Aftermath

FAQs

Eight months after the very first chapter released, we are still being asked questions regarding various aspects of this fic. Myself and my co-writers have convened once more and brought together the questions that we have been asked most frequently and conjured some answers

Some of these questions we expected and some we did not. I have formatted them so that they are listed in the order that they are most asked

It's like a game of truth or dare with some of these XD

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Q: Is there going to be a sequel to this story?

A: We did think about it, actually. Alli has a thing for Tygren, so she very much insisted that we do not kill him at the end as originally planned (I'm not convinced she knows that we strangled him a bit in Achillean's death chapter). With that, we obviously left it open-ended, and we did consider it for a while. We never actually said we wouldn't, but thinking ahead, it is possible that we would hit a few roadblocks in terms of what the plotline would be and how it would end.

It's still possible, and I think Joe is into the idea, but it would require so much more thought than this one

Q: Is Senn the new Voltaris Master?

A: No. Now this is a question we get asked a lot. In canon, Senn becomes the Voltaris Master because there's basically no Voltaris left – he is the last one following the Deathsinger. In AM, none of that happened, so there are still some Voltaris lingering about back in Hailstone. Senn went back to go and return Voltar to someone who might be able to take on the leadership themselves while he processes everything that he found out over the course of this story. Who knows? Maybe he gets there, and he decides that actually he'd like to give it a try. If we were to write a sequel, it would be based at least a few years, maybe a decade or two, following this plotline where maybe he is the Master XD

Q: Ingressus is nowhere near the canon character he is. Why did you make him less evil?

A: Oh now, this one I like. Between the three of us, we psychologically analysed Ingressus' canon character perhaps a bit more than we should have done. When writing this, we wanted to keep the characters as close to canon as possible, and we deduced that, by separating Ingressus from the Deathsinger, we have two characters as opposed to one – the Deathsinger is the evil monster under the Prime Songs' influence, as we know from S3 Ep8 when he tells Senn about their "irresistible allure" and how they "corrupt your very nature." Ingressus is the normal Voltaris Ardoni who is just a bit broken inside from all the crap he's had to go through as a child. We had it so that Achillean was the only person who could get through to him, try as he might to seclude his inner self. Without the Prime Songs, Ingressus is himself and he doesn't know how to deal with it, which of course only gets worse when Achillean is killed because, when he gets stuck, he falls back to what he knows best, and when one of those options is revoked, he has very little left to help him.

Basically, we told the story using Ingressus for the most part. Not the Deathsinger. (Exceptions being the first 6 chapters and the final 3)

Q: Why did you kill Achillean?

A: Oh gosh, alright. Full disclosure, we wanted the shock factor in the story and Achillean is almost everyone's favourite character – mine included. Did we kill him just for the hell of it? Perhaps. But it played its part in Ingressus' character development and his shift in relationships for the story to continue. I can't say I was a fan of the idea, but we went with it and, despite the sheer amount of doubt that festered for weeks, we stuck with it, and it worked. We had a backup chapter just in case it didn't go down well, and we could make the plotline work with Achillean alive for a bit longer – he was always going to die based on the Nether-time effects that we gave Ingressus as well, but he needn't have been killed.