This is kinda full of spoilers for the Ceristen series and Sorrow and Song, fair warning.

But if you've read the Ceristen series, and you're interested in hearing the top scenes that broke my waterworks to write, you're in the right place.

Criteria for scene inclusion: It has to preferably have induced tears during the writing process. If the emotion was pure joy/ecstasy, then choking up is a legitimate qualification.

#1: Veno Thir's sorrow on Tor Hiath (From my one-shot "A Farseeing Flame")

I'll never forget writing this scene. It reached into my deepest soul. You know when you write a character in a place where you've been before mentally? I've never been given a vision of a task I must perform to save the world from destruction, and I've never stood on a mountain and talked to a messenger of God, but Veno Thir's conviction and shame were mine, and I wept as I wrote.

I've never cried so hard writing anything.

#2: Mordred's outburst at Fred in the tunnels (From "The Claw")

When I started thinking of these scenes, this was right behind Veno Thir. The Claw is where we really begin to see how young and broken Mordred is under his hard exterior, and here he really breaks. He breaks so hard and it hurts. Fred is still holding on here -- his breaking point doesn't come till several chapters later -- but his pain is real too, and it just accentuates the anguish of the moment. Both times Fenris is referenced, it's like a crisis point: Mordred cries. And I was crying right along with him.

So much ow.

#3: The General's death (From "Winds Rise")

Funny thing is, the death didn't actually hit me that hard. What made me cry was this part:

It was the first time I remember crying over my writing (I wrote this waaay back in 2015). It's unchanged from the first draft and it still hurts just as much. Because you know Mordred is losing the General. And he knows it. And you just know he's seeing memory after memory of the man who was a father to him when he was a pain-burdened, hate-filled boy -- because memories are so, so real to him...

I'm making myself choke up all over again.

#4: Mordred after leading the Leader's army into the trap (From "The War")

It's the little things, sometimes, that make me cry while writing, if only because I, as the author, know exactly how much lies behind those little things. Here, Mordred's feeling the entire weight of everything wrong in his life. It's killing him. He doesn't even know it yet, but he's going to soon, and he just needs to have an enormous cry and some hard sessions of talk therapy.

But he won't. Because he's still running.

I was an emotional wreck by the last few paragraphs. It may have also been 12:30 at night... but still.

Mordred made me cry a whole lot in The War, come to find out. But I think that was one of the biggest.

#5: Return of the thindran (from "Path of the Tempest")

Obviously, this wasn't the same thindran that Fred and co. met in The Journey. But it was a thindran, and I was anticipating it for its significance in the saga as a whole as much as its place in the actual story. As I got closer, my pulse was pounding higher and higher with excitement and in the moment where in that moment, it came (I intentionally used similar language to the thindran encounters in The Journey) it came all together in one torrent of pure, heady emotion. I can't imagine a blend of deeper joy, rapture, and excitement. There's only one other scene I've written where I've felt such strong emotion.

6: Braegon's death (from "Path of the Tempest")

I was bawling. Braegon is my favorite in a way none of the others are. He has so many little things that make him special to me. He's illiterate. He's the spirit of enthusiasm. He's the humblest man in the world (my "Moses" of Legea, I call him). He was made a soldier at the age of 14 to serve the remainder of his father's time. He never gives up on anyone. He has a soldier's loyalty. He dies a soldier's death.

I'm going to cry all over again.

Well, gotta limit these somewhere. I'd say these are my top six, although there are couple not from the Ceristen series that I have in mind. I might do a separate chapter with those.