Hi! Did you enjoy the story? I hope so.

I wanted to prove that I could write something more than just a short story, but I didn’t want to try to push myself too hard with a massive, hundreds-of-thousands-of-words epic. So instead we got this story instead.

One of my goals was to not make any of the characters actually evil - the closest thing this series has to an antagonist is Thomas Gillan, and even he is just someone who was misguided in his methods. By that logic, this is a tragedy: the folly of man creating a series of events that lead a human child to run from who he grew up with, and become an entirely different class of person entirely.

But, I don’t think that’s a good view of this series. Sure, I suppose it’s technically valid, but it’s an unnecessarily dim way of putting it. After all, none of the characters decided to have a war, it happened. The situation simply didn’t let them do what they really wanted to do, and it ended up pushing Samuel/Saya away from the Fredericka convoy. The only active wrong is on Thomas, and even his intention wasn’t that.

I guess the message is that this is an anti-war story, then? The original intent was to have Thomas’ character be someone who tries to be super masculine, only to have it be his undoing. Perhaps there’s some poetic irony in trying to be pro-feminine and accidentally being anti-war instead.

Though, for an overall message, I didn’t honestly think of the story as having one. I just wanted to write a good story, with good characters. (Whether or not I was successful is very obviously an exercise to the reader.) Anyone who wants to read for some form of a moral or message would probably find one, provided the characters have some definable moral fiber and the story ends on some sort of happy note.

Well, with this series wrapping up on my end, I’m going to have to think of what I’m going to do next. As I write this afterword on my Google Docs sheet, it is the morning of March 9th, 2023, so you are going to be reading this a few weeks after I write it. I’m not sure what I’m doing next, there are a few competing ideas. My thinking is trying to do two series, each on weekly updates, just on different weekdays. One of them is almost certainly going to be a supernatural-adjacent high school rom com of some sort, and the other… I’m not sure. I’ve wanted to try LitRPG, but trying to define a ruleset always bothered me, and I want to make sure it feels like something that actually fits the story, and isn’t just tacked on.

Until we meet again.

-Realspace