Hello everyone! Welcome to the end!
First, a quick bit of administrata. The complete epub for Vacant Throne will be available on my Patreon in a few days. February 1st, is my current target date. I am currently, indefinitely, and until further notice suspending monthly payments. However, charge-on-subscribe is currently enabled. That will effectively allow anyone the ability to ‘purchase’ the epubs for however much you want by signing up until I figure out a better store-like solution. The epubs are really nothing special, so don’t feel pressured to do so. None of the text should be different than here or RoyalRoad. I will be updating typo reports as they come in in all three places.
With that out of the way, on to the Vacant Throne thoughts writeup thingy. Postmortem? Something like that.
This is a bit of an Author’s Notes segment. I’m going to be talking a bit about Vacant Throne, maybe writing in general, and quite possibly just rambling a bit. There is also a bit of a talk about future projects waaay down at the bottom. If that doesn’t sound interesting, then feel free to not read this! If it does, read on!
The first thing I wanted to mention was the ending, given it is the most recent thing people have read and the most recent thing I wrote for VT. It’s fresh on the mind. At the risk of sounding like I’m tooting my own horn, I think I did a rather good job on the ending. Void Domain’s ending received a… less than unanimous acclaim. It had a fairly abrupt ending, didn’t examine any of the many characters aside from Eva, and had an ending that was distinctly melancholic without giving readers a real sense of resolution.
I hope Vacant Throne’s ending has come about a bit better. From the reactions of my Patreon supporters, I think I hit it far better. With more than just the epilogue at that. The last few arcs built into a proper climax, I think. Maybe it was a bit out of proportion relative to the rest of the story, being only a few thousand words compared to the near one million of the rest of the story, but things were moving quickly. And, frankly, I tend to find climaxes that last too long to be exhausting. But what did you think?
As for the epilogue itself, I think that went pretty well. A comment on my Patreon did point out that Brakkt and Fela had a distinctly unsatisfying chapter relative to the other characters, especially given their importance in the story as a whole. And, yeah. I agree, especially in retrospect and after reading their full comment. I actually considered rewriting it in the short timeframe between reading that comment and the chapter going live here, but I didn’t in the end. I didn’t think I would be able to make it significantly more satisfying without changing too much, and there was only a week or so to do it in, which is not a lot of time from my perspective.
Outside the topic of the ending, I had a few gripes of my own that developed over the course of the story. Some minor, some a little major. I talked about most of these over 2020 on my Patreon, so I’ve pretty much had a lot of time to think about each.
For example, some readers might notice that Tzheitza kinda just… disappeared from the story aside from the occasional mention now and again. That was completely and totally my own fault. After a few arcs of her, I really started to loathe writing her odd manner of speech. There were a few other problems with her character, mostly in relation to Alyssa, but the thing that actually got her booted was how painful it was to write her dialog. Initially, the idea was that she spoke quickly, dropping ‘non essential’ parts of sentences and slurring words together. All because the backstory lore of alchemist-types having this danger to them, where they would have to communicate extremely quickly to other people in laboratories to prevent accidents. “Don’t add the blue chemical to the red chemical” or “grab that vial before it hits the ground” needed to be condensed into only a second of spoken dialog. Which, over time (in lore), just sort of evolved into a speech pattern that most potioneers share.
I wrote a few weeks ahead of the currently posted chapter throughout the entirety of VT. When Tzheitza first appeared way back at the start of the story, I had written dialog that matched that lore idea. However, upon rereading the chapter before posting it a few weeks after I had written it, I found that I could not even mildly figure out what she was trying to say for half her dialog. The only bits that I could figure out were because of context with Oz and the situation. So I rewrote it, significantly downplaying the unintelligible nature of her speech to the point where readers should have been able to understand most of it. In fact, it mostly came down to simply adding in a few contractions where there wouldn’t normally be any.
Would it have been better had I stuck to my original vision?
No. Absolutely not. She would have been written out of the story the arc after she appeared were that the case. That might have been for the better, but I’ll get to that in a minute when I talk about Alyssa.
Back to Tzheitza for just a moment more: I actually wanted her and Oz to be a big part of the demon-form Taker fight in the city. That was the original plan, anyway. They had a whole shared history with him, having been on the same team while fighting demons. However, Tzheitza was already in the process of being phased out and, while he was still present for several parts of the story after, Oz kind of got phased out along with her. Both, along with the rest of Oz’s crew, were supposed to have been a whole lot more important.
Brakkt and Fela ended up replacing them for the most part. Which is another reason why I’m a little upset about their epilogue chapter.
Anyway, learned something from that at least. Don’t do super exaggerated accents. I should have known better because I remember reading… something. Can’t remember what. But it had a dwarf or something that talked in a manner I found extremely irritating.
There were a few other things throughout the story that I ended up doing nothing with. A lot of which were because I thought up some cool idea related to the world and immediately wrote it into the story as soon as it made sense to, regardless of whether or not I had a plan on how to actually pay off the mentions. Things like the elf blacksmith having a whole chapter where she drops big hints that the elves were going to be up to something, but basically never get mentioned again. Decorous and his implied coup attempt kind of fell into that as well, though I also tried to somewhat resolve that by having him having severe doubts about following through with that in his interlude… along with his brother showing up and saying that their country was changing their stance in respect to monsters.
Feel free to ask about such things down in the comments. I normally avoid even responding to comments that are speculatory in nature because I never know what to say about them. But the story is done, so I’m free to answer both in lore and as a writer, if you want.
Side anecdotes out of the way, on to Alyssa.
I rather liked Alyssa. Generally speaking, I think she was a rather good protagonist. Not to say that I am unaware of her flaws—not character flaws, but flaws as a character. This was another thing that I brought up on my Patreon earlier this year. Alyssa lacks a good motivator. When I started Vacant Throne, I knew I wanted to do better than Void Domain. Eva was a protagonist who was rarely ever proactive, mostly because all she really wanted for the majority of the work was to not make waves and just go to school like a normal person. For Alyssa, I decided that she needed a good, strong goal.
Getting home. That sounds like a great goal. Leave the mixed up world that she wound up in to return home.
Wrong. That’s a terrible goal! Why? Because she can’t work toward it. With the way I had the rules laid out and the knowledge of magic, there was no visible path forward that Alyssa could take realistic steps to follow through with that goal. As such, what should have been a great motivator turned into something that just occasionally got brought up throughout practically the entire story.
That isn’t to say that she lacked goals completely. She had much smaller goals that generally lasted an arc or two. Save the princess, recover Oxart, distract the Astral Authority, close the pit, etc. Those arcs were probably stronger arcs in the series because she had those goals at the time, but there was just nothing overarching to bridge the gaps. I realized that was a problem partway through and tried to bring her efforts to get home (and avoid the problem of angels bothering her) a little to the forefront with things like her experimenting with her connection to Tenebrael and asking Irulon about being a lich and other such things, but none of those paths really aligned with how I had envisioned and planned the ending from practically the start of the series. As such, they just sort of fell away without pomp or ceremony. Which probably made them a whole lot worse than the aforementioned world building stuff that never went anywhere.
Should I have changed the ending? Maybe. I don’t know, honestly. Not sure what exactly I would have changed it to.
But, because of that motivation and a lack of a way to work toward it, the story ended up repeating several mistakes that I had already made in Void Domain. Namely and most notably: Both Eva and Alyssa just kind of follow along with the events happening around them, reacting for pretty much the entire story. There is never that moment where reaction turns to satisfying proactive action.
I brainstormed up a few ways that could have solved that issue without changing the entire story. I think the best one that I came up with was to give Alyssa another goal. Something smaller, maybe not significantly easier to achieve, but one that she could actively work toward alongside everything else that went on. The idea I came up with was to make Alyssa into something of a food-buff. Make her want to bring modern flavor complexity to the masses of a medieval society. There is a lot of food talk already—one of the first things she does is cook up a hamburger for the brothers in Teneville. That could have been expanded a bit. I would probably take out most of her job with Tzheitza and replace that with wanting to start up some food stall. Maybe even using Tzheitza to synthesize some flavors or maybe just having her look up creative and tasty dishes on her phone that she could make with the materials on hand.
There could have been a bit more strife with the gang on the streets of Lyria, a bit of depression over having to leave it for long periods of time during certain parts, maybe an apprentice that could have taken up the mantle when she went to Illuna… And in Illuna, maybe she started another food stall, this one instantly successful because of what she had learned and failed at during the first bit. Most of the main plot points would still have happened, many in the exact same ways, but I feel that would have given some direction and more tangible motivation to Alyssa as a more rounded character with a better arc.
Anyway, there are some other things I had problems with. Villains, especially. I seem to have a problem with villains. There were lots of things I liked as well—I think most of the side characters are much better done here than in Void Domain, Irulon and Kasita especially. But this has already gone on quite long, so I’ll probably stop here as those are the most important things.
I’ll be fielding any and all questions down in the comment section. I normally have a policy of avoiding commenting on speculatory comments, but not now that the story is finished. If you have some question about a plot thread that went nowhere, what a character did after the story, or even just some random symbolism that you noticed, go ahead and drop it in the comments. I’ll at least respond and say that I have no memory of why I added that thing to the story 🙂
As for what is coming next, I have a lot of ideas. I want my main focus to be on the hero and the villain, the dichotomy between them, and having stronger motivation and character arcs for at least the hero to go through. I took most of December off writing, but I’m back at it again now. I’m currently quite enamored with a project that I’m not actually going to talk about at all beyond what I just said. Why? I think I have significant motivation losses toward projects that I talk too much about. Like my brain goes “Oh, you’ve already told everyone this story. No point in writing it now, right?” even if I only mention some general aspects.
So nothing about a future story for the time being. But I’m a pretty quick writer, I think. So when can you all expect to read something from me?
Unfortunately, probably nothing is coming anytime soon. I think I’m going to give up the web serial bit entirely. While I like reading them well enough, I think I would prefer writing shorter, more traditional novels. I’d like to try to break into more traditional publishing as well, though I might have a bit of work to go before I actually hit that point. After I finish the thing I’m currently writing, I might try shopping it around to agents for traditional publishing, or I might try to hire an editor to go over it before I self-publish, probably with a properly commissioned cover art to go with it. It depends on how I feel about it.
That means that there might not be anything for six months, maybe a year. Maybe more if I scrap this project in favor of something else—which I am not planning on at this moment, but I scrapped several projects between Void Domain and Vacant Throne that I thought would be my next series, so who knows. If you click the follow button over on the sidebar on this WordPress, Void Domain, or the preview site, you’ll definitely get an update when something happens. Twitter as well. The preview site might even have some intermittent updates, but not sure about that just yet. I’d like to be more active there, or even on Twitter or some place, but I just often feel like I don’t have much to say outside of writing related things, and I don’t usually share anything about something I’m currently writing. I might try to give it some effort though.
Beyond that… I think that’s it. Thanks for reading all this way. And thanks for reading Vacant Throne as well.
I appreciate all the support you have given me over the years.
Tower Curator
Thanks for writing it, it was an enjoyable read. I have some thoughts about how it turned out that I’d be happy to share once I’m not on mobile and have more time, but it was definitely an improvement over void domain so you are moving up.
Thanks for reading! Glad you enjoyed it and glad you found it an improvement over Void Domain. Always trying to be better.
Thanks for the story!
I really liked the world building, and I’m excited to see how you build your next world now that you’re studying how to better begin and wrap up cohesive side plots.
I enjoyed this quite a bit more then void domain, which was to dark for my taste. and yes, void domain ended a bit sudden. Shame this story is ending here, but it guess its best.
Thanks for all the stories, looking forward to your next book, will be interesting to have it all at once.
I thought about continuing further. Having Alyssa visit the Fortress of Pandora and the First City, which had kind of been built up, but after thinking about it, I didn’t think it would actually explore that much new territory. I was feeling like the story was meandering a bit much already.
But I’m glad you enjoyed it more than Void Domain!
Thanks for this great novel, wishing you lots of luck with your aspirations to real publishing. Kinda sad that this is over now, but as we know, all good things must end
Thanks for reading! And here’s hoping for something good.
I’m personally curious about some of the questions that are unanswerable in the narrative. How did the Throne originate, why is is empty, is there any purpose to the throne and it’s collection of souls beyond self-maintenance? Overall I was very pleased with Vacant Throne, though I will admit it certainly felt like you were almost setting up Nod for various future stories with all the side hints that never got fleshed out. Good luck with your new project, I’ll be checking back with eager anticipation.
Such things are, essentially, unanswerable even outside the narrative. But I can offer a theory that the likes of Irulon, Tenebrael, and Alyssa might come up with. Perhaps there was some primordial force. And that was all there was. The state of existence was just an entropic state of being with little to no change at all. But it wasn’t a complete heat-death. Over who knows how long a period of time, a consciousness emerged, learned how to manipulate the primordial essence into becoming the Throne and the universe as we know it. Souls are a fuel source of sorts, something keeping the universe from falling apart, back into that entropic mist of primordial essence.
The who and where did they go? Boredom, possibly. Perhaps they, as a being that began outside the current existence, had a life span that they couldn’t extend. Or maybe they consumed souls as Tenebrael did, only to decide that continuing that way was distasteful.
As for using Nod for various future stories. That might have been part of the plan originally, but I realized that the ending I had started in mind with was simply incompatible with using this universe in the future. Unless Alyssa becomes a completely selfish jerk and ignores all the problems that she has been shown to care about, having meaningful conflict in this universe is nearly impossible. I posited somewhere, Patreon maybe, that if there were to be a sequel, it would probably heavily involve the Dark Lady. But that would probably be a story far too unrelatable and far too metaphysical for my tastes, so such a thing is unlikely.
I do want a universe like that. Some place where a great many stories can be told, spanning many different characters. A world that sparks imagination and makes others want to explore the world as well. I don’t know if I’m there either from a writing perspective or from a world building perspective, but it is what I am striving toward. And, unfortunately, VT’s universe is not going to be that world, I think.
I kind of thought the throne consumed itself.
To be honest, a universe that exists to generate and consume souls is incredibly dark.
Though the story was pretty solid even if it was so much grimmer than Void Domain
Hi Tower Curator,
Thank you for writing such a great story. I’ve been following Vacant Throne since around arc 27, so 1.5 years now, and it’s kept me well engaged the whole time.
Looking back on the story as a whole, I enjoyed the beginning half more than the latter. I felt it flowed together more than some of the events in the second half, where she has a lot more magical events. Fighting hordes of demons/Astral Authority, learning about miracles and the Endless Expanse, and conducting extensive bio-magical experiments are all fine individually, but combined and in what feels like rapid succession seems much less believable than just Alyssa’s journey to and around Lyria, even though that had two invasions and one rescue attempt. Maybe the ‘more’ down-to-earth adventures went together better. Going to the capital, exploring it, then protecting it works as a single, expanding goal, alongside the more personal connections Alyssa developed with Irulon, Kasita, and Brakkt. Then again, that may just be the nature of keeping up with a web serial rather than catching up all at once. I’m pretty sure I look on the half I had to wait for with more scrutiny than the half I read in just 2-3 days.
Regarding the characters, I liked them as characters, more or less. You definitely had a problem with characters dropping out of the story later on. I personally was hoping for more of Alyssa’s mother and the other people of Earth, but maybe that’s my own tastes for Isekai tropes shining through. I guess the readers probably missed Oz’s presence most. When Alyssa started spending most of her time with Irulon/Brakkt/Fela/Kasita/the Drakon, I think the ‘common Nod man’ got left out, both for Nod politics and morals.
I really liked the thought you put into the magic system and the Astral Authority. The early parts where you explored how a magic-dominant society never really developed basic technology for things like fire stuck with me. The shortcomings you put in for high level magic make sense and the lore explanation for how magic comes from Tenebrael and Enochian are good.
I am looking forward to your next work. Whether you go traditional, self-publish, or your next serial, please keep us updated!
The beginning of the story focused almost entirely on the world and Alyssa’s stumbling steps through it. Although Tenebrael popped up on occasion, there was very little exploration of the metaphysical elements. However, the entire endgame that I had in mind, the end that we got, basically needed those elements to be explored. I knew from comments and engagement on the few chapters that did involve more angelic things that those bits weren’t as popular. Maybe I should have sat down and revised how I wanted everything to go, but I also rather liked my original idea.
Leaving Lyria might have been a mistake. Maybe it was just that leaving Lyria was the start of most of the metaphysical storylines. Were I to rewrite the entire thing, I would probably try to blend things together a bit better. Rather than backload the metaphysical elements, they would be mixed in throughout the entire thing. Preferably mixed in with the interpersonal character development and events of the world.
The biggest problem with characters dropping out was them existing in the first place. I have a very bad habit of just creating more and more characters whenever I get an idea that doesn’t perfectly align with any existing character. Or maybe that isn’t perfectly accurate. It might be more that I brought characters to the forefront when they were supposed to be background characters for the most part. Oz and Brakkt are basically the biggest example of this. Brakkt was supposed to be more of a background character. Something to flesh out the world while Oz played the part of the monster-encyclopedia, martial prowess, and companion. But I liked Brakkt better as a person and character after writing him some. So Oz, who already existed and fulfilled a lot of those roles, essentially vanished. His development stopped and Brakkt’s took more of a front seat. And with Oz’s departure from prominence, he took with him the lower-class perspective that wound up lacking because I already had Irulon there to provide the political and royal side of things.
As for the magic system things, the only thing I really want to comment on here is the fire thing. In retrospect, that is frankly absurd. Fire is one of the most vital, most important things humanity ever learned to do. Taking that away, even if it could be replicated with magic, is insane. The entire world would have been different. If I wanted my cake, and to eat it too, I should have made ritual-style magic more prevalent among the lower class. Something that near anyone could use while the card-based magic was reserved for a higher class of educated arcanists. It would have transformed the world in a more unique direction than standard, out of the box medieval fantasy land. Imagine instead if the main way to create fire came from some ritual altar that could be found in every town no matter the size where the people would go up, prick their thumbs, and offer a drop of blood in exchange for a magical flame that they could light torches with and carry around to the houses/buildings that needed it. It wouldn’t have changed much at all, but it would have made the world more unique. Then that raises the question of what other rituals common people might perform, leading to a far more interesting world overall, even if I didn’t actually write anything about that kind of stuff.
But writing down that only arcanists with their magic cards could produce fire was one of the earliest things that happened in the story, so I was kind of hamstrung from there.
That would definitely be something I would change were I to rewrite VT.
Well can I just say it was a great ride, I was following this from near the start since I came here from Void Domain and I would say you have considerably improved since.
While there are a few pacing issues or plotlines and characters getting dropped it is significantly less than there and, most importantly, the climax here better built-up and sustained. Ending felt great instead of feeling incomplete if interesting.
So thank you for the opportunity to read this and I look forward to whatever you write next.
Thanks for reading. I touched on characters getting dropped in my reply to Matt, which you may find interesting to read. But I am glad that you feel this was an improvement over Void Domain. The climax and ending was something I really wanted to get better at in VT compared to VD’s rather… incomplete-feeling ending. So I’m glad to see lots of people saying that.
I think the major flaws of this story were regarding the world. Essentially, the questions about a Christian based god and why and how and what and who are not answerable in any satisfying way. And the story kinda reflects that with Alyssa trying to go back and be mortal and not really doing anything with her power. For obvious reasons a human author just can’t write a broadly acceptable wrap up in a plot based on Christian theology, even loosely.
I read the whole story and broadly liked it, although I agree about issues with Alyssa’s motivation. As a practical matter of course both Alyssa, and Eva, can’t really have strong motivations while interacting in plots at the highest level because that level is so far beyond them and you can’t show them leveling up appropriately without major dissatisfying time skips or making their stories last for like 100 books.
Almost every high fantasy story, and the “higher” the fantasy the worse the problem, suffers from the promises made early by the author being so easy and sort of amorphous and the payoff having to be concrete and also so intense. This you mention, as so many authors trying to write a very high concept story, trying to leave things out and being deliberately vague. Because the promises are so open ended in a long epic story and people form desires and opinions so early without having anywhere near the necessary context, that the author will inevitably piss off a large section of the readers with the ending. Although this often is substituted by the dissatisfied readers quietly dropping the story well before the end rather than an explosion of anger by a large group that read all the way.
Given the constraints of web novels, and high fantasy, and also some luck in my feelings about the story vs what eventually happened, I’d say this is a 4/5 for a high fantasy web novel. My 4/5 is probably a 4.7/5 on Goodreads or Royalroad or w/e since people who read to the end of a story are often excessively big fans of a work or they wouldn’t have made it.
If you read the story knowing that the formula heavily constrains the quality of the resolution “flaws” in the ending don’t hit quite as hard.
I agree with most everything you said. The initial concept for this work was ‘what happens when you pal around with a grim reaper instead of dying properly?’ The scrivener folder for this is even called ‘grim reaper’. But I was just coming off Void Domain which had reapers and similar things. So I thought that angels would be a good swap. I changed a bunch more things from my initial concept, obviously, but didn’t even realize until a good way in just how big of a can of worms I was opening with Christian theology.
The rest, yeah. You hit it basically on the nose. I’m surprised but pleased at getting such a high score. I don’t know that I would have been that generous. I’m hoping that my next work, something much shorter and narrower in scope, will allow me to focus on fixing a lot of the problems that come across in serials. Especially in the editing process, which is basically impossible to do in a web serial. I’ve estimated that I’m about 40% of the way through my first draft and I already have so many notes on things that I want to fix. Two chapters are marked for complete rewrites with long blurbs in the notes section about how and why they need to be rewritten, and plenty of other chapters have more minor notes.
First, don’t go into trad pub. You will actually lose readers and money. (Unless you get extremely lucky) Audio books are performing way better than written works right now and even for them, unless you are one of the top 100 writers within your genre, (likely closer to top 20, and this includes past writers, not just active ones) the cost to hire someone to read the book aloud will take 75% of the profits. Thus, the advice is that if you are going to do trad pub, you need to create the audio book yourself.
Additionally, the way the market is right now, there are almost no options outside of Amazon. Due to the way Amazon handles recommendations, your books will not get a natural growth of readers and unless readers rate your books highly, they won’t get recommended other books of yours. They have to manually look up your page to find them.
Also be careful of who you listen to for advice, many of the people who are “in the know” stand to gain if you go trad publishing so they have an incentive to make it sound more viable than it is.
All of that said, what seems to work is for people to have two series they write at the same time. One using web novel format that does the advertising for the other. (typically by getting new readers to look at your content) This path can be risky because many prior readers will turn on the author if old books are put behind a paywall or “essential” books are put there.
As for the story itself, I thought it was very good. I started reading it about 6 months ago so most of your concerns were not major problems upon binge reading.
I would say the world building was very good, you did an excellent job on the characters (even for the one off characters!) and your foreshadowing was not overbearing but also not overly cryptic.
You identified the biggest flaw that I observed. The central conflict was not a major factor in large portions of the story. A more active and more threatening villain would have likely helped alleviate that problem. (assuming you are a gardener/pantser. If not, perhaps outlining the steps the protagonist would need to take to resolve the central conflict would have helped.)
Thank you for the story!
Is there somewhere we can go for updates on what is next, whenever and whatever that might be?
I don’t know if you’ve checked my Patreon numbers, but I’m not exactly rolling in the cash. I definitely have not been writing for the money. I would say that it would be near impossible to lose money no matter what I do. I appreciate everyone supporting me, but even out in the middle of nowhere where I live, the cost of living is still quite a few times what I make from writing.
If I do end up going the traditional publishing route, rest assured that I won’t be quitting my day job just yet.
One of the ways I was thinking about doing it would be to indie publish one book. Then release the chapters to that book maybe once a week as if it were a web novel either upon publishing a second book or as a build up to releasing a second book. And so on and so forth. That would keep things free for people who want things free while also keep up with putting out content for attracting new and retaining current readers.
I am absolutely not going to be doing a serial in the same way that I have been going about it, however. I am going to complete a book. I am going to edit it. Then I will release it through one of the above methods. No live-writing for me anymore, I think.
Of course, to get anything started, I’ve got to first finish my book. I’m currently about 40% of the way through, I think. As I mentioned to TenThousandSuns, I already have so many notes on things that I want to fix. Two chapters are marked for complete rewrites with long blurbs in the notes section about how and why they need to be rewritten, and plenty of other chapters have more minor notes. Once that is done, I’ll try deciding more concretely where and how to release it.
As for updates, I’ve not yet said anything anywhere on what I am currently working on. I told my Patreon supporters the why: I think there is something wrong in my brain where, if I tell people what I’m going to do, I lose motivation to actually do it. Like my brain just thinks that “Oh, I’ve already told people that story. No need to actually write it now.” However, when there are updates, they will definitely appear on this WordPress page, the preview WordPress page (in the side bar), and my Twitter as well, which will likely have smaller updates every so often. So following any one of these places will get you updates.
Thank you so much for all the writing. Honestly, a lot of stories have their ups and downs which means my motivation to read them tends to fluctuate as well, but Vacant Throne was one of those stories that was continuously enjoyable to read! I loved it =)
Personally, I loved the dark theme of Void Domain and I wish you’d write something further in that vein but everyone has their own preferences and I’m certain I’ll be looking to read whatever it is you write next!
Thanks! Glad I could make a page-turner. I don’t dislike I like a dark-theme. But I do think I like slightly more optimistic things than pessimistic. Still, it isn’t off the table!
Regarding Tz*ia, I think the concept could work with some tweaks. 1, it’s pretty vital to be able to signal urgency. If she’s in the “urgent” mode of speech all the time, then nothing is ever actually urgent. 2. Rather than playing with spelling to fake an accent, playing with grammar would be much more understandable. Maybe she avoids “the” and other superfluous words; speaks in a truncated manner; and gives single syllable nicknames to all reagents, ingredients, and assistants. This can get more extreme to signal urgency. “Mel, add a red in blue. Soak in bands” may sound silly, but it’s a lot quicker to say than “Meltheraptor, go mix a pound of red plague shavings into the bloopus-wort tincture and soak it into the bandages before dressing the wound.”
Yeah. That’s a much better version, I think. I remember thinking about doing something along those lines, but decided I wanted it to be even more alien.
I honestly liked Vacant Throne less than Void Domain. Maybe it was the fantasy setting, but I liked the fact that Eva was really, not a great person, and the demon stuff was fun. At the time I didn’t dislike the abrupt ending of Void Domain, because it just felt like setting up a sequel. Looking back on it now though, yeah not the best. You did it better this time. I didn’t think the side characters being super strong was as important for that story as it was for this though, as Eva was the main focus. Alyssa is a fun character and a breath of fresh air for the most part, but at the same time she’s so *good*. As in, a pretty good person. I loved that Void Domain was dark. Vacant Throne was dark but I never really felt attached to the world itself. Maybe it was because Alyssa’s goal was to return to Earth, like sure we’re here, but when Earth exists it’s like, it becomes the main focus. Overall I loved Vacant Throne, I do love interesting takes on otherwise known things, like angels. I’d say my only real complaint was Alyssa’s mom being introduced. I just felt it was awkward when she was introduced, and it hurt the story a bit for awhile. Alyssa was just doing her own thing, but suddenly it’s like “oh now you have to worry about parents.” and I wasn’t a huge fan of that. When Alyssa had to sort of take care of other characters and help them it was manageable. But her mom, it just changed things and I thought it was the wrong place to move towards. Whatever the next book is, I hope it has lots of demons kekekekeke. I love demons okay.
I have a question about the different ranks of spell cards. What sets a rank 1 arcanist apart from a rank 6? Is it something to do with their soul? Or maybe how well they can do math or something? Also, after Alyssa learned some Enochian from the virtue, Irulon speculated that more grammatically correct spells could be cast by lower-ranked arcanists. She handed several spells off to Alyssa to see how her improving them affected that. Was that actually the case? I don’t remember it being mentioned.
I really enjoyed both of your stories. Thank you for writing them. I look forward to seeing what you make next.
In terms of spell creation, a lot of studying, calculation, and general knowledge is required. But for someone merely handed a completed spell card, it is generally a belief in Tenebrael that determines casting level. Both in her existence and in her ability to perform the feat requested on the card. There were a few hints of this back toward the start. Irulon, obviously, is quite a devout believer in Tenebrael while Aziz said something like “I never really believed…” waaaay back when he witnessed Tenebrael at the Festival. A lot of lower ranked spell casters tend to believe that *they* are the ones performing the magic, and thus can never really achieve anything on the level of Irulon.
Although the human society has classified spells into ranks, there really aren’t any hard boarders behind the scenes in lore. It’s all a construct of human perception.
As for the Enochian improvements, taking the above in mind, it shouldn’t really affect things too much, but it might help a little. Maybe allowing someone who could only cast rank 1 spells the ability to cast some rank 2 spells, but perhaps not very consistently.
Thanks for writing this story. I binge-enjoyed the series over the past week, having been linked by a reddit post some time ago. I found this to be one of the more better ascent to godhood stories, because you built a rich world, and gave it strong pacing by skipping minor details between chapters. And most importantly, you gave us a fulfilling conclusion instead of neverending growth!
But why didn’t they simply write more accelero cards while under accelero???
DMs either hate you or love you.
Amazing story from start to finish in my opinion. I don’t think that there was any point where I had the disconnect from the immersion that usually characterizes bad writing, so kudos for that 🙂 Even after guessing the fairly obvious conclusion of the serial less then halfway through, *how* you got there kept me reading.
Maybe an odd thing to highlight, but I really enjoyed the explanations and worldbuilding you did for both Nod and the hierarchies of angels. An involved detailing of the operations of angels, isn’t something I have seen executed nearly as well before.
Looking forwards to whatever your next project may be.
Things like characters like Tzheitza disappearing is a natural result of the serial format I guess (unless one finishes a book first and then publishes it chapter wise but few do that.) Along with plotlines getting introduced and abandoned. It isn’t always bad imo can make stories less predictable by being more like real life that not every person that seems important will be and that you don’t get involved in every plot point you encounter. Though it can also be disappointing of course when one liked a character or plot development. Plots are worse though if characters just start appearing less it usually isn’t a big deal for me unless it feels forced or I was a fan of them.
Overall it was a good read for me. Payoff/ending wise a bit weaker than the rest but still good enough. I thought there would be more to Alyssa’s nature but it is fine that there wasn’t. Hoped for more interpersonal development between MC and Tenebrael. Demon lady plotline felt like it went kinda nowhere but I guess it is in the nature of becoming god to cut short some plotlines.
Hi Tower Curator,
I learned of Void Domain four months ago and finished the last chapter tonight. I want to thank you so much for this series, it was amazing and right now my whole being is lifted in that rumbling feeling of amazed contentment you get when you finish a good book. I have to say, because I knew the end was coming, the end didn’t feel rushed at all. The great storyline of powers was resolved and then there were some closing chapters. I loved that the ending was bittersweet because Eva became a demon and that wasn’t all positive.
I will be starting on Vacant Throne soon and the fact you feel more positive about the new series has got me real excited.
You’ve delivered a great work and I highly appreciate it.
Thank you!
Ruben
P.S. Devon mentioned he would one day explain to Eva why he didnt want to become a demon himself. Did you ever explain why?
Hey, thanks for this. I’m really glad you enjoyed it. That amazed contentment always feels a bit melancholy to me given that it means that I can never read a certain story for the first time ever again, but I’m supremely happy to know that other people feel it from my works.
With Vacant Throne having finished, I think I can safely say that it is better than Void Domain. It does have some flaws that I mention throughout the comments and especially in the ending note, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy writing it and I hope most people who have read it like it as well.
As for why Devon didn’t want to become a demon, you mentioned that it wasn’t all positive for Eva. And looking at Arachne, it was definitely not all positive for her either. Although the ending doesn’t see them reunited just yet, both are definitely hoping that the other will help fill a Void (hah) in their existence. Devon sees beyond the immediate strength and power and does not want to walk that route.
I just realized this story shares names with VD, Brakkt/Brakket, Nod (the Academy in VD) etc ….