Fhiad leaves the court and walks through the halls of the castle as he reflects on the circumstances that brought him to Faloren. Guerig, the king’s secretary and acting regent, has granted Fhiad permission to live in the castle while supposedly doing research on the building’s architecture. Fhiad curses himself for being drawn back to the kingdom, but he has few resources and fewer choices.
As he wanders, Fhiad reflects on how he was originally sent to Faloren as a replacement for a retired diplomat during what he intended to be a temporary break from his studies. He reflects on how the kingdom has declined during the past hundred years, and he wonders why Agnes seems to be a ghost of the person he met in the northern forest.
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An Unfound Door is written in limited third-person perspective, and this is the first chapter that focuses on Fhiad. As the representative of the novel’s “B Story,” Fhiad represents the upside-down world of Act Two, which begins when the “A Story” character’s status quo is disrupted. Fhiad is the catalyst for this disruption, but his arc is also a mirror of Agnes’s character development. Fhiad and Agnes ultimately want the same thing – the power to choose the direction of their lives – but their initial motivations and goals are drastically different.
Fhiad may have told Agnes that he intends to destroy her kingdom, but what he truly wants is to understand what happened to him. He’s suffering from severe trauma that he hasn’t been able to process, and he alternates between distraction and intense anger. He attempts to distract himself from his grief by tasking himself with a quest. Meanwhile, his frustration has no outlet save for Agnes, who became his target simply because she’s the only living person he knows. Fhiad is doing his best to survive, but he’s a hot mess.
More than anything, this chapter establishes how and why Fhiad has come to Faloren Castle. It also provides a second perspective on the setting.
What the reader is able to see through Fhiad’s eyes are two things that Agnes takes for granted. First, Agnes is subtly shunned by the members of her court; and second, Faloren Castle is impossibly large and labyrinthine. These two observations help justify the “fun and games” portion of Act Two, which will involve Agnes and Fhiad hunting for a hidden relic. In other words, Fhiad’s observations hint that Agnes is free to search the castle precisely because she doesn’t have many social obligations, and that her search is going to be interesting because it isn’t going to be easy.
Something else Fhiad has noticed is that there’s something suspicious about Agnes’s cousin Galien. This is fair, as Galien is hiding a number of unpleasant secrets. Still, Galien is no more a villain than Fhiad. I like to think of An Unfound Door as a “gothic fantasy mystery,” which means that everyone has secrets. This is why, at this point in the story, the main task of the characters is to learn how to communicate with each other. If they’re going to figure out who the actual villains are, they’ll need to be able to trust each other.
The portrait of Fhiad in the chapter preview was created by the heroic Silverpeel, a fantasy artist with a gothic flair. You can see more of Peel’s illustrations of knights and forests and gods and legends on Instagram (here), on Bluesky (here), and on Tumblr (here).
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