A New Frontier started as a number of pieces; first, it was a tiny little idea about a scheme affecting Earthlings that Serenity gets pulled into. That survived intact, although the exact way Earthlings were being kidnapped changed a bit; this makes far more sense than the original. Of course, the original came from a dream; dream logic usually has holes.

The second piece was supposed to be checking up on Entherys, the instructor Serenity banished from the Tutorial back in Arc 1. I’m not sure how many people noticed, but he was sent to Iron Mountain. As it happens, he was Andarit’s fiancee (broken off after his disgrace); that part survived and was mentioned, but they never actually made it into the Mountain’s Crest Estate to actually run into him.

The third piece of the puzzle is showing a bit more of the outside worlds; Zon is very different from Tzintkra, even though they’re both failing worlds (well, they were; that may be less true of Tzintkra in the future). The other worlds we’ve seen so far are not failing, however, and we’ll get to see more of both Lyka and Aeon in the next arc.

The fourth piece is that this was a way to get Serenity off Earth and moving again; if he stays on Earth, he’ll stagnate because advancing makes it exceedingly uncomfortable to leave high-mana areas like Aki’s dungeon. He’s probably going to make a home on Earth, but we’ll see how that goes.

It’s funny to see how I’ve kept the core of each of those and yet the final outcome is very far from what I thought it would be. At one point, I expected the flight across Zon to include Rissa’s group, but it made far more sense in the end to have them get stuck on Lyka (for several reasons).

Overall, I think I’m relatively happy with this one, though the final sequence (traveling through the demon-infested cities alone) was difficult to make as interesting as I wanted. I’m still not sure I succeeded.

I’d planned more interaction with Ceney (the armorsmith princess) but that simply didn’t work out. If I do an edit, I might add a scene where he actually does go to her armor shop. The problem is … I don’t know what the point would be, really. He doesn’t need anything from there; it would simply end up being a way to meet her earlier and make it a bit less of a coincidence when they leave Zon together. Maybe that’s enough of a reason.

I hope I managed to give a sense of history, both known and lost, for Zon without drowning you in it. I did a bunch of worldbuilding on what happened there in the past, but there’s no way that was all going to fit. It’s a hard balance to keep because I know that different people have different levels of appetite for it; some people really appreciate all the details and want more while others just want me to get on with the story. It’s just like when I get into the inner workings of magic…

On a similar note: Yes, Serenity did change history. If he went back and checked, the map he copied no longer matches the one Duke Lowpeak has because Serenity’s didn’t change. Hopefully this gives an idea for just how weird Time magic can be, especially with an Unbound Child of Time running around.

I’m very happy with the scenes on Berinath; I really liked showing the touristy side of the universe. I doubt it will ever some up, so I’ll just tell you here: Berinath orbits Tzintkra.

As you can probably guess, the next arc (tentatively titled Corrupted Divinity) takes us into the Church of Aeons on Lyka and Aeon. For now, all I want to say on the topic is that Lykandeon and Serenity don’t see eye to eye on pretty much anything, so it should be a properly bumpy ride.

See you there!

~Lillene