I guess, in a way, Viggo did break Humphrey’s piece during the final battle. But instead of killing him, he broke his spirit instead when he killed Runt. Humphrey’s grief over Runt was going to be the cause of something big going forward so I wanted to take a lot of time to fully flesh out just how badly Runt’s death affected him. Plus, it made Kate’s uplifting monologue even more meaningful.

Speaking of which, Kate’s monologue in chapter twenty-four wasn’t too hard to come up with. I really just thought about what Humphrey meant to her and the impact he had on her life. Kate’s monologue is one of my favorite moments in all six storied because of how true and heartfelt it is.

As for Viggo, these last three chapters with him underwent some pretty big changes, which I’ll get to when I talk about his redemption. When I was writing the beginning of chapter twenty-five, I tried my best to make it sound fairly accurate given I know nothing about snake bites or how antivenom works or what exactly happens to the flesh in the area that’s bitten or who long recovery takes, which depends on the severity of the bite. I knew, of course that it depends on the type of snake, which is why I tried to keep it as vague as I could while still covering what was going on in enough detail. I also ended up pushing the events of this chapter out a month in the timeline because I knew I would have to allow Viggo to have time to recover somewhat.

Originally, Robert was supposed to have either been captured or killed during the final battle along with all of Viggo’s men. Viggo, being completely alone, would go wandering outside of Jasper and come across these two guys named Mark and Joseph who had their own kind of “army” and were working on building some kind of device or something. Viggo would’ve been recruited by them until they tried to kill him. However, as you can see, there were numerous problems with this idea, and it was simpler to just have Robert survive than trying to sort this mess out. These two guys just come up out of nowhere and are already a huge threat. I never got farther on what the project actually was than the fact that it was dangerous. It made so much more sense to have Robert betray him instead.