---

It's coming.

Today is the day that I "kill my darling," literally.

It's so close that I burst into tears on the last sentence of the chapter I completed yesterday. I didn't have the heart to fill it with exposition just yet, but here's the barebones:
 

Xelcia turned to Lyria and offered a sympathetic smile. The young woman had paled significantly and was lightly touching her face, the mark shining as bright as the illuminated quartz pillars that surrounded them.

“It seems your arrival to my Isles this day was ordained by the Diviner, my lady.”

Lyria closed her eyes for a long moment as she considered her own thoughts, then knelt by the plainscat.

“Ari, release him. The Magisters can take him from here. Go back to Astana, look after Cael and Marcus.”

The plainscat offered a rumbling growl in response, but grudgingly climbed off the man’s body then barred her passage as she tried to enter the gate.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll be back soon,” she smiled tremulously, then pushed past the cat and stepped into the swirling vortex.

Xelcia watched in silence as the woman’s blonde hair disappeared into the nothingness, as the cat bowed its head with a forlorn mew then peered up at her with glimmering, tear-swept eyes. Clearing her throat, she turned to Alysse and Brell.

“We’d best return this noble beast to Astana and inform Lord Cael. Brell, bring the book.”

 

 

Ahhhh, just copy-and-pasting that here has set me off again.

I mean, it has no context! But this is the beginning of my breaking heart.

Sleep came hard last night, as I lay there trapped in my imagination and how I was going to hurt my poor fictional people. And how it's going to END soon. I can't bear it to end. But it has to end. That's the whole point of this. To end it. HAHA! Then start on the next and break myself again alongside new fictional people.

Well, not entirely new. My planned four-book series is set over a thousand years. But, the spirit/demon is in all four of them. An unlikely girl is in all four of them -- in fact, she's the main character for Book Two. And of course, there's the mystery of the red-haired curse. When I wrote the last chapter yesterday, I at last came up with a backstory for the curse. Which I guess was always there to begin with, but I finally actually saw it.

It's an homage to my very first iteration of the story. Which makes me happy in a bittersweet way. 😅

Anyway, last night I made the mistake of trying to start the next chapter, wrote two paragraphs and cried myself silly right before bedtime. And that's my goal for today -- complete this "Final Conflict" chapter, WHICH ISN'T EVEN THE HEARTBREAKING ONE. The heartbreaking one is after this one. And I'm already dying.

Here's my checklist from the last Maynia Update post, bold and italicised is what I'm up to today:

 

• The little girl at the Sundered Isles needs to have her moment.
• A spirit will be taken advantage of which leads the way into the rest of the series and is really the whole point of the series.
• Someone is betrayed.
• The final moment........
• The chapter my heart breaks.
• The Final Chapter.
• A tiny epilogue.

 

 

Flickering mage-lights danced across the dusty old pages of a tome unopened for centuries. The scrawl was faint, barely legible, and what few paragraphs could be deciphered spoke of what they already knew. The red hair is cursed. High Magister Xelcia slammed it closed and flicked her wrist, directing the useless book to insert itself back into the library shelf from whence it came from.

She briefly closed her eyes then snapped them open again. There would be no relief. Whether awake or asleep, what lurked behind closed eyes remained the same after all these years: black sands and twisted red hair fell as blood and formed sanguine rivers across lifeless sand, and across the desolate wastes the woman’s voice laughed and laughed in eternal trills. Was the Serin controlling these visions or did they manifest in response to her ever-increasing presence? It seemed more the latter and that was disturbing in upon itself. She needed to find the answers to this madness — soon — before it drove her completely mad.

 

 

Can't share too much -- we're near the END!!!!!! 😂

Though, if you're curious... a few bits of my story were inspired by the daily five-minute #freewrite, hosted by @mariannewest. And, well, this is where I'm leading to today:

Day 535, Prompt: Portal

 

Can I finish this damned thing before the end of May/Maynia? 😉 Wish me luck!
(Not that I'm stopping if I don't finish then. I'll take mid-June too! This will be done.)

 

HAPPY MAYNIA! 🍻