Exile Chapter 26 rewrites

I've finished the second draft of Exile Chapter 26 and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

This chapter is half new and/or rewritten material, half original text from the first draft. Everything after Silmera starts talking about the blue moon is, for the most part, carried over from the first draft with a few small edits having to do with changes in the plot between the two drafts, and adding more emotional response to Mal's reactions.

In the new material, I wanted Mal to see what he's done to his village, and see someone whose life he has completely and utterly destroyed. Why? Well, for one, I'm a sadistic bastard and I take pleasure in the suffering of others. Another reason is to give readers the full impact of just what has happened to this village and its people. And another is to give Mal something more to feel awful about what's happened, because the more awful he feels, the more he's going to want to do something about it.

I also wanted to give Silmera something that she could use to really just scathe the hell out of him, because she's suffering here too, it's not just Mal. She thinks everything is her fault, because if she had not healed Mary Miller, the Fayt never would have come, and the village would never have been destroyed. She's looking for anyone at all that she can shift the blame onto so she doesn't have to deal with it, and she uses what she sees on the way out of the village to really just thrash Mal while he's down for the count before she realizes how stupid she's being, and how much her words have hurt him.

The fisrt draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 186,713 words.

I've reached almost 70,000 added words to this draft. To put that in perspective, the average mainstream novel is 70k-100k words in length, with exceptionally long novels been 150k-200k, and then epic fantasy (my forte) being typically 200k+. I've added the equivilant of an entire mainstream novel to the second draft and I still have about 90 pages left to edit/rewrite/add to/etc. When I started on this draft it was 186 single spaced pages in length, it is now 297 single spaced pages in length(with those 90 pages of the first draft I've yet to complete still added onto the end).