Making the Teaser That Nearly Broke Us
When we began work on the teaser for The Spark, we expected intensity.
We did not expect resistance.
Book IV of Warriors of the Last Days is about ignition: pressure accumulated over three volumes finally finding flame. It felt only right that its teaser would burn hotter, move faster, strike deeper.
Instead, we stalled.
The Hardest Part: Starting
The fourth book carries weight. It must resolve tension without simplifying it. It must escalate without turning into spectacle. It must ignite without betraying the system that built the fire.
The teaser faced the same burden.
We drafted openings that felt too obvious.
We storyboarded sequences that felt performative.
We tried versions that leaned into destruction and they felt hollow.
We tried restraint and it felt inert.
Almost every early idea collapsed under its own ambition.
Revision After Revision
Ironically, the process mirrored the novel itself.
Every strong concept had to be interrogated.
Visual direction changed.
Music shifted tone.
Pacing was tweaked repeatedly.
We scrapped sequences we had spent days refining.
We rebuilt transitions from scratch.
We cut what we loved because it did not serve its purpose. Kill your darlings, they say, It always suck.
There were moments when it felt like the teaser simply did not want to exist. There even was a moment where we considered if we would even bother make a teaser for this book. But we already did for the first three, and even got inspired for a short story, the Lullaby for the Last Days (more on that soon!), so we figured that we had to find a way…
The Click
Then, quietly, it aligned.
We stopped trying to make it explosive. We let the pressure speak. We trusted accumulation.
The structure simplified. The rhythm found itself. The images began to breathe.
From that point forward, the process transformed. What had been friction became flow. What had resisted began cooperating.
Just like the novel. The novel was so hard to start for this one for some reason. Just like the teaser, we felt, as some point, we might end up with just three books. But it kept calling, and we eventually answered. And it became the strongest book in the entire series.
What We Learned
The Spark is not about chaos.
It is about inevitability. Thing simply have to happen. No matter how you want to resist them.
Fire does not begin with an explosion.
It begins with heat no one notices.
The teaser needed to reflect that.
When it finally did, everything clicked.
Creating this teaser was an ordeal.
Finishing it was a release.
And once it starts, it does not stop.
Watch it here:
© Copyright 2026 WARRIORS OF THE LAST DAYS All rights reserved
Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.