Chapter Twenty-Four (Spoilers hidden)

As you can probably deduce from what I’ve said before, this Telrii scene is a late addition. It’s not one of my favorites between Hrathen and Telrii–re-reading it, it makes me feel like Telrii is simply there to be persuaded. While the intention of these scenes is, indeed, so show Hrathen as a stronger character, their secondary purpose is simply to let him voice outloud some of the thoughts he’s been mulling over. If you have trouble characterizing or motivating one of your characters in a book you’re writing, try giving them someone–either friend or foe–to talk to.

Anyway, this particular scene is a little weak, and I suppose I could cut it without too much loss. It is a good idea to keep people thinking about Telrii, however, since he will be important later in the story.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Hrathen chapters tend to be shorter than the other two. As Raoden and Sarene’s chapters pick up, I was left struggling just a bit to find things to do in the complimentary Hrathen chapters. I probably could have sped up his plot through these middle chapters just a bit. However, the triad system means that I had to give him a viewpoint every third chapter. That is probably why he got so many contemplative sections–and, possibly, is what in turn made him into such an interesting character personality wise. It’s kind of hard to dissect these kinds of things now that the book has been done for five years.

Anyway, I did need this chapter to give Hrathen a chance to do some more foreshadowing on Dilaf. The emergence of Dilaf in these chapters is, I think, one of the more interesting and surprising elements from the middle Hrathen chapters. When Dilaf is originally presented in the book, I expected people to see him as a simple sidekick to Hrathen, much in the same way that I established Galladon and Ashe to be counterparts to Raoden and Sarene. With this parallelism in servant characters, I hoped to pull of a subtle surprise with Dilaf when he started to make trouble for Hrathen, as he is doing in these chapters.