Ten Days In a Leaky Boat was basically: “Eoin and Ingbord go on a completely uneventful, ten-day boat-camping trip.”

  It was long. It was complete. It was boring.

  It was ten days of rowing, broken only by nights camping on beaches—lighting driftwood fires (a rare indulgence in Eysa, where trees are too scarce to burn)—or by brief visits to small island settlements.

  Ingbord would quietly mend whatever needed fixing. Eoin would drift through like a stray breeze: observing, listening, telling half-true tales.

  Every single stop at an inhabited island featured Eysian singing. Eoin loathes Eysian singing. And by the third island, so did I.The chapter began to feel like the most tedious parts of The Lord of the Rings—you know the ones, where everyone’s singing about stars and trees and nobody’s stabbing anyone anymore.

  So I cut it. All of it. The monotony, the campfires, the singing, the awkward "getting to know you" phase between Eoin and Ingbord.

  But one small, important detail got swept away with the rest:

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Eoin is good at rowing.

  Very good.

  And that, dear reader, should give you pause.

  Why would a slippery fae trickster—a thief and a liar—bet practiced in covering long stretches of open water by rowing?

  Why does the punishing work of rowing for days not break him?

  Maybe—once—he belonged to a ship.

  Or maybe a ship belonged to him.

  Maybe he rowed for someone else's glory.

  Or for his own survival.

  Ten days of rowing would break most men.

  But Eoin’s been through worse.

  The rhythm would come back easily. The muscle memory. The tricks of breath and pull and grind.

  But his hands—softened by Eysa—would still have been chewed raw. Blistered. Bleeding.

  I thought I’d gotten away with cutting that chapter.

  I really did.

  I was doing just fine pretending it never happened. Pretending Eoin never spent hours, days, weeks rowing until his mind went blank and his hands turned to leather.

  And then a reader (thank you—I love you!) left a comment:

  “Shouldn’t Eoin be a claw-handed wreck after ten days of rowing?”

  They were absolutely right.

  So no, you didn’t miss the chapter.

  I buried it. Deep.

  But thank you for digging it back up.

  If you're curious—Eoin makes a very, very veiled reference to rowing and oars in The Twice born Storm when he remarks about a trade cog:

  “No. She wouldn’t have oars. She’s peaceful-like.”

  The history of rowing ships in our world is very, very dark.

  I don't know how dark it is in Eoin's world, but there are some things Eoin will never tell you.

  This turned out to be one of them.