I hear plenty of readers dunk on prologues all the time, and I’m well aware that a good number of readers will choose to skip them entirely, but epilogues don’t seem to get similar treatment. My personal theory is that’s because a reader who makes it to the end of your book should be invested to the point of wanting to know more, even if they’ve gotten the pay-off on the main story promises and the plot’s wrapped up—at least, that’s what compels me to keep reading.

It’s now been three-and-a-half-years since I published Petition, and even though I wrote the damned book, it’s tricky trying to remember exactly what was going through my head at the time of writing.

As readers, we generally perceive a book as a singular story because that’s how we encounter it, though I daresay maybe that’s changing a bit these days with serialization and more authors (commonly indie, but there are trad examples) choosing to issue revised editions.

As an author, however, ‘my book’ is a multitudinous entity: ‘book’ encompasses not just every draft I wrote, but also every sentence and paragraph that I wrote and then discarded; it is both the core conceit of the story I was trying to tell and every possible manifestation of that conceit I ever considered, written or unwritten; it is all of the physical and mental and emotional and spiritual states I experienced in the hours and days and weeks and months and years it took for me to claw that story out of my brain and put it onto the page.

(Sidebar: this is why gen AI hurts so much for authors and artists. What took us a lifetime—and it is a lifetime even if the ‘direct time spent’ working on a specific book or a piece of art might be measured in months or days, because when we create, we put our life experiences into what we create—has been stolen. Not only are gen AI companies actively profiting off of that stolen body of work without our consent and without compensating us, they openly admit that what they ‘do’ is impossible without what we do, yet they show neither respect nor remorse for their wrongdoings; in fact, they revel in them and relish how much it hurts us. I don’t hate the technology, but I do hate how it’s been developed and its misuses.)

I firmly believe that every book should tell a complete story so that’s how I wrote Petition: it is the complete story of Rahelu and how she successfully Petitioned the Houses. She had a goal, and she succeeds, albeit at a cost.

But also: I don’t like neat endings. They’re too tidy, too fairy-tale-like. Life is messy; so are my characters and my settings. I don’t wrap up every hint I drop or answer every question I raise because those things are not part of the specific story I was telling in Petition.

Rahelu is the main character of her story—but there are other stories, too; stories that she may (or may not) be part of. Rahelu and her story takes place in this setting with these other characters, but they do not exist for her sake. I mean, sure, they’re ultimately just figments of my imagination and thus hand of the author and all that, but, to me, it is very important that you, as a reader, feel this distinction when you read my work. Without that distinction, the book would feel hollow.

Anyway.

When I finished the alpha draft, there was no epilogue—the book just ended after Chapter 27. I had an XXX placeholder as the last sentence for a long time, because I kept feeling like there needed to be one more thing. In the end, I deleted that placeholder without ever writing another line to replace it.

Exit Rahelu. Lights down on the Sable Gull.

That’s it. That’s the story.

When I actually wrote the epilogue, it was several months later, after much plot hole wrangling. (Specifically: figuring out what the stupid magic rock does.) Consulting my notes, it was originally supposed to be a Lhorne POV, but it was structurally more elegant to stick with an Azosh-ek POV to close off the cultist arc for this book, so that’s what I wrote instead. (see note)

At the time, I was extremely unsure but ended up including the epilogue for two reasons:

• In Chapter 22, Rahelu and Lhorne kill two cultists but a third technically remains at large. There was no room in Chapters 23–27 to deal with that; from Rahelu’s perspective, she thinks of that task as done and dusted as of the opening of Chapter 23.
• Where Rahelu goes and what she does while she’s on mission as a Supplicant is the next part of her story. I deliberately left the nature of the mission itself vague, both for justified plot reasons (it is very ultra super duper top secret) and because I’m a discovery writer (I had worked out the broad strokes of what the mission was about, but zero details). But that lack of specificity does leave the reader on a very open-ended note, with no explicit “oh-my-god-what-is-going-to-happen-I-must-know” urge to read the next book in the series.

Another important distinction: while hooks and cliffhangers achieve the same purpose, they are not the same thing. Here’s how I define and delineate them.

Cliffhanger: book ends before a complete story has been told.

Hook: an intriguing hint at a new story, delivered after the conclusion of a complete story.

Both compel readers to pick up the next book, but one does so fairly (by extending an invitation) while the other does so punitively (by withholding something that was promised).

The epilogue both pays off and hints at the story to come (“what is with that stargem and those cultists?”) and it also raises the question of, “wait what how is Lhorne involved and what is he going to do?” in addition to “what’s that mission all about?” for the sequel.

If you wanted to, you could skip the epilogue to Petition. I’d prefer that you read it, but if you as a reader dislike all things that aren’t part of the main text (e.g. prologues, interludes, interstitals, epilogues, epigraphs, footnotes, appendices, etc) you would still get a full and complete story even only reading Chapters 1–27 of Petition.

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Note: yes, I totally planned for there to be Lhorne POVs and separate storyline in the sequel to Petition and no, the writing of book 2 really didn’t go to plan, but I’ll elaborate on all that when I write the next set of annotations for Supplicant.

So I’m sorry (possibly in advance, depending on when you’re reading these annotations) about teasing the Lhorne POVs/storyline in this epilogue and not delivering on that in Supplicant BUT I WILL IN BOOK 3. I am literally taking a break from the alpha draft of Dedicate to write these annotations, and the draft is currently up to the point of bridging what Lhorne did after Rahelu left him at the Sable Gull and showing up to find Azosh-ek with the stargem. (return to text)