Author's note:

            This story was written to give me the opportunity to explore certain concepts as well as to snip off some loose threads from my previous works involving Iain Grey and some others. As such, there is a lot more discussion in this story than is found in others of my works. Up front, I'll also admit that there is an overriding plot arc and pretty much as soon as I started writing the characters started doing their own thing (as usual) and shot that pretty much to hell.

            There will be references to previous characters and events, in many cases without me bothering to recap them. I decided not to do the recaps because the events should be familiar if the reader has read my previous works and, if not, the references, while important to the part they appear in, are not critical to the primary story arc.

            Having said that, also understand that I will be using some of my favorite characters with the most developed personalities, and they tend to do things that not even I expect. That includes Iain, and he's supposed to be me, but in hindsight I can look at the decisions he made and say,  yeah, I'd have made 98% of them too. So I guess it's accurate in that.

            Chapter sizes are going to vary because while I'd like to stay near my ten thousand words per chapter as usual, sometimes the breaks are such that I can't do that and I'd rather post a shorter chapter than a twenty thousand word monstrosity.

                                                            Kerrik