I haven’t written a foreword for any of the volumes of Candlelit Lives so far, but I do think one is in order here.

We’re getting to the end of the story here, and we are approaching it very quickly. A war has started and it will end here. It’s all been building up to this, so let’s get to telling the story.

By necessity, Volume 3 is going to have quite a different structure. It’s overly focused solely on a single plot point / event, and so it takes on a bit more of a traditional narrative structure than the prior volumes. On the other hand, there’s not actually too much story to tell about the war.

Conversely, explaining the war itself solely from a present perspective overlooking the protagonists is difficult. There’s a lot of background material that I’ve written that impacts the gods and the war they are fighting. And while some broad strokes have been hinted at before, there’s a lot of detail which is needed here to make it make sense. So in addition to the present chapters with our protagonists, there’s going to be several flashback chapters (they have a roman numeral for a chapter number) where the pertinent points of the story of the gods is told.

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Still, it’s a fairly short volume. Sixteen chapters and an epilogue comprised of ~15,000 words. For comparison, volumes 1 and 2 are roughly 70k words each, if you exclude the full-chapter status sheets. I have to wonder whether it shouldn’t have simply been a part of volume 2.

In any event, I hope you enjoy this final installment of Candlelit Lives.

Best,

luda305