Exile chapter 23 draft 4

I've finished the fourth draft of Exile Chapter 23 and you can download it at the bottom of this page.

This chapter was new to draft 3 and is the first chapter from Patrick's point of view. You get to see his stress over the war, his frustrations with his impotently small army, and his troubles with trying rather unsuccessfully to court Weasel. This chapter is pretty important as it establishes Patrick's feelings toward her, and it also lays the groudwork for something extremely stupid and uncharacteristic that he does in the end. I'm trying to go with a sort of love in the absolute worst of times sort of theme with this storyline.

This chapter needed a crapton of work since this is basically just the second draft of it, which is why it took me so long to get through. And, like all chapters with these characters it's rather long to fit a huge amount of material into a single chapter so as not to break up the main storyline with Mal and Silmera too much. Sometimes I look at something I've written and it makes no sense at all and I scratch my head and wonder wtf I was trying to say with it. Sometimes I can't even get the context from the rest of the paragraph around it it's so bad XD.