The (Deleted) Battle for Revance

It’s not often that I gather the guts to share something like this.

It’s one of the problems of being a writer, especially when it comes to novels. So much of the process, so much of the “making of” and the behind-the-scenes work is and MUST remain hidden from the world, both at the time of creation and long after it. Spoilers must be avoided. Out of context lines must not be presented as such, or they’ll lose the power they once had, and that which ends up on the cutting room floor must stay there, for it no longer can have any association with the final piece.

But today I’m opening up my archives to bring you one of the larger chunks that didn’t make it into the final version of Molten Flux. If you’re yet to read the novel, I suggest you stop reading this and go read the book itself, for everything after this point will be considered a spoiler.

Have you done that? Good, and so quickly as well! Nice work!

Anyway, what I’d like to present to you today is the battle for Revance, the scene of the actual mutiny where Tyrag and the Locusts finally gain control of the walking fortress and set off the course of events that would lead to its destruction. In this accompanying blog post, I’m also going to share my thoughts on why it was removed, and some insight into Molten Flux’s development as a narrative.

Firstly, lets talk about the scenes themselves and why they got removed.

These three chapters are battle heavy. Even with the siege of Iroka that was soon to follow, at the time, I felt these were the most frantic moments of action for Ryza and his squad in the book. The fighting is happening at close quarters between combatants armed with both rifles and magic, and even Origin ends up assisting Ryza in a mechanised duel with Maligar.

While it was a great deal of fun to write these chapters, they ultimately didn’t find a place in the final pages because I felt there was already enough battle to whet a reader’s appetite for violence.

The skirmish in the scrapyard early on in the book was the first look at Ryza’s new-found combat prowess when he was let off the lease, the duel with Ferrick in the undercity was a desperate brawl that had already led to the deaths of multiple important characters, and then the final fight against Tyrag’s Revance in Iroka was the main fight the book had been leading to.

This extra battle onboard Revance felt like it didn’t fit in. The rhythm of the plot beats didn’t quite allow it to happen with the stakes appropriately raised for it to feel important. When I was in the editing process, it just felt like things were happening and the characters they were happening to weren’t in any real danger because I’d just HAD those scenes of danger in the undercity.

This does neatly bring me to my next point about it. The scenes in the undercity were intense, and I don’t feel like I’m tooting my own horn too much for saying that much. There needed to be a bit of a lull in the action between them and the next fight for that eventual next fight to have the appropriate stakes, and the way I’d structured the plot simply didn’t allow for that.

I didn’t want to create space between the undercity and the return to Revance because it would’ve broken up the flow of the book as well, so I had to rewrite these scenes into a battle already lost. I’m actually quite happy with how this new version came out, as well. Up until this point in the book, Ryza had taken a beating at every turn, but he’d never been out and out defeated before he’d even started a fight, so I felt that the idea of returning to an already fallen Revance would give him that defeat and give his character an opportunity to grapple with how to bounce back from it.

The last big reason this scene got removed has to do with character as well. During these fights, Ryza takes on a leadership role he hasn’t yet earned in the narrative, and the other characters around him went along with him a bit too easily. Origin, as well, participated too much in the fight. In the final version of the book, Origin was always meant to be an observer of Ryza, yet here he fights alongside him like any other conscript would, using his rune-less manipulation of metal to a great and unquantifiable advantage that lowered the stakes simply by how powerful he was.

Also, as you read these chapters, keep in mind they haven’t been past my developmental editor or my proofreader, so I am the only one to blame for janky sentences or typos.

With that, I want to talk about the journey towards Molten Flux.

I’ve written in other blog posts about how it started as a side project away from The First Hytharo series, and that it originally wasn’t centred around the substance of molten flux, but I can share a little more of how much it changed between its first draft and its final published result.

Originally, not much planning had gone into its narrative. I was around 22 years old when I started it and wanted a place to explore all the machines and contraptions that could be created by Kretatics. I also wanted to write larger battles, things that didn’t have a place in Spiric’s story at the time, along with a plot that was centred around The Droughtlands for what it was in its current time, rather than exploring how it was in the time of the Hytharo or even those-of-glass.

The result had Ryza simply fighting on as a conscript whose ambitions were only matched by his bloodlust. In what little of the original outline that existed, Revance was never meant to fall into the hands of the smelters, and the finale was meant to have a convoy of smelters attack the fortress, and then that would be that. It was more focused on the action rather than Ryza’s development as a character, but I’m glad that I gave this story plenty of time to grow so he could grow along with it.

Origin went through a number of personalities after he was freed of having control of Revance. At first he spoke like any other character, before I changed his lines to be more solemn and less wordy. Eventually I reduced him down to an almost telepathic version of communication where he only spoke in haiku, to better reflect how personal Ryza’s connection with him was, almost to the point of showing Ryza as having lost his mind slightly.

Other changes included the fact that Ferrick never existed, the combat being more mechanised and tank focused, and Kyrea not being the industrial factory town it now is. The entire theme of a self-cannibalising military industrial complex wouldn’t have existed without it!

In the end, I’m quite happy with how it changed, because it resulted in a deeper story that could stick to its themes rather than a disconnected series of battles to trek between. I’m going to look to share more deleted scenes from other books in future, including more about the original version of Spiric’s story and even some thing from Blazing Flux, once that book has been out long enough that people have had a chance to read it.