I set out to write a story about a people who had reclaimed their power.

That was the plan.

But as I began to write, it was not their story that came to me first.

Zea stepped forward.

Not as a symbol of strength.
Not as someone restored.
But as someone who had lost—deeply and repeatedly—and was still learning how to stand in the aftermath of it.

She walked just ahead of me as I wrote, and I found myself trying to keep up, trying to understand the world as she saw it. She was a Reacher—and a woman—both identities shaping the limits of her life in ways that could not be ignored.

The word Reacher came to me as she moved through the streets of Gosha. It named a people who were never meant to reach at all. A tribeless group, existing on the margins, surviving within boundaries they did not create and could not escape.

So when the reader encounters the petition—made by the Banu Kiente—to marry her without her consent, I needed that moment to land with weight. I needed it to feel as dire as it truly was.

But I also knew something else.

I knew the reader might question her reluctance.

Because I did.

Walking behind her, seeing what she endured daily, I found myself wrestling with the same thought that her Aba carried: Would this not be better? Would a life among the Banu not offer something more than survival?

And that is where the story shifted for me.

Because Zea did not see opportunity.

She saw loss.

She did not long for freedom in the way I expected her to. Instead, she held tightly to what she knew—even when what she knew was suffering. The unknown, even when it held promise, felt more dangerous than the life that had already taken so much from her.

It reminded me of the Israelites.

They had been led out of slavery in Egypt.
They had walked through a sea that should have swallowed them whole.
They had witnessed deliverance in its most undeniable form.

And still, when they reached the edge of the Promised Land, they hesitated.

They saw giants.

They forgot what they had survived.

Fear spoke louder than memory.

Zea stands in that same tension. She is not standing at the edge of promise with confidence. She is standing there grieving—resisting—uncertain if what lies ahead is salvation or another form of loss. What looks like opportunity to everyone around her feels, to her, like the erasure of everything she has known.

So I walked with her.

Through her resistance.
Through her questions.
Through her grief.

Waiting.

Watching.

Wondering if she would remember who she was.

Because her name means light.

And I found myself asking—how long does it take for someone to believe that about themselves? How long does it take to see strength where there has only been survival? To trust that what looks like giants might not be there to destroy you—but to grow you?

We walked on together, and we both began to trust the journey.

We are still walking, reminding ourselves that the giants are food for us.