Below is a chapter rewrite from Book 1: The Raven Dreams of The Raven Dreams Trilogy. If you’d like to read the original series, you can get it here.
I finished rewriting The Raven Dreams: Book One a little while ago.
I sat with it quietly for a moment. Something meaningful had completed itself. And I needed to feel it fully before beginning The Raven Wars: Book Two.
Thirteen years ago, I wrote The Raven Dreams: Book One for the first time as someone who was living through her own descent. I didn’t have the words for what I was walking through then. The story carried it all instead. The darkness, the not-knowing, the searching for ground to stand on. It came out of me through story because it had nowhere else to go.
To come back to it now, after all of that, after the returning, and rewrite it from a place of genuine power has been one of the most healing things I have ever done as a writer and as a person. Seeing the world deepen. Watching the characters expand into territory I couldn’t have taken them before. Understanding, finally, why I wrote this story in the first place.
It was always about descent. And it was always about return.
This is the last chapter I can share with you from The Raven Dreams: Book One rewrite, without giving away how it ends. And it feels right that it’s this one.
The climax.
She has been taken from the cells beneath the Enforcement by a Tempest. No food, no water for days. No access to Meditation, the quiet inner practice that keeps her grounded. Her body and energy are depleted.
“Where are you taking me?” Eva asked as he forced her out of the torch-lit tunnel.
The Tempest didn’t answer. Eva struggled to keep her footing with his long strides. He pulled her through the front doors of the prison and up to the main streets. The roads were eerily quiet.
She notices everything even now. Even half-starved, even being dragged through the streets of Dysmortia, her mind is working. She remembers the explosion from weeks before. She thinks of Simon and why he went cold after it happened.
And then, like a blade sliding between her ribs, the truth finally cut through.
It was the explosion. That single, cataclysmic moment had shifted something inside Simon. Everything strange, everything cold and distant that had followed — it had all begun in that moment.
She understands it now. Too late, or so it feels.
It doesn’t matter, Eva’s mind answered bitterly. He abandoned you, and there’s no excuse for that.
I love this about her. She holds compassion and anger simultaneously. Understanding and grief. She doesn’t let herself off the hook and she doesn’t let anyone else off it either. That’s someone who has come to know her worth, even when her mind wants to spiral into stories of why she isn’t.
The streets around her are filled with human slaves. Broken, bruised, working in silence.
They didn’t dare look at Eva as she passed. They didn’t look at anything but the task before them.
She sees them. In the middle of everything happening to her, she sees them. It’s the survival that makes you look only at what is directly in front of you. Eva recognizes it because she’s nearly there herself. Her body is failing with each step toward the Enforcement’s towering spire.
Days without food or water, and far longer without the quiet refuge of Meditation, had finally caught up to her. And the dark magic grew stronger with each step, weighing her down even more.
Eva’s mind drifted to her companions still trapped in the cold cells below. To every other prisoner who had been dragged here, broken, and tortured. To her family, far away, wondering if she was even still alive.
I’ve failed them. I’ve failed everyone. I’ll never see Isaak again. Hazel…
Her stomach tightened. This time, she swallowed hard to keep the bile down.
This is the thing about Eva that I have always loved. She doesn’t want to be the hero. She never asked for any of this. But when her mind goes somewhere in the darkest moment, it doesn’t go to herself. It goes to everyone she might have failed.
The Tempest stops without warning.
The halt was abrupt, and Eva’s thoughts were still drifting through the gloom of the cells when she slammed hard into the Tempest’s back. The impact jolted her to a sudden, jarring halt. She stumbled, catching herself against his armored shoulders.
Before them, a large, dark tower loomed atop the Enforcement, the pinnacle of Eva’s prophecy. Its double doors swung open at their approach, revealing a hallway wrapped in smooth black marble. The Tempest pulled Eva through the daunting entryway into the dimly lit corridors.
This is where The Raven Dreams: Book One leaves you until the republish.
On the threshold of the thing Eva feared most. Walking toward it, not because she chose it, but because the story has carried her here one impossible step at a time. She didn’t want this. She never wanted any of it. And she walks through the doors anyway.
There is still revision work ahead before the full republication, which I’m working toward. But the rewrite itself—the deepening, the returning to this world with new eyes—is done. Sharing it with you along the way has meant a lot to me.
Next time, we begin The Raven Wars: Book Two.
The darkness Eva and her companions thought they had faced begins to return. Slowly at first. A shadow where there shouldn’t be one. An illusion that feels more real than the truth. The bonds between them will be asked to hold more weight than Book One ever required.
The prologue is where we will begin.
Thank you for reading!
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Read all the chapter shares and behind-the-scenes from Book One and Book Two here.
If you’d like to read the original version of The Raven Dreams to see how the story evolves and changes in the rewrite, you can get a copy here.
Some journeys ask us to go deeper than we expected. If you’re in one of those seasons, I’d be honored to sit with you through the cards.
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