WIP Wednesday - 06/03/2026
Wow, two weeks in a row?? I'm on a roll here. The chapter is now up to about 7.000 words and I have at least started the draft for each of its scenes, so we're defintiely getting somewhere! Choosing these passages is always such a struggle in that I want them to have fun hints for what's to come, but I also don't want to show my whole hand. Gotta hold onto some surprises for the chapter itself, ya know? Admittedly this one is mostly self-indulgent scenery descriptions, but hopefully there are a few nuggets of interest to be mined from it as well!
Ylisse’s countryside sprawls outside Robin’s carriage, emerald hills ribboned with gurgling streams. She long ago gave into temptation and lowered the pollen-filmed window pane for a closer look, each breath she takes now sodden with the metallic taste of impending rain. Robin shakes her head. It’s not as if she’s never been to Ylisse before—but it was only the once, and close to the border where the Halidom’s greens are still tinged with the golds of her homeland. What’s more, those memories are as muddy as all her others from before the attack—impressions visible only as if through breath-fogged glass. They cannot hold a candle to the lush moss teeming from the gaps in the stone fences lining the road; or the bursts of bright-capped mushrooms that ring the ancient stumps of fallen trees; each one making her wish ever more desperately that she’d thought to pack her field guide. Needless to say, Ylisse is proving itself a distraction that she cannot afford. They are just a day’s ride from the capital now, and she needs to put what time she has left towards memorizing her notes on the prince—especially if there’s a chance that Gaius’s final report will have as little of substance as those before it. The carriage lurches around a poorly paved bend in the road. Robin throws out an arm to steady Puss’s cage, leaving the papers on the coach desk to fling themselves to the floor. She sighs as she bends to collect them; it's almost as if the Halidom’s roads themselves are protesting her plans. Of course it just happens to be the letter that she grabs first. Robin memorized its contents several dozen passes ago, but one glimpse of Prince Chrom's looping script compels her eyes to re-read it.
As a heads up, I'm going to be away on a trip out of the country for the next two and a half weeks, so there likely won't be a lot more progress to share until the end of June :') Still, I'm hoping that I'll return from the trip creatively recharged and rejuvenated and that the remainder of the draft will go quickly from there!
