As promised, here is the outline of the rest of the fic.
You've already seen that it'll be divided into about three storylines: the main one about Will, plus two supplementary ones, one about Mary and Will's mom and one about Ethan.
I introduced Elemi and his world in the second chapter, and that's the first world Will cuts into. Elemi's family kind of takes him in, and he realizes pretty quickly how screwed up everything is there. He can't really do anything about it right away so he just tries to lay low and gather information, but he makes a few comments that make people nervous, so after a couple days Elemi reports him for heresy. The religious police guys ride off to arrest him or assassinate him or whatever, but luckily Kirjava is wandering around town and sees what's happening, so she and Will escape to another world just in time.
That world happens to be the one I introduced in chapter four, with the City and the Gallivespian Liberation Front. The man I introduced at the end of that chapter, the renegade man living in the forest, his name is Caelis and he fled from the City fifteen years ago because there was an incident with him trying to save a Gallivespian tribe from slaughter. He didn't succeed, but it made him a traitor and so he had to escape. Caelis hates the Authority and basically all religious people, and he's a little crazy and very unstable—this is all very important to the rest of the story.
Will cuts through right outside Caelis's hut and Caelis, being crazy, thinks that Will is some sort of assassin and attacks him. Will is obviously still holding the knife, and so in the process of defending himself he accidentally cuts off the last two fingers of Caelis's left hand. Will is not the bearer of the knife for the majority of the story. I was excited about this idea because I haven't seen it done before, not that I've read a ton of HDM fanfiction (at least, not recently—I used to).
Will helps Caelis get himself over to the Gallivespian Liberation Front (GLF) camp so he can get his wound treated, and he fills him in on what it means to be the bearer and what Caelis has to do as far as finding and defeating the renegade angels. Caelis is very gung-ho about this because, as I said, he hates the Authority. Will is tempted to just get him to cut a window back to his world so he can leave the whole job to someone else like he wanted, but he doesn't trust Caelis and decides that he should tag along to help.
Will finds out that the GLF is made up of soldiers from Asriel's rebellion who didn't want to return to their own worlds, so they volunteered to win equality for the Gallivespians instead. He and Caelis stick around in that world for a bit and use the knife to infiltrate the City (not completely sure why—just something the leaders of the GLF asked them to do to help their cause). While there they get caught up in this big coup against the Commissars, who get overthrown because the people are sure they've lost the favor of the Authority and everyone's fed up with their timid attempts to defeat the GLF instead of going for an all-out attack. Will and Caelis run back to warn everyone about the new leadership and tell them to prepare for battle. Will wants to stay and help them fight, but Caelis, being unstable, decides that he wants to go on to the next world. Will, of course, has to follow because the knife is his only way of getting home.
They wander through a few more worlds trying to track down the angels. Things happen, they gradually learn more and more, and eventually they capture one of the angels and he tells them everything: he and his compatriots are trying to carry out Metatron's plans for establishing a permanent Inquisition in every world, and they are led by the angels Shatomi, Mergola, and Bedoran. Caelis, of course, recognizes these as the angels who used to control everything in the City, and Will remembers hearing these names back in Elemi's world, but back then he didn't know that they were important. He guesses that the Inquisition thing might be being led from there.
Interspersed with the Will/Caelis storyline will be the other two storylines, but I don't have those worked out to quite the same detail. I was pretty excited about Ethan though—he becomes the first male witch. Lanselius takes him to meet Serafina and her clan and Serafina knows she's supposed to do something with him, just like Lanselius knew, but she doesn't know what or she's reluctant to accept it, so she goes to Lyra to ask the alethiometer. Will is the main character of this story because I like him best, but I wanted Lyra to be in at least one chapter of it. (There is NO Will/Lyra reunion in case that was holding anyone in suspense.)
I guess I don't know how well Lyra would be able to read the alethiometer at this point, but I'm going to assume she can do it somewhat, it just takes a long time and she has to use the books. So she asks it about Ethan and it tells her that he is to be the first male witch and that he has something very important to do, but either it doesn't give details or she can't read them. And then, in that casual way the alethiometer has, it adds that Ethan is the aeronaut's son. That was one of the first things I decided when I started this story, because Lee was always my favorite character and I wanted to reincarnate him in one of the flashback/interlude chapters, which would be about his meeting Alexandra Herrera, a fellow Texan, when he was in his late 20s and just beginning his balloon career. They had a one-night stand and he never knew about Ethan.
So Ethan does the crossing-the-plane thing, separates from his dæmon and becomes a witch. After that I'm not completely sure what he does for the rest of the story or how he gets to the place he needs to get to in order to…kill Caelis.
What happens is this: Will and Caelis go back to Elemi's world and Caelis goes a little more crazy while Will tries to keep him under control. I'm a little fuzzy on the details here; this was one of the things I was going to work out as I wrote the actual chapter. Long story short, Caelis somehow succeeds in finding and killing Shatomi, Mergola, and Bedoran; Will isn't actually there when this happens because he gets caught up in something involving Elemi—again, not completely sure what. But he escapes from that eventually and goes after Caelis, only to find him running in the opposite direction, covered in blood (because he pretty much killed everyone blocking his way to the angels). Caelis cuts back to his own world and Will of course has to follow (he feels pretty powerless for most of this story, you may be able to gather). Will gets Caelis to tell him basically what happened, so he knows that the angels have been defeated.
But that's not the climax of the story. As I've reiterated several times, Caelis is crazy and he holds a serious grudge and he hates pretty much everyone from his world. Will tells him that he needs to destroy the knife now, but Caelis refuses and tells Will that there's one more thing he has to do. He doesn't want Will to come with him, but Will of course does because now he really doesn't trust Caelis.
Caelis is determined to kill the people who were in charge fifteen years ago who listened to the angels and obeyed the Authority and made the whole world suck and destroyed Caelis's life. So he uses the knife liberally to get back into the City and then into the room where a bunch of the new leaders of the city are meeting. He kills several of them before he gets someone to tell him where they've locked up the former Commissars. But then Caelis and Will get separated somehow and Will ends up getting to the jail first and finding the Commissars Belshiv, Terkin, and Mens (the other three died in the coup that I didn't go into a lot of detail about, but I do know the details). Again I'm going to skim over the details here because this is getting long—Will makes a deal with Belshiv, Mens does evil things before Belshiv kills him, and Terkin commits ritual suicide or something like it. Will and Belshiv together try to take out Caelis, but he cuts a window and gets away. And I know you must be tired of hearing this, but Will follows him.
He cuts into Lyra's world, where Ethan is waiting nearby. He somehow found out where to be (a prophecy the witches overheard, I think it was) and that he's supposed to stop a very dangerous man, and it's pretty obvious that Caelis must be him (since he's a crazy-looking tattered-clothes-wearing man covered in blood and carrying a knife who appeared out of nowhere). They fight, Ethan kills Caelis, and…becomes the final bearer of the subtle knife!
Will takes Ethan back into the Gallivespian world briefly in order to wrap things up there. Belshiv has gotten things under control and is talking to the new leaders of the City, trying to work out a different leadership system. Part of his deal with Will was that they'd stop persecuting the Gallivespians, but it's obviously going to take a long time to get people to accept that. Will has an idea how to be quicker about it, but he needs to talk to Xaphania and he doesn't know how to find her.
He and Ethan return to Ethan's world, which is also Lyra's world. Will goes through an intense personal struggle over whether to go to Oxford, but he ultimately decides not to because he knows he wouldn't be able to leave again. So Ethan cuts a window back into Will's world, then destroys the knife. Will goes home.
While all this was going on, Mary Malone and Elaine Parry were also fighting the angels in their own world by creating an underground pseudo-religion philosophy. I was kind of hoping I'd figure out a way to connect this storyline to the main one as I wrote it, but if I couldn't I would have de-emphasized it a lot and only given it two or three short sections as parts of longer chapters.
To wrap everything up: In the final scene, Xaphania comes to see Will again as he'd hoped she would. Will wants her to send more angels to Caelis's world and get them to put everything right; she refuses on the grounds that soon angels will no longer be able to travel between worlds and people need to figure things out for themselves. But then Will makes this whole impassioned speech and she finally agrees. Will and Xaphania talk about the nature of Dust for a while, and then the last line is about building the Republic of Heaven.
Oh, right – I forgot about the interlude chapters. In addition to the one about Lee and Ethan's mom, I was going to write about: one of the soldiers from the Second Rebellion who decides to go to the Gallivespian world instead of his own; how Balthamos and Baruch infiltrated the Clouded Mountain and learned about the Inquisition plans; and…that's all I definitely decided on, but I had a few other possibilities.
There you have it. I didn't think the summary would be so long, sorry about that… I hope you're all suitably impressed with the level of planning I put into this story because I never put this much planning into a story (even, like, a real non-fanfiction one). It would be nice to actually write this some day, but I won't hold my breath.
Feel free to tell me what you think, or ask for any further details because I probably know them (unless, of course, I specified that I do not in fact know them). Thanks for reading, everyone, and thanks for favoriting or especially reviewing!