Spires of Infinity Chapter 42

I've finished the first draft of Spires of Infinity chapter 43 and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This chapter is Gabriel's climax/resolution. You'll notice that the climaxes of both Gabriel and the Apostle are more about inner discoveries and overcoming things within themselves than about action. This is something that really shines in the medium of the printed word. You can describe the emotional changes, realizations and turmoil much better than say, in a movie where the climax of the story is described in pictures. Sure, there was a lot of action that led up to the two of these characters overcoming their respective demons, but the true climax comes with their realizations, rather than their defeat of each other.

In keeping with the whole a protagonist much either convert or utterly destroy the antagonist in the end of a story rule, we have Gabriel who lost to the Apostle in their duel, but he defeated her by converting her to his way of thinking afterward. And the Apostle utterly destroyed Cain's plans by removing the Spires of Infinity then killing herself rather than using her crystal to jump to safety.

Anyway, Gabriel basically earns his redemption in this chapter, and that's pretty much the end of his storyline. There'll be a bit more from his point of view at the end, but now the story is going to focus on Kari and the end of her storyline. She and her brothers have been pretty absent in the last ten chapters or so, and now it's time to see what they've been up to. I couldn't jump over to them in the middle of the part where Gabriel went into the past, because since all of the characters came together at the Spires of Infinity we've been following his timeline, and even though these things have happened for other characters, they have not yet happened for Gabriel. Now that Gabriel has returned a minute or two after he left, what is going on in the present can now resume, and I can get to telling the end of Kari's storyline. Does that make any sense to anyone else, or is it just me? haha.

The first draft of this story is now at 154,180 words of an estimated 170,000. Yet again I've raised my estimate of how many words this story is going to end at. 170k seems like it'll be pretty close though. There's not much left, maybe two to three chapters and an epilogue, I definitely couldn't finish that in 160k, but I think I can fit it all into 170k give or take a few thousand. This story turned out to be much longer than I originally expected, which I suppose is a good thing, though I'd really like to keep the word count of the final draft down around 150k to help my chances of getting it published.