Spires of Infinity Chapter 38

I've finished and uploaded the first draft of Spires of Infinity Chapter 38. You can download it at the bottom of this page .

In this chapter Gabriel must fight his way into a maintenance duct that leads to the containment area under the Central Spire of the Spires of Infinity so that he can set his paradox into motion and save the future.

This chapter was not in my original outline. I added it in on a spur of hte moment whim because I thought there needed to be something a little more exciting in the build up to Gabriel's confrontation with the Apostle. I also wanted to show what the Emperor's elite are really like, but never found a way to work it into the story yet. The reason it took me so long to write this chapter was that I took a couple days to plan it out before I started writing it. I do things like this quite a bit. Sometimes my outline looks awesome before I start writing, but as I get to certain parts ideas come to me for changes, or I think that something needs to be done differently. I think that being flexible and telling the story the way it needs to be told rather than locking myself into the outline, the outline and only the outline is very important.

One thing that I would like to note is that each of the three separate storylines have come together now, but each of them will have their own climax to them. The coming climax is the ending of the Apostle's storyline, not Gabriel's. There will be an ending for Gabriel's storyline shortly after, but the fight in the containment area is the Apostle's resolution, not Gabriel's. After that we'll flash back/forward/wahtever over to Kari's climax, which is the part of hte story that explains how the Apostle and Sam got back into the past. After this will be a sort of cooldown, tying up loose ends, sort of thing and the end. I just want it to be clear that there's still more story beyond Gabriel and the Apostle facing off with an unstable black hole in the background. As cool as that is, there needs to be a resolution and a triumph for ALL of the characters, not just one of them. The Apostle may seem like a villain, but she's not. She's one of the heroes, and she needs to both redeem herself, and triumph over the evil that is controlling her.

The first draft of this story is now at 136,863 words out of an estimated 150,000. I've now passed up the 135k mark where I estimated I would end. With this extra chapter added in I'm thinking it's going to end up closer to 160-165k, but we'll see.