Martin at last gets a little time alone, although cooking to death might be the cost. His first look at what once was the fortress at Brewer’s Ford is sobering. But maybe he has friends he didn’t know about before. And Elena says something that you should pay attention to.
What is moving Martin now?
It’s an odd double life, writing Episode 23 while trying to move Episode 21 to “ready”. Knowing that as soon as I send this installment into the world I’ll find a fatal flaw. But I’ve gone over Episode 21 enough times to know it’s pretty damn tight. As tight as I’m going to make it anyway.
Meanwhile, for the patrons, the rest of Bags’ backstory is coming real soon, I promise. We just have to cross a certain spoiler line in the main narrative first.
Interesting that mention in your last post about mysteries that Martin could be wrong, because this “new” assertion that the destruction of Brewer’s Fort was meant to kill them all. From the original publication, I viewed the Soul Thieves as precipitating all their delays, so that they could see the destruction of the fort at the Soul Thieves’ hands. This line of thought was further corroborated by the new details in the new version about Martin’s near brush with death with the broken bosun chair: The Soul Thieves did wish to delay them, and so washed out the bridge, but then also took the opportunity to try to kill Martin.
It makes me happy to discuss the story like this.
I had to go back for a quick review of the episode before responding; to be honest I hadn’t considered your interpretation of the original MR&HBI version, which might have been a “we’ll give you one chance to join us before we crush you, and just look how easily we can do that” message. That would be pretty cool, actually. And I reserve the right to steal that idea for future developments.
But in this case if that’s the message the Soul Thieves wished to send, it would seem that Martin did not interpret the signs correctly.