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So, Volume 9 is complete at an already long fifty six chapters.
Once again, I am your author, Eric Fretheim, online as Fushigi on this site and on Discord, and as /u/ericthefred on reddit.
If you are a free chapters reader popping in to read this when you haven’t unlocked the preceding chapters yet, please go away and come back after reading Chapter 464, because I am probably going to drop spoilers on you.
Volume Nine was a slightly weird journey, I admit. It was mostly about Tiana trying to find her new place in life as a duchess and a mother, and trying to define her relationships better, all while searching for ways to still be herself. In other words, it’s a normal story of a young adult having to learn how to adult.
I mentioned in the last afterword being uncertain whether there would be a volume 10. That’s because I was seriously contemplating a version where she would go take care of the issues with the missing bodies of her parents herself, before pregnancy. The end of the main story would have been more-or-less what you have just read, in that case.
One reason I decided against it is that I would have had to completely ignore a lot of issues that were begging to be explored, and practically treat Narses and the residents of its castle as just passing mob characters. This is going to be her capital and the people whom she must make her own, and her relationship with them is going to be complex, so treating them so lightly didn’t feel right.
But that’s just making excuses. My principal reason was that a finale that went ‘and then Tiana got pregnant, the end’ just did not feel good as a way to end an adventure story. She obviously needs to cap her story off with action… the other kind of action, I mean.
Of course, this is the main arc we are talking about. As I mentioned last chapter, I have a future arc after a multiple decade timeskip, that I would publish as a separate story when I write it. Tiana is a character in it, but the main character is different.
So am I now looking at a total of 10 volumes? Again, I have a choice to make in exactly how to pursue the ending. It may be 11 volumes, if I go for the longer option. I have to make up my mind on that soon, but I am leaning toward the longer option.
So, let us discuss what sort of creatures the sisters about to be growing in her tummy are going to be. They are, of course, Elders. Juvenile Elders (a weird oxymoron of a term, but there’s no other way to say it) are fairy vampires, of course, and as such, they will be like the original Tiana in her childhood. But one of them is Mother (albeit amnesiac, since she will not remember her previous life or lives and may never do so) and the other is an unknown soul who seems to also have been impressive in some way. At least, the Immortals weren’t willing to let her go back to Samsara in order to keep Deharè more secure. Was this simply ethics, or did they have some other reason to want to keep her as well?
At the beginning of the chapter, Gaia did mention that the original purpose of the amulet was to keep from losing original Tiana’s soul in the event she didn’t survive the predicted encounter with the dragon, and Deharè mucked it up by not giving the amulet to her, thanks to her suspicions of the Immortals and their motives. The fact is, they could have probably pulled something else off (well, Oranos did, in the end) but they wanted to keep that soul in particular. So, even though in the end, it wasn’t meant to be, the trouble they went through to create the amulet is proof they took interest in and looked after this certain individual as part of their job of managing the world.
Clearly, Deharè’s daughter/sister is not ordinary, just as Deharè is not, but we will have to wait for that future story arc to find out how extraordinary the twins will be. This arc is Tiana’s story, not theirs.
Tiana has picked up some interesting new talents, and she has also developed something vaguely resembling Dissociative Identity Disorder (or really, resembling the mass media portrayal of DID, which is by no means accurate to the real disorder.) They’ve begun to play a bigger role in her way of going about things, but she’s already been advised to not rely on them so much. The next step in her internal growth is learning to be herself, literally, when she uses her expanded spiritual state, rather than handing things off to her previous incarnations.
I slipped mention of the time difference between Earth and Huade into the narrative during this volume. It is a bit contradictory from the early chapters, but I am re-writing those with the same time difference described. I will state it here, for future reference:
A year on Huade is now longer than a year on Earth. The days and the years are around 1/5th longer duration, so a fifteen year old on Huade is about eighteen on Earth. I’m doing this for various reasons, but mostly because I don’t want to encounter trouble with publishing later.
This means that the ‘Upper School’ that Tiana was attending was closer to a college than a high school (with the ‘Lower school’ being the high school) and that the twelve year old Tiana entering Royal Knight training was more like fourteen and a half.
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A couple questions came up in the comments whose answers are worth repeating here, so I will put those in.
Q (After the chapter where Elianora helped the wounded Tiana feed safely. The following is a compilation of more than one question): Elianora’s preparations for feeding the young Tiana turned out to be more spicy than expected. Was she really doing all that with a little kid in the room?
A: When Tiana was an infant, once Mother’s breast milk wasn’t sufficing any more, Elianora became her wet-nurse, because vampire breast milk passes the necessary Mortal mana to the vampire baby just like blood. The wet-nurse needs to feed more often, but it is safe for her, since an infant doesn’t require an adult dowse. Vampire babies breast-feed until about three years old for this reason, and the process is the same as for humans.
The process described in the chapter was after that, when the vampire child reaches the age that they need to feed on mortals. They need to learn how to do so safely. As mentioned in the chapter, they can’t properly control their feeding at that age, so an adult vampire must first ‘take control’ of the mortal, allowing her to keep the mortal’s mind safe from the child while the child feeds. It’s pretty normal for the child’s wet-nurse (if different from her mother) to handle this part.
The ‘preparation’ process, so that the adult can grow their fangs, isn’t appropriate for a child to watch, so the adult does this while the child stays in the next room until their meal is ready. Before puberty, the child’s fangs grow quite easily, pretty much upon seeing their blood donor waiting to feed them, and only becomes trickier once sexuality starts developing, complicating matters. It’s probably the wet-nurse teaching them at this point as well, frankly.
I didn’t mention it in the comments, but this procedure continues until the child reaches puberty (which, as mentioned in a much earlier volume, is rather young, around 10 years old). So Tiana saw rather a lot of Elianora growing up.
Q: Is the intended implication of the tutelary council being so similar to the Greek pantheon that they had a hand in Earth’s development as well?:
I’ve never come out and said it, but I’ve implied it in various places. Just like species of plants and animals, knowledge, language, and culture are tied across the many ‘Human clade’ worlds. Words, names, ideas, even languages get reflected in various worlds. Like how Fan Li’s world speaks Mandarin Chinese or how names in Ostish are the same as in English, even though the languages aren’t. Each world will have its own subset of all these things, like how Mireia’s world was nothing like Earth but they both had Otome games. So these real people (immortals) on Huade ending up echoed in an Earth religion (Ancient Greek mythology) is another case of this.
In reality, Earth’s Immortal managers are likely fewer in number, as it is lower on the ladder of spiritual development. Possibly as few as one individual Immortal?
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Well, this is going to be all for now. I wanted to put together a couple appendices, but I haven’t had time. Real Life has been brutal lately, owing to a variety of issues, and right now I’m barely keeping up just with creating chapters. I greatly appreciate everyone who has stuck with the story this far, and I’m looking forward to continuing on in this journey with you!
