Hey everyone, I just wanted to say a few things.

Firstly, I've decided that I'd rather you all read the rest of the story in one sitting for the sake of your enjoyment. Waiting a week or more in between a few pages takes a lot away from the mood / tone that I've set and I want to make sure that the story is received in as illuminating a light as possible. So, throughout the next few hours I'll post the last two chapters of the book, as well as two smaller posts that will make up the epilogue.

Tying into the second point, the reason that I have been spacing out these last chapters is so that this story doesn't go on "Hiatus" and remains labeled as "Active" on this site, which I felt would be better for visibility. Unfortunately, I figure that this will happen regardless as I simply do not have time to continue working on the series as it is. I invested years into The Slave's Son Saga but let alone sales on Amazon I hardly have any traffic on RR or other sites, so it really lessens my desire to keep working on the series despite having almost finished the outline for the third novel, as I went into a large amount of debt in order to allow myself the several thousand hours that it took to write the second book and I literally have no other option than to get a full-time job as I haven't even been able to make minimum credit card payments for the last several months (sighs sadly). This leads me to my next point, unfortunately I had no choice but to get a job at a metal processing plant in my city and I'll be working 6 days a week / 8 hours a day, leaving me with Saturday and the odd hour or two here and there to put in the ~15 hours that I usually do to write the Archaic Ring's weekly patron posts (which have been more like every 9 or 10 days since I've been so busy and exhausted). Essentially my work week is now in excess of 60 hours per week, which is a bit overwhelming, and sort of a bummer as I spent 50,000 dollars on a degree that's been largely useless since I acquired it and I evidently had to seek out a general labour job for the meantime.

As for this story, I wish that it would gain traction and grow a larger audience, for if I had it my way I'd work 60 hours a week on this saga and I'd happily pump out a couple of books per year, but as of now this doesn't seem possible. However, I do still have a bit of hope for this series, and that hope comes from you, the reader. Once you finish reading the second book as well as it's epilogue, if you've enjoyed the series thus far and want to see more of it, I hope that you can leave a review on this site (or if you were one of the handful that purchased the book, a review on Amazon and Goodreads would help my visibility exponentially, I can't stress enough how important this is as I only have a single review on Amazon and only two ratings). Reviews and ratings are the only way to increase visibility for this story at this point and also my only hope at salvaging the situation and making this a more feasible approach to continuing the series. There are around 1,000 readers for this story but only 136 ratings, and almost all ratings I've received in the past five or so weeks (aside from a couple) were drive-by .5 downvotes. I've noticed on this site that there seems to be a toxic culture of "gatekeeping," where authors keep a close eye on the rankings of the stories ahead of theirs, and immediately downvote those stories with throw away accounts once a story displaces theirs in the rankings. When you get four or five .5s within one hour of each other immediately after passing a certain threshold, and when this happens to hundreds of authors, it makes it kind of obvious. In doing this, they remove competition before it can gain notice and thus ensure that their story stays within whatever ranking it currently is. I've confirmed this with the Archaic Ring series, which was originally in the top 500 stories on this site, and every time it passed a 500-rank threshold (top 2000, top 1500, top 1000 etc.) it would get an unnatural bombardment of .5s. I recall when it hit rank #490 I woke up the next day and it was around rank #1700 from over ten .5 votes and I'm starting to see that with this series. The only way to avoid this fate is to hit Rising Stars or Trending and gain enough of a following to offset the petty downvotes.

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

If you have an account on this site and enjoyed my series, then I really hope that you can take a few minutes out of your day to leave a review as a show of support and to show others why you think these novels are worth reading. If you're a casual reader with no account on RR, I hope you can make one and share your thoughts on the series, which might encourage others to take a chance on it. It's only a short amount of time, and far far less than I've committed to the free release of my works. If the majority of you did this, it's possible that the entire situation could change.

I'm currently five pages into the third book (the title of which is, like the other novels, pretty significant so I won't announce it until the conclusion of the prologue) and at the rate things are going I won't be done this project for several years. Unlike the Archaic Ring series which is almost 100% rough drafts (the moment I finish typing up a few pages, I post them), both novels in this series have seen fourth or fifth drafts, along with extensive revisions and editing. I also edit each post after uploading it, just to catch anything I might have missed (believe it or not much of the second book was written on a notepad with no spell check or grammar assistance tools). This means that writing a single post for this story takes a lot more time and effort than it does for my other series, sometimes in excess of 20 hours per post.

I apologize for the long explanation, I just want to be candid with you all. Hopefully one day I can work full time as an author (I'm confident that I have the skillsets to do so, it's just that I'm currently beneath the radar, so we shall see how things develop). For now, I have to focus on paying off all the debt that I amassed in the past few years of post-secondary school / full-time authoring, and if that means putting down my pen so to speak and committing to a job I don't like, well, that's life my friends, I cannot complain, only lament.

Please, if you like my work and are planning to read more, then consider dropping a rating or a review. It literally means the world to me and I cannot express how important this is. Without further ado, however, I'll begin my final posts. Remember, as of now the Dozen have fled into the forests surrounding Distan, and Alistar is in the midst of escaping from Bishop Maels's men, as Maels is aware that he should be dead and thus has framed him for the demon's appearance in Mayhaven.

I really hope you guys enjoy the finale of the second book and I can't wait to hear your thoughts on it.

All the best,

Reed