Hello, this is the author. Thank you for reading my story, and extra thanks to those who stuck around since its first upload.
This fic was one hell of a thing to write, being my first real attempt at writing anything creatively. A majority of the difficulty came from myself, as I kept adding on and revising aspects of the story before it finally turned into what you're able to read today. The other main contributing factor is that I chose to write in the dead of night while half-conscious like I am now writing this at 4 AM.
Dropped story beats, stilted dialogue and interactions, prose I'm not particularly proud of and would like to rewrite, the list goes on. But a rewrite might end up with me never finishing the story, so I stuck with it until the end, as I hoped you would have.
When I first began writing this, it was meant to be a simple short story with a similar premise: an outsider meets Mystia and befriends her. However, she would let them go and they would have settled into the human village. The rest of the story was supposed to be about the outsider and Mystia meeting every few or so years, and cover the different stages of the outsider's life in Gensokyo: settling into the village, making a living for themselves, getting married, having children, growing old, and eventually passing on. Their relationship with Mystia would have remained distant, and they would simply be a customer who visited her stall on rare occasions. In the future, I may consider writing this as a standalone story.
There were originally only going to be 4 chapters (the current chapter 4 was not supposed to exist) but I included it because I think that chapter 4 recontextualizing the entire story up to that point would make the ending hit even harder. I hope I was able to achieve that to some degree in that regard. The final chapter was originally meant to be a lot bleaker, with it taking place after Okane had passed on and having Mystia visit his grave, but I figured that would be too bitter of a note to end off on, so I relented.
Okane and Mystia's story ends here. However, I am open to the prospect of using the worldbuilding I used in this story for future ones. I think I'll stay a bit away from anything with romance in it for a while though (but if I do write another story involving it, it will be a lot happier than this one).
All that being said, I'm glad it's finally over and I can say that I've written and finished a story. I can move on and stop feeling guilty about not writing it.
That's all for now, see you next time.