I'm glad you liked it this much. Yeah, justifying Wiz's actions in the sense that they make sense from the character's perspective was very much the goal of this rewrite. Go deep into his mind and see what makes him do things. To that end, I've also changed some of the reasoning behind Wiz's flight, the idea of fearing to hurt others through his magic is something a lot less emphasied or used at all in the previous incarnations of all these early stories.
To make things more reasonable, I've also changed how Wiz reacts and how long he stays that way. Originally, Wiz walked the worlds as an empty shell virtually devoid of thought, as it is described, for about 3 years. In this version, Wiz much more realistically still very much thinks throughout the whole ordeal (except the very emotional outburst in the beginning) and yet remains prisoner of those thoughts and that's what keeps him away from anything. At the same time, he only wanders for a year and some change (unclear how long, could be some months though) now, making it easier to understand how he stayed that way that long. 3 years was just too much of doing nothing. The excess 1.5/2 years were partly used to give Wiz more time in the Nexus Force (around a year) and partly tossed into the drain of the temporal dislocation, which went from 20 to 21 years. That also means Wiz is now ~1 year younger in the following years.
The side characters appearing throughout the whole story definitely have some interesting elements. There are the ones among them that I think are pretty obvious in having a "story of their own" (i.e. the hooded woman and man), but whether the others are important beyond their appearance here is something we may never know. It is interesting though. The title in the original referred to the singular path that Wiz finds through the Nexus Force. However, I am glad that I wrote it in plural ("Paths"), because that takes on an new meaning in this story. It's not something I planned on from the start and not the reasoning behind why I first added those characters to the story, but it happily worked out towards this new idea as well: The whole story is basically Wiz trying to find a path out of his miserable state and he is constantly met with potential such paths.
I intentionally made this story a bit harder to get all the details from so that it might require analysis to understand some stuff. But perhaps it would be okay if I gave some of my thoughts on it here. At first, Gertrude offers her solution. She will take responsibility to help Wiz. He needs to put in the effort himself, too, and ultimately he'll have to do what must be done on his own, but Gertrude is willing to help him get there instead of letting him fight it out all on his own. However, Wiz refuses out of his pride and fear to hurt others. Gertrude warns him that he will fail alone, but Wiz says he will take responsibility himself. But just as Gertrude predicted when it comes to it, Wiz is not ready to face the people he loves and flees again, almost losing entirely all the progress he made while staying at Gertrude's.
After that, comes the second attempted path. This time the path is suggested by Wiz himself. In a way, he might be thinking of the conversation with Gertrude still and trying to take responsibility accordingly by solving it himself. He begins to build a house. The idea behind that is trying to start a new life for himself from scratch. He'll build a house and live in it and be a new Wiz, much like his house is new. There is some symbolism to be found in the exact placement of the house. It is in the middle of the forest, isolated from people. However, the forest itself is near a town. That is, I would say indicative of what Wiz intends to do here. He wishes to build his new life and that means ultimately going back to society. At the same time, though he remains distant, aloof even when he starts dealing with people again. We could perhaps contrast that with the Gertrude situation where although he happens to be alone with Gertrude it still is what we could call an inhabited place and he would stay quite close to Gertrude; in other words it would be a solution bringing him quite close to the society of people.
In light of his attempts, Wiz walks down to the town several times and he displays both willingness to make himself more socially acceptable and work, both of which are important for integrating back into society. We also see him asking about Argenturegnum. That is not much explained at all, but the implication is that should he get himself a stable life there he might feel ready to go back and visit his parents again and needs to know how close/what route he should take to find them.
However, in the end when the house is finished Wiz just leaves it as easy as that. It is not much explained why he does that and it might look just one more of the pointless acts of Wiz in that time. Yet, the reasoning is there if you want to dig for it and are prepared to make some necessary assumptions. The one clue we are given is how just a little before it is described that Wiz can see himself all over that house, it's his achievement through and through. This sounds like proud celebrating of his work. But in actuality, as has been shown earlier in the manuscript, Wiz is in fact not proud of himself in that time. He has already expressed some self-hatred for himself. But it is in that time that it manifests before him more strongly. Even though he worked so hard for this undertaking and put so many hopes on it, when he looks at it in the end, he hates it for he hates himself. He cannot live in it. He cannot build a new life for himself. He would hate that life. Because he would be the one living it. And he was the problem from the very start.
The third path after that is given by the hermit on the mountain. Whereas the previous locations represented being within society and being near, but outside it, the last location is entirely removed from society, in complete isolation of anything. The hermit lives there, but because he too is disconnected from society (where Gertrude would connect with other people and urge Wiz to do the same; in fact we don't know how many other farms might be near there that we just didn't see) that doesn't make much difference. Almost in response to the previous failure, the old man suggests Wiz deals with the self-hatred by completely rejecting himself and becoming a new blank slate of a person. As long as he has no hopes or fears, there is no reason to be depressed. If you expect nothing, you can't be disappointed. Just live life instead of worrying about it. Wiz cannot let go of all that, however, as he is too hung up on his failures even though he doesn't know how to fix them.
These are the three biggest things except the final path taken, but I ended up including some mini searches along with it. In the interim passages between those three main parts, we see Wiz visiting different landscapes but finding meaning in none of them, representing his long search throughout the world of a place that could make him stop, making his travels make a bit more sense than completely aimless wanderings. Then, we also see Wiz look for knowledge, philosophy, religion looking for answers that might help him. Mental wanderings in search of a solution. He still fails, however.
The hooded woman I don't think so much offers a path as a wakeup call, where the path ends up being the Nexus Force laters when Wiz meets it. We see there near the end that based on that Wiz intended to go find the Nexus Force (the source of the Call) even before the temporal dislocation. For a bit, that seemed off to me because it seemed to say that the dislocation was in the end inconsequential to Wiz's journey where in the original it was very important in changing his ways and even now as the last part of his journey I would like to keep it significant to the story. It is the end of that arc, so it should be relevant. Ultimately, though, I figured that even if Wiz had not been sent to the future and had met up with the early Nexus Force, he might have joined, but a lot of the final change we see in Wiz at the end would not have happened probably. He would have still been a loner and might not have made the same revelations as we see in the end of the story. However, the fact that he is sent to the future creates a situation where Wiz is forced to open up in order to figure out what's going on and in the process that helps him get along with the Nexus-Forcers later on a lot better than he might have.
Damn... I might have ruined some of the fun of making the story a little cryptic by explaining all that here, but I really wanted to talk about it.
As for the Bob scene, though it is indeed handled a lot better, it's honestly not that much more fleshed out than the original. That scene already took up the majority of the 2.7k words in the first version and I didn't expand it too much from what it already was since I did not see it as that significant. Yes, it is the resolution of the whole story, but it only receives that meaning by being the last part of the entire rest of the story that needed the expanding more. In other words, yes it was a little fleshed out I suppose, but nowhere near as anything else in this story or the other rewrites I would say. Still, it's a lot better and we should celebrate that.
I also like how I ended up describing the early history of the Maelstrom (and the Nexus Force a bit, what with the Call to save Imagination and a war being referenced). I basically mostly copied what I'd written on the Darklings page and sprinkled it all over the story, but I think it works, because it serves to gradually prepare the threat that Wiz ends up answering to to acquire his purpose. We get to see its danger all throughout the story and that Wiz sees it, too, so that we understand why it is important for the Nexus Force to exist and for Wiz to join it and why it motivates Wiz. At the same time, it works to familiarise potential new readers with the Maelstrom some more.
The Crux world rivers is an interesting idea. I don't entirely remember where it came from, but I suppose it might have had to do with thoughts of how the dispersed Maelstrom in space between worlds ended up disrupting the magic of people making it very hard to teleport from a world to just any other. Instead a lot more specific paths would have to be used in this new environment. But for that to happen, magicians would have to have a path of Imagination/non-Maelstrom from world to world to help them across. And I think that might have given me that idea. Or perhaps it was also combined with questions of what happens to dispersed air and water beyond the atmospheres of the worlds, how rain works in shattered Crux, how people from world to world without rockets (i.e. in order to answer the Call and join the Nexus Force a la LU trailer). And also a thought of how would I have Wiz move from world to world. Teleporting just didn't seem right.
I don't know if the system of the currents and worlds is a connected graph, but there's probably a lot around. It is either maintained by the Mythrans or the Last Shard of the Nexus, I would think, much like the atmoshperes of the worlds are. I don't think the system is static, at least during the early Crux system when the clashing Imagination and Chaos made the position of worlds very unpredictable and dynamic. I'd say the space rivers are hard to find, but maybe they've been found at times to allow people to move between worlds. That would answer, as I said above, a long-standing question I've had in mind of how people who answered the Call managed to get to the Nexus Force without the necessary vehicles (see for instance pirates and knights in the trailers who wouldn't know about technology like that and probably wouldn't have materials to build it even if the Call instructed them how to make them themselves). I'm not sure how they would find the currents, especially so many people and why they would be so obscure for none of us to have heard about it before in any story if so many people and the NF itself knows about it, but at least it provides and idea that could be worked with.