Hello everyone ! I'm back, and this time it isn't for a chapter.

Warning : dumb rant by overly emotional author who likes to hear themselves talk ahead.

1 year and 3 days ago, on the 21st of september, 2020, at 16h18, european time, I posted the prologue for this story.

It...has been quite the ride since then.

As this is written, the story contains 289 581 words, or by RR's calculations a total of 1 053 novel pages. There is more text of course, patreon chapters for one, plus all the associated lore files that haven't been posted on RR and such, but this number will do. That makes it an average of 786 words per day, rounded down, which given the fact that this is my first experience with sustained writing without total burnout, let alone while attending and succeeding a full university year amidst a very chaotic time, I'm very happy with.

I suppose the first thing I should adress is : what's next ? Well, I don't know. Not exactly anyway. But, I do have some plans.

As some of you have heard in my author's notes, my university requires me to do a 3 months internship within the start of april to the absolute maximum end point of the end of july. Due to this, one of my objectives is to accumulate an absolute minimum backlog of 12 chapters in preparation for this internship, so that even if I am not capable of continuing to write during that period the upload schedule will continue. That means that from now on I am lifting the limit I had set of 11 chapters in the backlog until I started clearing it out by posting biweekly chapters. If the backlog gets stupidly big (read 25+ chapters), then I will revise that, but until then I have to take precautions.

Next, at some point I am planning to do a full, professional edit of the story, plus a full reorganization of chapters, with the sight of posting the story on amazon. Note that I will never, ever set this story on kindle unlimited and thus withdraw it from Royal Road bar a total and absolute emergency. So the story will still be fully available, on Royal Road (and potentially other sites as well later down the road), for totally free. There'll just be a tidier, more cleaned up version on amazon for those who are interested in that or want to support me without becoming a patron.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

As for the story itself, well....there's a lot left to write. Believe it or not, we still have not left the second large arc I set up for this story (arc 0 being the prologue, and arc 1 being until the wasteland expedition touched down on Alexandra's front door). I had the outline of the third arc done before I started writing the prologue. Of course I have kept adding stuff as we went on, but still, there should be plenty of material left for me to continue writing on it.

Now, I know this is already getting long, but I want to talk about some stuff relating to the story.

This story...was never meant to be one of my main, long term projects. I originally created it purely to get much needed feedback on my writing style. That's it. It was never meant to become something more, but oh boy it has. It is now my main writing project, and one of my longest running personnal projects, dwarfed only by my main, 'big' writing universe, which I've been planning and writing lore for for 9 years at this point (half of it in French, which is...interesting to translate. Let me tell you, French and English naval terminology does not mix well). I had actually paused a novel project set in that universe (which I got 42k words in) to create this story to get the feedback I need to judge if I was actually writing good stuff or not. Apparently so....not without a significant amount of hiccups.

Now however this story has turned into something much bigger for me. Alexandra, Emilia, Allya and Pyn, with all of their associated enemies, allies, henchmen, ect are firmly stuck in my head, and I doubt I could stop writing for this story even if I wanted to XD. I've also, almost unintentionally, created a community of readers, both here and on my discord, which I am very proud of (yes, even you guys suggesting I make golems after eldritch horrors from my worst nightmares in the dungeon suggestions channel). I now mostly hang out -lurk being such an impolite term- in my discord with my own reader base, cracking jokes, exchanging memes and answering questions about the story, and generally having a good time.

Of course, this hasn't been the smoothest of rides. There have been issues of course, construction, massive fuck ups, from myself and my university, and a whole range of other problems. But overall, it has been more than worth it.

I'd have loved to celebrate this one year anniversary on the day with another chapter, but unfortunately I thought the 1 year anniversary would be on the 29th, and I was too busy these last few days to check again to make sure I hadn't remembered it wrong. So, unfortunately you'll just get this message with me ranting ^^.

Alrighty then, I think I should end this here before I go into a full chapter of me ranting about stuff. Let's go for one more year of this this story, shall we ? Then, another, ect. See you on saturday for chapter 51 !