The dessert arc has interesting origins. I'd actually sketched its broad strokes thought out before volume 1 ever reached Royal Road, and at the time it was meant to come somewhere in the middle of volume 2. I had a pretty poor sense of word and chapter count, back then. You might be stunned to know that the very initial sketch for volume 2 had Ailn traveling all over the empire to every single duchy. And then it was supposed to have room for the dessert arc. Yeah.

But I knew from the start that Ennieux would have her moment to shine, and you can see the seeds of it already in her introduction.

"The Aunt Character"

Of all the names I invented, Ennieux's one of my favorites. Second, probably, after Noué Areygni. Like the majority of invented names in the story, it uses mostly-French phonetics. And in fact, it's a meant to be a play on two French words: anneaux and ennuyeux. The first means ring, and the second means... well, annoying.

There are a handful of characters in TRAS who were conceived as I wrote them: as in, they weren't outlined before their first featured scene. Ennieux is the most prominent of those. It was a consequence of how the Saintess arc was planned.

It may be hard to believe, considering how elemental these decisions ended up being to TRAS's character setting, but the murder mystery of volume 1 was quite fluid in its planning stages. Multiple different culprits were considered and the structure of the eum-Creid family was up in the air until the mystery was fully crystallized. There were plenty of character concepts who never made it into the story: uncles and middle brother characters who were meant to be shady and ambiguously kind. Quite a few abortive takes centered around a main family-branch family struggle, where the branch family had their own competing Saintess candidate.

In most of the branch family takes, the "aunt" character was meant to be the biggest red herring. There were definitely a handful where she actually ended up being the culprit. Going along with the broad Phoenix Wright inspiration that shaped volume 1, that antagonistic aunt character would've essentially been Morgan Fey, and her daughter would have been the Pearl to Renea's Maya.

Because those takes never materialized, Ennieux ended up being tough to pin down from the 10,000 foot view. By the time I reached her first scene, I wasn't sure what she'd be. On a whim, I looked up the French word for annoying, and the character started to take shape

As with so many of TRAS's cast, Ennieux's character came from taking a familiar archetype and searching for nuance. Even without the branch family subplot, the path of least resistance would have been to write her more antagonistically, and possibly at odds with Renea. But I'd just sketched out the family solar, with its unmade beds and realized its implications. Only three people slept in the lord's chamber: Ennieux, Sophie and Renea. Two sisters and their aunt.

For me, the quiet intimacy of that space said more about their family's truth than any outline could. Here was an aunt watching her nieces after their parents (as far as they knew) had passed away.

What was she like then?

What makes Ennieux compelling to me is this: she can be understood differently through every familial relation she has. She's nuanced, without contradiction. Her many sides accumulate into a full view so organically, it can be easy to miss how she differs in each role.

She's a mother who struggles because her adult children have broken from the nest to become knights, and are alienated by her fierce pride in her nobility. She's a wife estranged, with a distant husband. She's the younger sister of the duchy's most legendary Saintess. She's the aunt to four siblings who are all major headaches themselves, dukes and Saintess former and current.

And before all of that, she was a daughter. A girl born to a mother who died giving birth to her, and a father who fell protecting the duchy when she was just ten.

Low-talent, cowardly aunts are a staple in childcare plots and Korean rofan. I was interested in exploring that cowardliness. What's it like being a coward in a family of heroes? Especially when those heroes aren't just your older siblings or your parents, but your children and nieces and nephews. Someone who didn't have their weak-to-strong, timid-to-brave arc but kept on living as best they could.

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Silly Love Songs

It shouldn't come as a surprise that I wrote the dessert arc listening to a playlist of love songs. One in particular stands out:

That's right. Horace was named after Horace Wimp, and "The Diary of Horace Wimp" was probably the earliest seed for the whole dessert arc. For one thing, the song is just delightful. I can't help but point out a small stretch from 1:20 to 1:35. There's just something about the bouncy strings, the way they respond to the verses like a character in and of themselves.

"Horace met the girl,

She was small and she was verrrry pretty,

He thought he was in love,

He was afraid,

Uh oh."

Go further into lyrics, and the inspiration becomes clear: the song's about a timid man who has to be pushed by the voice of God to seize his destiny and meet the girl of his dreams. That's Horace Wimp.

Horace Gren, of course, is a play on the isekai archetype of the salaryman worked to death. The natural flow of that kind of character is that they go on to lead the idyllic "isekai slow life." That would be the most common plotline. But the archetype is also strongly associated with timidity. Hence, the second most common plotline is how they come into their own, learning to live without shrinking. If isekai character subplots are typically about rebuilding identity, then the salaryman's is this: he rests, and then he remembers how to properly stand. In Horace's case, he has to overcome his timidity to properly convey his feelings.

That's why one of the chapter titles borrows from Billy Joel: "Tell Her About It."

Overall, Horace came from a different approach than most of the cast. Rather than dissecting the archetype and digging deep (as I did with say, Ennieux), I focused on maintaining and fully delivering its deep inherent emotional resonance.

That's a bit nebulous, so it bears taking a moment to talk about the whole conceit of the novel. Reincarnators. One of TRAS's central premises is this: that reincarnators carry their history with them. Horace, who might more specifically be called a transmigrator, carries another burden: the legacy of the original Horace Gren. From a plot perspective, the dessert arc is ancillary. But in terms of the novel's premise, it sits closer to the novel's core conceit than the Amière arc. It's a story about the inheritance of identity and circumstance—and all the yokes that bind.

The central trait of the isekai salaryman (specifically those characters worked to death in a black company) is that they came from a place of quiet, ordinary despair. It's the opposite of "death by truck." Trucks are a neutral death. They're used because they let a story start with zero baggage.

With Horace, I wanted to truly capture the emotion of an ordinary man, taken from all of his despair, to another world. So much of the isekai flavor that gets lost as the genre gets saturated is that awe, the idea that there can be something beyond your wildest dreams. In the context of her lineage, Ennieux is seen as a failure. She's seen as a coward by the knights. She's a recluse to the duchy. But to Horace, she's a literally otherworldly beauty, the angel who saved his life.

Twilight by ELO (same artist as Horace Wimp) was a huge inspiration for this feeling. The plot of the song doesn't quite match. But the music is so energetic, so otherworldly and effervescent, that I wrote the arc imagining this was how Horace felt when he first met Ennieux.

Finding Eachother a Little Late

A lot of the romance of the dessert arc, for me, is the fact that it's old love, a married couple trying, for the first time, to genuinely reach each other. It makes their yearning all the more desperate, and their moments of connection that much more tender.

The song that inspired the final scene of the arc isn't strictly a love song. But it captures that sense of things finally becoming as they should.

Between "Twilight" and "Dancing in the Moonlight", the two songs together had a considerable aesthetic influence on the Festival of Light.

Funny enough, when it comes to romance, there's a lot less to say about Ciel and Sigurd because after the horrors of Amière they seem to have mostly figured things out. The original outline had them being a lot more awkward after reuniting. But by the time I reached that part of the story, I realized that would feel unnatural after everything they'd been through just to be together.

That said, I think Ciel's small role in the dessert arc is one of the most resonant. After all the pain she's gone through, and how hard she's fought for her happiness, it seemed to me one of the most important things is to show her actually experiencing it. No melodrama. Just cotton candy, the man she loves, and her beloved daughter enjoying a festival.

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