Exile Chapter 40 Rewrites

I've finished chapter 40 of the second draft of Exile and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

There's one small part here that's slighty similar to the first draft, where Lilia gives Mal his reforged sword, though i've done some very big changes even to that. Rather than enchanting his sword, she's given him a magic knife, which is going to come into play later in the most awesome of ways... or at least I think so anyway.

This chapter has mostly to do with Mal and Lilia working out their unresolved issues, and with the last bit of set up for the final confrontation that Mal needs to do before heading off to war. I've done almost all of the setup needed for the ending. There's one more chapter to go before all of the action starts happening. Silmera still needs to find out why she's been captured, or at least part of it, and then everything can fall apart into bloody action that goes on and on until the very end. I didn't mean to make this chapter so long, but once I got into it I realized it kinda had to be, because Lilia is not the sort of person that's going to just give up. She'd goig to keep trying and trying and trying until she's run out of things to try, then go and try to think of more things to try. She's really getting desperate now, because she knows that she'll lose him if he goes to Silmera and she hasn't won him over yet. I think I did a pretty good job of illustrating how hopeless her cause is when she asks him to kiss her one last time and all he does through the whole kiss is think about Silmera. You can't choose who you love, and you can't force someone to love you. Two things I've had a little experience with in my time, unfortunately both with the same girl. I know a little bit about how Lilia is feeling, because I've had something similar happen to me.

All in all I think the changes to the ending are going pretty well. I'm pleased with them so far, and now, when things are really going to start to change, I think I'm going to be very happy with how things turn out. I was not at all pleased with how the ending turned out in the first draft, so I've put a whole lot into making a different, better ending. The ending was my biggest regret from the first draft, amongst a whole ocean of other regrets. I really think that this story has gotten 1000% better with this draft, and I hope that those that read it before and hated it (with good reason) will give it another chance, because it really is different and better than it was.

The first draft of this story ended at 117,352 words.
The second draft is currently at 215,507 words.