The decision to bring the group to the sandstone cliffs was mainly because it was one of their last safe places to go and it was, again, another callback to an earlier story and another old location to go back and visit. The chess board was a massive piece of foreshadowing which I don’t really do, but when I got the idea for it, I couldn’t not do it. Having the pieces set up with the two kings in the middle was foreshadowing the climactic battle, where there’s Humphrey’s army on one side and Viggo’s army on the other side. And the two of them meet alone in the middle.

This was Viggo’s way of basically saying that this is how all of this will end, and he breaks Humphrey’s piece because he, of course, plans on it ending with Humphrey’s death. And in the end, that’s exactly what happens. When the climax starts, all of the wolves are waiting behind Humphrey and all of the humans are waiting behind Viggo with them facing each other alone in the valley. I also knew that I could make it work because Kenya was with the group and because she had been a pet for a long time, she would know some human things that the others wouldn’t, and that fact opened up some fun possibilities down the road.

Having Viggo ambush the group at the cliffs was something I did to drive the group from their last safe haven and force them to go back to the ruins of Humphrey’s pack, which was something I had planned from pretty early on. I wanted to bring them back to where everything began and of course for another callback.

Viggo’s origin story and his motives for wanting to kill Humphrey was probably the thing that had the most thought put into it out of all six of my stories. Even “The Lost Tale” didn’t have as much time and effort put into its making than Viggo’s backstory. I worked really hard to make sure that it made sense and was believable given the circumstances, what with the humans and wolves aging the same and all the history I had already created by the time the thought of his backstory came up.

I don’t remember exactly what I started thinking about that made me start putting his backstory together, whether it was putting him in A Hero’s Past or deciding it would be a cool plot twist if he was responsible for Kate and Humphrey’s trip to Idaho in the first movie. It grew from one of those two, but I can’t exactly remember the thought process that went into it, so I’ll just explain it in chronological order. I will say that age and passage of time was very hard to make work and a lot of timeline changes happened, but I was eventually able to get it to work. And of course, as the story progressed, I had to go back and change some minor details in A Hero’s Past to make it work, such as giving Jack a burn mark on his side, which was something that he didn’t have originally.

I knew something tragic had to happen to Viggo to give him such an intense hatred of wolves. He was obviously an avid outdoorsman so I decided that he and his parents would go out camping a lot. He had to be young when they died because of stuff that was setup in A Hero’s Past. It couldn’t be Humphrey for numerous reasons like the fact that by the time Humphrey would be old enough to kill them, the first movie would be happening. And it couldn’t have been Humphrey’s parents because they were omegas and never really went on hunts or patrol. So, it ended up being his grandparents. As for Viggo’s hometown, it ended up being the one where Kenya was taken to in A Hero’s Past simply because it was the only town located inside Jasper Park.

I also had to make sure to touch on all of Viggo’s abilities; his tracking, his intelligence, his martial art skill, so I did a short bit talking about his childhood and how he gained all those skills. It did end up making the timeline pretty tight because by that point, I had decided that Viggo would find the Central Pack and see Humphrey’s birth when he was twenty, so he would need to graduate high school early in order to get the proper amount of tracking and martial arts training he had at the time.

This is one of those times where I don’t exactly remember how I came up with something. Figuring out Viggo’s age and where he fit in the timeline is something I don’t remember much of. I knew he had to be older than Humphrey but after that, I can’t think of what I did to decide when he was born. I’m thinking that I didn’t want him to be too old in The Final War. Since he was older than Humphrey, that would put him at at least over forty-seven in The Final War, since that’s how old Humphrey was. He would still have needed to finish school and take time to acquire his skills, so I picked twenty as a good age for him to be when Humphrey was born, making him twenty years older than Humphrey, which I then used to figure out his birth year.

A Hero’s Past was long since finished by the time I started figuring out Viggo’s backstory, so explaining his placement in A Hero’s Past was easy enough since all I had to do describe what the Mysterious Man went through from his perspective. One little detail I included in A Hero’s Past was that I made sure to only have the Mysterious Man present in chapters with Humphrey in them. At first, I had wanted to put him at the end of every chapter, but then I decided to only do the ones with Humphrey to raise that question of “what does this guy want with Humphrey?”

Viggo’s original plan took a lot of thinking on how to make it work but still be believable. In the end, I did as best as I could and hoped it was good enough. It was definitely out there, and I figured the fact that he didn’t want to put himself in danger by trying to kidnap Humphrey and Kenya himself would make up for that.

Explaining Viggo’s specific hate for Humphrey was another thing I was worried wouldn’t be believable enough, again because of the circumstances. Viggo wanted to kill Jack and Mary for killing his parents, but since both of them, and Humphrey’s parents were dead, Adam, Humphrey, and Kenya were the next best options. Obviously, Adam was guarded by the rest of the pack, which would be suicide if Viggo went after him, so that was out. Kenya had already been adopted and at the time, Viggo wasn’t interested in getting into any legal trouble, so that was also out. That just left Humphrey, who at that point was lost somewhere in the woods.

This hate and want to kill Jack and Mary later turned into a want to destroy Humphrey’s entire pack, and Jack and Mary would just be the starting point, which also made his hate for Humphrey more believable since he was one of the last survivors.

As for why he hates Humphrey specifically, that’s because of another character trait I partially drew from myself. Viggo hates to be bested. He hates losing constantly and he hates being outsmarted, something that becomes very noticeable later on in The Final War. Humphrey constantly getting away from Viggo and escaping throughout A Hero’s Past and in the first movie continues to make him more and more frustrated because no matter what he seems to do, he can’t catch him. But Viggo’s not a quitter and doesn’t give up no matter what, which is why he keeps trying to go after Humphrey. His anger and frustration mixed with his perseverance is what creates his incredible hatred toward Humphrey.

Viggo thinks pretty highly of himself as well because he’s such a great hunter and tracker and is good at pretty much everything. So, when he sees that Humphrey continues to evade him, that frustration later turns to admiration because in his head, if Humphrey is good enough to constantly get away from him of all people, then that makes him a worthy opponent.

Another difficult thing to figure out was how Viggo wouldn’t get Humphrey when he was all alone after he was separated from Arnold. I first stopped Viggo with the freak storm that would later trap Humphrey under a tree. Obviously, since it was such a large storm, Viggo would be forced to stop and wait it out while Humphrey continued on.

Then I had to stop him from setting out early in the morning because Humphrey wouldn’t be found and saved by Kyle and Owen until midday and Viggo would surely catch up with him by then. So, I figured with a such a strong storm, Viggo’s belongings would be scattered around the area, so he would need to spend quite a bit of time cleaning it up and finding everything.

The last time I had to keep Viggo from getting Humphrey was after he was banished from the Northern Pack. By that time, Viggo had been camping outside the pack for a year and was right there when Humphrey went out on his own. I ended up relying on dangerously low visibility. Having it be a pitch-black night in the middle of the woods, Viggo would’ve needed to stop and set up camp for his own safety.

This whole time, I knew that at some point in Viggo’s history, he served in the military, hence his fit, healthy body and general habit of keeping in shape. I figured the seventeen-year time jump from Humphrey’s acceptance into the Western Pack to the first movie (the fact that it ended up being seventeen years again was completely coincidental), would be the perfect time for Viggo to not only serve in the military for a little bit, but also build his feared reputation as The Wolfslayer. And this, of course, is the moment when the audience finally finds out that Viggo and The Wolfslayer are one and the same.

There are a couple of times throughout the story where I drop a small hint of redemption in Viggo. One of those times is in this chapter, when Viggo says he felt strangely proud at seeing Humphrey grown up after he returned to the Western Pack. One short moment where he didn’t feel an intense hate for him and had a bit of humanity slip through.

Another thing I was excited to reveal was the twist that Viggo is the one responsible for Kate and Humphrey’s trip to Idaho in the first movie, and better yet, he was there the whole time, always arriving just after the camera cuts away, or always standing just off screen. It was fairly easy to put him in the movie, without him being in the movie. I literally just put him in the fourth wall. The train scene is the best example because there’s one shot where Kate and Humphrey get on the train as it passes by, and I had Viggo standing just behind where the camera was.

Newest Additions was a scrapped story about Kate’s pregnancy and the formation of the Rogue Wolves in the months after the first movie. But I didn’t have enough ideas and wasn’t all that motivated to do it, so I scrapped it, but still consider the ideas I did have to still have happened. Kate would’ve obviously been unable to hunt so I figured Humphrey would have to do it for her. Also, their law-breaking marriage would’ve angered some wolves who would eventually break off and become the Rogue Wolves.

Viggo framing Humphrey for the murder of a wolf to try and get him banished is one reason why I scrapped this story. I was hard pressed for ideas for the climax and a way to cause the Rogue Wolves to split, which ended up turning into what I got. However, I’m okay with it still having happened because with the story scrapped, the details around it can be very vague, and now I can just say that somehow, Viggo was able to do it instead of having to explain how he did it in more detail than that. Stinky’s namesake ended up coming from that as well, since he was able to uncover a faint hint of Viggo’s scent. However, once I actually decided to write the story, all that got scrapped and became irrelevant anyway.