beyond the wide world's end

“Good news, bad news time,” Natasha said as Steve finally levered himself to his feet and then held his hand out to her.

“Good news,” Steve said as he hauled her upright, “the drones are all dead.”

“Bad news,” Natasha said, sliding her baton back into her harness, “got attacked by drones.”

“Good news,” Steve said, “Howard Stark’s bag of magic tricks still works. Bad news: he never fixed the problem where it fried all our kit, not just the bad guys’.”

“Good news,” Natasha said, “found out what Hammer and Sterns were after.”

“Bad news,” Steve said, “it was the Project Rebirth files.”

Six months after the Snap, Earth is slowly putting itself back together, or at least trying to fit its shattered pieces into a semi-functional whole. For Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers, and the surviving Avengers, who have spent that time cloistered in New Asgard keeping an eye on King Loki and his people, this means new and old enemies, familiar faces, and coming back to the world – or not.

A prequel to On Yonder Hill.

Loki’s first warning that something interesting was going to happen was when Mobius said, “Oh, shit,” and tried to steer Loki down the nearest corridor.

Loki wasn't the only Asgardian variant the TVA brought in with the intention of hunting down their rogue, but the problem with Asgardians is that they're Asgardians.

Months after Ezra Bridger vanished into the depths of the mysterious Jedi temple on Lothal, he reappears -- with Kanan Jarrus in tow. All Hera Syndulla and the other surviving members of the Ghost crew want is to retrieve their missing teammates, but a Jedi who can raise the dead is a prize too great for the Empire to pass up. Palpatine will do anything to get Ezra and the secrets he carries -- secrets that may allow the Emperor to control reality itself.

Ten years after she vanished during an Imperial raid on a Twi'lek colony, Cham Syndulla sees his daughter Hera for the first time in a hologram -- now wearing the uniform of an Imperial agent and apparently working closely with a human Inquisitor. All Cham wants to do is to bring his long-missing child home to what remains of her family, but he soon finds that Hera Syndulla is only interested in two things: her duty to the Empire and her loyalty to her crew, a mismatched collection of outcasts brought together by Hera and her pet Inquisitor.

With Cham and the Rebel agent known as Fulcrum in pursuit, a new mission takes Hera and the crew of the Ghost to the planet Lothal, where a chance meeting with a Force-sensitive teenager awakens something long buried in the Inquisitor once known as Kanan Jarrus...and has dire consequences for Hera, their crew, the Empire, and the fledgling Rebel Alliance.

Ten years after she vanished during an Imperial raid on a Twi'lek colony, Cham Syndulla sees his daughter Hera for the first time in a hologram -- now wearing the uniform of an Imperial agent and apparently working closely with a human Inquisitor. All Cham wants to do is to bring his long-missing child home to what remains of her family, but he soon finds that Hera Syndulla is only interested in two things: her duty to the Empire and her loyalty to her crew, a mismatched collection of outcasts brought together by Hera and her pet Inquisitor.

With Cham and the Rebel agent known as Fulcrum in pursuit, a new mission takes Hera and the crew of the Ghost to the planet Lothal, where a chance meeting with a Force-sensitive teenager awakens something long buried in the Inquisitor once known as Kanan Jarrus...and has dire consequences for Hera, their crew, the Empire, and the fledgling Rebel Alliance.

It has been well over a year and I finally finished writing this.  I’m really sorry, guys, I have no idea why it took so long.  Here is how Dark Bishop and Knightfall, the second two books in the theoretical Gambitverse trilogy, would have gone.

Queen’s Gambit is structured somewhat oddly because it was written and plotted to fill two distinct and contradictory positions: the second book in one trilogy (the Ouroboros series) and the first book in another trilogy (the theoretical Gambitverse series).  The universe in the Gambitverse existed before the Wake characters arrived; it will continue to exist now that they’ve gone.  The story hasn’t concluded, and for that reason there are a number of plot threads that weren’t tied up or that were introduced near the end of Gambit, because they were intended to lead into the second and third books.

I promised that when Gambit had finished I would write up the events that I knew of in the second and third books -- Dark Bishop and Knightfall, respectively.  There’s a good chance that this says more about the way that I plot and write than it does about what was actually intended to occur in the remainder of the trilogy; I usually write to and around what I call “keystone scenes” -- flashes of visuals or, occasionally, dialogue that stand out for me.  They don’t always end up in the story in its final form, but using them is often what I’m structuring the plot around.  I didn’t do extensive plot work on Dark Bishop and Knightfall since I knew I wasn’t going to be writing either one, but I do know a handful of the keystone scenes and plot threads in each one.

Queen’s Gambit opens with Queen Amidala essentially occupying Count Dooku’s canonical position as head of the Confederacy; it ends with her in Leia’s position at the end of A New Hope: as a queen in exile (though still head of the Confederacy, at least in name).  In some ways Gambit was supposed to be kind of a fakeout; the basic set-up implies that it’s going to be a take-off of the PT/TCW, but the bait and switch at the end -- the introduction of Palpatine’s New Galactic Empire -- is to actually set it up as a mirror to the OT, a thread meant to be carried through the second and third books.  Exact parallel?  By no means.  But it was something I was thinking about.

Ten years after she vanished during an Imperial raid on a Twi'lek colony, Cham Syndulla sees his daughter Hera for the first time in a hologram -- now wearing the uniform of an Imperial agent and apparently working closely with a human Inquisitor. All Cham wants to do is to bring his long-missing child home to what remains of her family, but he soon finds that Hera Syndulla is only interested in two things: her duty to the Empire and her loyalty to her crew, a mismatched collection of outcasts brought together by Hera and her pet Inquisitor.

With Cham and the Rebel agent known as Fulcrum in pursuit, a new mission takes Hera and the crew of the Ghost to the planet Lothal, where a chance meeting with a Force-sensitive teenager awakens something long buried in the Inquisitor once known as Kanan Jarrus...and has dire consequences for Hera, their crew, the Empire, and the fledgling Rebel Alliance.

Ten years after she vanished during an Imperial raid on a Twi'lek colony, Cham Syndulla sees his daughter Hera for the first time in a hologram -- now wearing the uniform of an Imperial agent and apparently working closely with a human Inquisitor. All Cham wants to do is to bring his long-missing child home to what remains of her family, but he soon finds that Hera Syndulla is only interested in two things: her duty to the Empire and her loyalty to her crew, a mismatched collection of outcasts brought together by Hera and her pet Inquisitor.

With Cham and the Rebel agent known as Fulcrum in pursuit, a new mission takes Hera and the crew of the Ghost to the planet Lothal, where a chance meeting with a Force-sensitive teenager awakens something long buried in the Inquisitor once known as Kanan Jarrus...and has dire consequences for Hera, their crew, the Empire, and the fledgling Rebel Alliance.

Ten years after she vanished during an Imperial raid on a Twi'lek colony, Cham Syndulla sees his daughter Hera for the first time in a hologram -- now wearing the uniform of an Imperial agent and apparently working closely with a human Inquisitor. All Cham wants to do is to bring his long-missing child home to what remains of her family, but he soon finds that Hera Syndulla is only interested in two things: her duty to the Empire and her loyalty to her crew, a mismatched collection of outcasts brought together by Hera and her pet Inquisitor.

With Cham and the Rebel agent known as Fulcrum in pursuit, a new mission takes Hera and the crew of the Ghost to the planet Lothal, where a chance meeting with a Force-sensitive teenager awakens something long buried in the Inquisitor once known as Kanan Jarrus...and has dire consequences for Hera, their crew, the Empire, and the fledgling Rebel Alliance.