evelyn as a succubus for the first time, we see Chloé manifesting her sense of touch for the first time, only for her form to briefly scatter because of all the energy she expended.

She continues to make more connections, remember more about how the world works and how people interact with it. She also starts to remember that names have meaning. (Yet another thing she thinks is proof she is nothing, as she doesn't have a name.)

We also get a very small moment that I didn't show in the previous chapters. Chloé very briefly watches Vee, and sees her crying over how much she misses her. I purposely avoided showing this initially, as the early book is more rooted in Amara's POV than Vee's, but it felt important to show that Vee was still hiding much of her own grief in an attempt to be more supportive to the people around her, specifically Amara.

Eventually she begins to overhear conversations the Coven is having. She even hears a conversation that we ourselves caught the end of earlier in the book! she learns that the Coven is secretly here to swipe power for themselves, but we also see that Davenport seems to be manipulating everyone around her.

This is another great narrative stake to add to the story. Now, if Chloé fails to find herself by the end of the chapter, not only will we lose an amazing character, but Amara will also never learn about what Davenport is really up to.

I purposely tried to make the prose more coherent as time went on. We see more events, the narration grows easier to understand, and Chloé continues to wrestle with her lack of name, the presence of the void, and the nagging sensation that she's nothing.

She eventually ends up being present for Tessa's conversation with her parents. This was crucially important to me, and it's the biggest reason I included Chloé's dead name in the story at all. For the longest time, I feared that telling people her dead name would be an insult, as that's not something you're supposed to do to transgender people, but at the end of the day, it suits the story. I think Chloé's journey of literal self-actualization works much better if she has a chance to hear her previous name and wrestle with the complicated feelings it evokes.

She also makes faulty assumptions about what that name means to people. She sees Tessa get mad about hearing the name, and assumes that Tessa must not like whoever that person is.

At long last, however, Chloé follows Amara and Vee as they head to her room to finally confront her "death."

She recognizes her room, she even remembers the words for plushies, figures, posters, and games without having to jump through her usual (word word word association) game. She starts to finally piece together that she might have existed in a different state before she was this empty, absent ghost, but she latches onto her dead name, assuming that even if she existed before, no one wanted her.

Until she overhears Amara saying goodbye. The pieces finally fall into place, and once they do, her memories return.

With those memories, however, she also is forced to relive the pain of a portal attempting to rend her from existence. The Void suddenly seems like a very tempting option, a way to end the pain, and she stumbles towards it.

I want to highlight a specific passage here. I'm immensely proud of this entire chapter, but this line in particular I thought was very well implemented.

"They stepped towards it, their hands digging into their head as pain and torment threatened to undo them all over again. The Void grew, pushing at the seams of reality and breaking down the walls to spread its embrace, its eternal embrace that offered a way out of the pain. They felt themselves being pulled in, they wanted nothing more than to make that final step and end it all.

Nothing stopped them from falling.

Nothing stopped them?"

No.

Throughout the entire chapter, I make a point of playing around with Chloé's perception of nothing. The idea that saying "nothing happened" doesn't literally mean "everything stopped existing. No, saying nothing happened just means you're admitted that, although life continued, very little of import happened. However, since Chloé is experiencing the world from such a strange place, her version of nothing is different. We saw it at the beginning of the chapter, endless space with no thoughts, no actions, literally nothing.

She's called herself nothing, over and over, the entire chapter.

So in this passage, when I say "Nothing stopped them from falling," I'm playing with that double meaning. In a normal story, that specific line would imply that a character just fell. After all, nothing stopped them.

But, Chloé has been calling herself nothing this whole time. When I say "Nothing stopped them", I'm being quite literal. This entity, who perceives themselves as nothing, chose not to fall.

Hence Chloé's next thought, accentuating the difference of the meanings. No, she finally asserts that she is not nothing, and because she is not nothing, the sentence changes. Something, someone, stops her from falling. Someone who matters, who has friends that miss her.

For the first time, she correctly identifies as her rather than they. She begins to see her real identity, she remembers her real name, and upon speaking it to herself, she finds the strength to manifest and call out to Amara and Vee. Despite how painful her life has been, despite being scattered between dimensions by magic bullshit, she finds meaning in her identity and returns to the story, to her friends.

From my perspective, as of right now, this chapter is the greatest thing I've ever written. I'm genuinely a little nervous that I might never reach this level of impactful writing again, as it's such a unique story.

But, even if that's true, that's okay. This story matters, this chapter is the perfect distillation of a hugely important facet of my own life.

Quite a few of my Beta Readers had powerful things to say about this chapter, and I'm eternally grateful that I had the chance to make them feel seen, feel appreciated. I'm sure that Chloé's story won't resonate as powerfully with everyone, and that's okay too. No story is for everyone, and arguably no story should be for everyone.

I, for one, couldn't be happier that Chloé is back. I think SaS is better with her in it.

When I first wrote the end of Book Three, I felt terrible that I was creating a scenario in which an entitled, terrible person was effectively killing a transgender woman just trying to help her friends. In today's political climate, especially, I'm sure that chapter hit some people pretty hard. In the end, however, I think I made the right choice, even if it meant a few months of despair. This chapter feels like the most authentically transgender thing I've ever written, and I can only hope that all of you have found something to enjoy in Chloé's story, even if you're not trans yourself.

Nyx ♥