We’re coming to the end of these author commentaries, but there’s one last thing about the Alex Verus series that I want to talk about: the ending. And by ending, I mean the very end: the ‘Epilogue’ chapter at the end of Risen.
Assuming you’ve read Risen (if you haven’t, you should DEFINITELY stop reading this post, and this series, right now), you’ll know how the Verus series ends. But there were a lot of other ways it could have gone. In particular, there were two alternate endings to the Alex Verus series that I considered:
- Alternate Ending 1: Events unfold as they did at the end of Risen, but instead of retiring, Alex uses his new powers to reshape the Council, and the country as a whole.
- Alternate Ending 2: Alex dies at the end of Risen. This single change causes a domino effect that triggers a long chain of increasingly bad consequences.
Originally I was planning to make maybe two blog posts out of this, but once I started writing, I quickly realised that it was going to be much longer. Both of these two endings would be multiple chapters (if not a whole book) if I actually wrote them for real. I’m obviously not going to do that (I’ve got a new series to write!) but even if I only sketched out the endings in summary form, that still didn’t cover the question of why I didn’t choose them, and why I thought the current ending was better. And before I could do that, I’d have to explain what I meant by ‘better’ in the first place, which means discussing what I think makes an ending good or bad.
So at the moment, my plan for this mini-series is as follows:
- On The Subject Of Endings (Index Post)
- Consistency
- Theme
- Alternate Ending 1: Total Victory
- Why I Didn’t Choose the “Total Victory” Ending
- Alternate Ending 2: Bad Things Happen
- Why I Didn’t Choose the “Bad Things Happen” Ending
- Conclusion
. . . which adds up to two months or so of posts, not counting any weeks I take off to do news updates about the new series or Ask Lunas or something. So this is going to take a while, but I think by the time it’s done, a lot of your questions about the ending of the Alex Verus series will be answered.
We’ll start next week!
This sounds fascinating. 🙂 I confess I expected Alex to die at the end. Alternatively, I thought well, there are two open senior council seats (Sal Sarque and Levistus) and there are Alex and Richard, soooo… kind of a compromise ending to the war. Not that Richard wants to share power. I also hoped for change in the laws to make it more fair to adepts (and apprentices.)
I totally get the epilogue but i choose to assume that was meant for other readers. Maybe I’m just a miserable git and wanted death haha
anyway great stuff!
I‘ve just reread Risen and am wondering if Alex is truly alive. I mean, of course he is but I wonder with the fateweaver now integrated into his body, is his heart actually still beating? With the dragon‘s prophecy, that Alex would not survive, this would be an elegant solution, almost like a Schrödinger‘s cat.
Loved the ending, but I’m eagerly looking forward to reading anything and everything about the Verus world! This series will always be on my Best of the Best list!
Love this series, I was relatively late to the party having found Fated in a rubbish clearance I did early last year! Rescued it and gave it a try, not my usual genre,but was instantly hooked and bought the rest of the series immediately, looking forward to your upcoming posts and thoughts in the alternate endings, thank you for giving me sone respite from my own personal battles, I found Alex very relatable and burned through the pages on the first read. Brilliant.