Memories of What Never Was Chapter 35

I finished Chpater 35 of Memories of What Never Was and it can be found at the bottom of this page.
 

Raven's old girlfriend shows up and is understandably pissed at him.  I mean, he left to go get milk and has been gone FOR SEVEN YEARS!!!  Well, not really, but she's still pretty pissed.  It could possibly have something to do with the fact that he murdered all her friends, but I could be wrong.  In all previous versions of this story, Tryssyn a girl, was Tristan a boy.  Why the gender swap and previous love story?  I felt it gave a deeper relationship between these two characters.  The relationship between them as bros was okay, but the two of them needed a bit of a deeper connection with each other for the climax of book 2 to really work.  Plus I like the idea of this respected and powerful soldier also being a mom.  Did Raven father her oldest child?  I'll never tell, and neither will she.

And speaking of climaxes, we're almost there.  Originally, I had planned for this big, epic battle to take place, with a point of view character, Jonathan, directing the battle from the Crusade side.  But I've come to realize that I just don't have enough story for him this early on to justify a plotline for him in this book.  Keeping the story focused on Brand, Raven, Kriss and Temari removes a lot of the epicness I had planned, but it fits the narrative of this book a lot better.  I had to ask myself, which is more important, a huge battle for the sake of a battle, or a smaller look at the battle from the inside with a smaller group of characters that keeps the integrity of the story a lot better.  What is this book about?  Is it about two armies fighting each other, or is it about Kriss overcoming her past?  It wasn't a very difficult choice at all, really.  As Jonathan plays a much bigger role in the story in the next two books, I thought that I could move his introduction chapter in this book to the beginning of the next, and give a recap of the battle from his point of view after that to start book 2 off with a bang.