As I’ve been doing the past two weeks, I’m going to tackle three separate things in this blog post. Firstly, chapter three of Loyalty Fallen: The Desert Crossing is now live, and you can read it here. In this chapter, Lenore has a strange experience with an old friend of her brother’s who may now be an enemy, and Trista grapples with Illian’s eccentric demands.

On to the main topic of the post, which is going to be about foreshadowing in Loyalty Fallen. If you’re not sure how to foreshadow in your own novel, hopefully you get some ideas from this post, though I’m by no means an expert. However, there will be spoilers ahead for books two and three of Loyalty Fallen. If you’re keeping up with the story and you don’t want spoilers, I suggest you skip down to the NaNoWriMo week three update section. Otherwise, read on.

Seeing the future

So, what exactly is foreshadowing? According to Google’s AI summary: “Foreshadowing is a literary device that hints at future events in a story. It can be subtle or obvious, and is used to create suspense and keep readers engaged.”

For example, in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy (spoiler), Kelsier’s demise is foreshadowed multiple times in the first book. Just one example is when he asks Sazed about one of the religions that seemed the strongest, and that religion was based on a dead martyr. Kelsier seemed fascinated by the fact that death could motivate people so strongly. Later, the characters in the novel also remember this conversation and point to how Kelsier always planned to allow himself to die at the hands of the Lord Ruler.

Some of the best foreshadowing in my opinion occurs when it’s not obvious at all until the payoff comes. When the event that was being foreshadowed occurs, it’s extremely satisfying to look back and realize there were a dozen different little hints here and there that were easy to miss but seem obvious in retrospect.

Foreshadowing in Loyalty Fallen

In The Sapphire Prince, the main instance of foreshadowing occurs when Kathryn expresses that she can’t handle wine. Apparently, it makes her tired. Later, this is referenced after Lorrin is poisoned and she is used as the scapegoat for his murder. Ren points out that the person who poisoned Lorrin must have known Kathryn didn’t drink wine, or else they would have risked poisoning her as well, which would have of course made it impossible for them to implicate her in the murder of her husband.

In The Desert Crossing, there are several instances of foreshadowing.

1. Calix’s love for studying poisons becomes an important plot point that foreshadows the eventual conflict of the third book, when a pervasive poison fills all of the wells in Tephrayana.
2. Ren’s discussions with Zafiyah, who initially assumes he is a slave, foreshadow both his eventual enslavement and his internal conflict with autonomy vs. service.
3. Chance’s ability to speak Tephrayan and his knowledge of the country and landscape foreshadow the eventual reveal that he was once a slave in Tephraya.

Subverting expectations

It’s also possible to foreshadow something and then completely go against your own foreshadowing. For example, let’s say your young protagonist is about to go into battle with his mentor at his side and says something like, “I don’t know what I would do without you.” The clear indication from what we’re used to seeing in fiction is that the mentor is probably going to die.

If you leave the mentor alive, you’ve already subverted expectations. If you go a step further and kill off the character that usually is the protagonist, like a young apprentice, you can really throw your audience for a loop.

In the case of Loyalty Fallen, I initially planned to kill off Brenin in the first book. But if you’ve read through the first book, you already know that didn’t happen, and I don’t plan on killing him off later either. Instead, I decided I would throw out some nice death flags and hints that he’s going to die, just so people are surprised when I don’t go for the generic mentor death and apprentice revenge arc.

If you’re curious about more ways to foreshadow effectively or subvert expectations, I highly recommend you watch this video from Brandon McNulty.

NaNoWriMo week 3 update

With that done, it’s time to see how far I’ve come with my novel, Ashbranded. I’ve nearly reached 70,000 words and I’m still going strong with the plan to finish the first draft of the entire novel by the end of the month.

In the meantime, please continue to read Loyalty Fallen and subscribe to the blog to get updated when new chapters go live!