I took Duane Adelier at his word for 7 years (aka I’m still not over Monday)
I first discovered Unsounded while chapter 10 was updating, so probably in late 2014 or early 2015. I've re-read it and discussed it in the Discord so much over the last seven years that at this point I don’t really remember my initial impressions, with one exception. When I got to this page in Ch. 3:
I thought “no idea who this blonde girl is but she’s definitely dead.”
(they’d just been discussing Cara too, and Duane predicted that in Cresce they’d see “more dead children dying in the dark”. So, y’know, not exactly what you’d call subtle foreshadowing)
And eventually I got to chapter 7 and sure enough
There’s been a LOT of speculation through the years that she lived though. 1) Depending on your assumptions, there was technical leeway -- we’ve seen that wounds that serious are ABSOLUTELY survivable in universe if treated by a skilled doctor -- and Bastion was right there! However, he was also interrupted in his “resurrection” of Duane by an attack that nearly killed him, so I definitely thought he wouldn’t have had the chance to treat Mikaila.
(In fact it seems REALLY telling to me that he took the time to save MIkaila from his co-conspirators’ mistakes before finishing on his Grand Experiment with Duane. Did they just need to wait for Duane to bleed out, or is this a moral choice Bastion made?)
2) Mikaila was such a loveable, easy-to-root for character in Ch. 7 that a lot of us still WANTED her to be alive. (I was definitely in that camp, despite thinking that most reasonable narrative assumptions made it implausible). Even though things were.....precarious, for her, as female wright in Alderode, we imagined bright futures where she managed to forge her own path. Unmoored from the prejudices and constraints of canon, we could imagine her as happy and successful as we wanted. or y’know unhinged anime crossovers if that’s more your speed but I digress But now we’re getting both our wish come true and possibly a monkey’s paw... we’re getting a Mikaila who grew up in Alderode’s apparently fraying society, under the tutelage of Lemuel or who knows who else (the wright-killer who caught her on page 122 maybe?!). She’s no longer an innocent child for us to project our fantasies onto -- are we going to like the person she became?
Aside, but I want to point out that Mikaila should be about 14 now... the same age as Lem in the Ch. 14 flashback. We saw how badly he was already doing there, has Mikaila reached that age more unscathed?
3) Even as we went back and forth on the in-story likelihoods, and what we as readers wanted, what kept me from really buying into any of the explanations of Mikaila’s survival was the *narrative* arc. We saw the impact of Mikaila’s death from Ch.3, and as the story goes on her narrative shadow over Duane only grows. If she turned out not to be dead, it would completely undermine his narrative arc and motivation. Like, it would make most of book 1 feel irrelevant.
And I think that’s my mistake -- hence the title of this little essay -- it undermines the narrative impact *from Duane’s perpective*. Which we’ve already seen hinted over and over was wrong and due for an update. Frankly, it’s really tempting now to look at this chapter as an escalation of Increasingly Big Things Duane Is Wrong About. (Though obviously there’s a lot of other things going on too.) But still....
Basically, until last week I believed Duane’s (admittedly very compelling) perspective that his arc, his tragedy, was the most important thing shaping the story until the end of this book. But it’s not. Maybe Mikaila’s struggles and takeaways from that violent night are more important. Maybe it’s something else. But the narrative weight of that tragedy has shifted -- it’s no longer about Mikaila’s death, but (from Duane’s perspective) his own misunderstanding, and I don’t think I’m explaining this very well but to me that still has a TON of narrative weight.
I wanted to get this post out before this coming week’s updates because I *do not know* what’s going to happen from here. How is Mikaila going to react to this encounter? (did she even recognize Duane? I think not but I, uh, still haven’t backread the discord discussion so I’m probably missing a lot) What’s Lem going to tell her? And frankly WHAT IS LEM’S ANGLE both here and in Ch. 7 (that needs its own essay though)?? I’m hoping we’ll see a little bit of the fallout but that dramatic swing is also the PERFECT chance to cut away to one of our other half dozen subplots in the thick of things this chapter.
But whatever we see next, I’m fully invested in the story, and still trying to make sense of things.
So thank you Ashley!
