This week’s question is the most academically coded email I’ve received since launching HTP. I will attempt to do the discourse justice. From Chloe R. in California:

**Spoilers for Seven Days of Mercy for the Apostatic Priest**

At the end of Seven Days, Rux abrogates her vow and accepts the shepherd-with-culling-blade role alongside Luka. I just finished the free sample of What Lies Between available on your website. The preview opens with Rux already deeper into the shepherding work and shows it costing her in ways the first book did not depict. I’ve also read the first three books in the Tales of Ciel, and I noticed that protagonists who accept the moral burden of their power in your books consistently pay a price the books do not let them avoid. I want to ask you the question that is hardest to ask honestly, which is whether you know yet what the resolution looks like for these arcs, or whether you are writing toward an answer you do not yet have. 

I love this question because it demonstrates the exact dialogue between reader and author underpinning my aesthetic theory of the text. The author brings one half of the experience, but the reader brings the other. Their collaboration is what produces the art. I never would have thought to frame this pattern in the way you describe, but it’s absolutely a coherent reading and a valid response to the four books you reference.

I want to respond both to your observation and your question, but I’ll take them in reverse order, because the question is simpler. My experimental tendencies manifest in prose style rather than story structure, in imitation the works I like to read. I like to see authors trying things with their sentences, but I’m not on board for a story that isn’t satisfying and doesn’t structurally work. As a result, all my books are narratively formal.

Seven Days of Mercy is the most linguistically ornate novel in the current bibliography (though The Politics of Fear experiments with style in more daring ways). It’s also written in an established narrative form. Rux’s first volume takes the shape of a heist story, with the countdown to Luka’s investment as a ticking clock. The combination of experimental style and proven narrative structure, I hope, results in a text that satisfies different kinds of readers. If you’re the type of reader who likes to pick apart Ruxindra’s voice and examine her reliability as it relates to the theological superstructure running through the world, I invite you to do so. If you want to read a fantasy adventure with clear dramatic stakes and earned resolutions, that experience is available as well. This relates to your question because narrative formalism requires a threshold level of meticulous planning.

I always know where I’m going. Endings, both ultimate and intermediate, are plotted out well in advance of the first page of prose. The resolution to the Unmother’s cataclysm at the end of Seven Days wouldn’t feel as satisfying if not for the elements laid out in each preceding chapter. As the narrative builds, the mechanisms for story resolution accumulate, and the eventual climax draws on each of them in a way that resonates backward through the entire text. This is also true of the Tales of Ciel at the trilogy level. In The Compact Cycle, I’ve already written the first trilogy’s final scene. I don’t think it will change.

Moving back to your original observation about the thematic synchronicity between protagonists across series. I see it and I think it’s a fair reading. I wouldn’t say I’ve articulated this exact resonance, but I do think the harmony you’re hearing is emergent from my approach to storytelling, which ties elegantly back to the discussion fo structuralism. When I’m hammering out the structure of a new story, there are few constraints I apply to hold the narrative together. First and foremost, a conflict’s resolution must happen on terms previously established in the story. Second, each narrative pivot should result directly from a character’s agency. The choices made by people shape the story; not the setting and never coincidence. Third and most debatably, even moral actions have negative consequences.

I would argue that all good storytellers pay attention to those first two constraints, but the third one is less prevalent–especially in genre. In cozier stories, right action predictably results in success and reward. That pattern creates a specific comfortable reading experience that sells well and resonates widely. I rarely provide it.

In my mind, the heroic reward structure lacks verisimilitude. Right action isn’t an objective metric to begin with (“Right” from whose perspective?), and even heroic actions lead to complex results. Characters like Ruxindra and Vanna make hard choices because they are hard and not because they guarantee a happy ending. If you come to these books expecting a clear moral thesis, this dynamic makes for an unsettling reading experience. I would argue that it actually sharpens the character work. Every character is vested with agency, and their choices function across multiple moral axes, which are often in tension. You can evaluate each choice made by the character on its own terms AND you can judge those choices in retrospect based on their downstream effects.

I guess I’m talking myself into a minor pushback against your framing. Characters don’t pay a price for accepting the burden of power in a punitive sense, but power innately comes with a price. Even its morally calibrated exercise triggers complex consequences. 

You hit the nail on the head with the last bit. No one escapes the consequences of their actions. The characters move the narrative, but the narrative pushes back.

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