Victoria Aveyard says the original Red Queen ending gave Shade time travel powers and switched Mare with her future self

For a decade, Red Queen fans have litigated Maven like it was the Zapruder film with tiaras. Victoria Aveyard just revealed the twist that didn’t make it: the first draft ended with Shade having time travel powers and Mare getting switched with her future self.

So, the original version of Red Queen, the first draft, ended with Shade popping up having time travel powers, not teleportation.

This is not a cute DVD-extra detail. This is the kind of alternate ending that would have turned Red Queen from a class-war fantasy with a dagger behind its back into a YA version of Days of Future Past. Delicious? Maybe. Dangerous? Absolutely. The published book runs on one clean impossibility: some people have superhuman powers, and that biological lottery hardens into caste, monarchy, spectacle, and rebellion. Time travel would have arrived in the ballroom wearing a second crown.

And originally, I had this idea of Mare at the end of the first book gets switched with her future self

The cut was correct

Aveyard, talking on Booked, Blonde & Busy, explains the decision with a very useful genre-writing rule from one of her professors: an audience will believe one unbelievable thing, and then everything else has to make sense around it. That’s the actual reason the cut matters. Red Queen can sustain silvers with powers, blood politics, palace intrigue, a rebellion, two brothers, and a betrayal so famous it might as well have its own zip code. Add time travel, and suddenly every consequence becomes negotiable. Why mourn? Why choose? Why not send a plot intern back through the temporal mail slot?

Because she was right. The time travel was too much.

That’s the verdict, and it is refreshingly unsentimental. Authors often treat early drafts like sacred ruins. Aveyard talks about hers like a screenwriter who knows when the stunt has snapped the spine of the scene. Her film-school wiring is all over the episode: pitch discipline, act structure, chapter-end hooks, the almost gleeful sense that the reader is a rat in a maze and she is watching from above with a clipboard.

The better version of Red Queen’s ending is the one readers got because it doesn’t need a new law of physics to hurt. Maven’s betrayal works because it has been socially engineered, emotionally camouflaged, and placed inside the reader’s own expectations. Aveyard says she was trying to stay one step ahead, not drop a meteor on the page.

The best twists aren’t the ones that come completely out of left field. The best twists are the ones when they happen and you sit back and think, “How did I not see this coming?”

The fan-service version of this episode is not the best part

Yes, she also says Mare and Cal’s first meeting is basically reverse Aladdin, which will now colonize the brain of every reader who missed it the first time. Mare as street rat, Cal as Princess Jasmine. Once you hear it, the palace doors swing open and the whole thing starts singing. But the time-travel confession is more revealing because it shows how close Red Queen came to being a messier, wilder, less disciplined book.

Aveyard is good here on the mechanics of commercial fantasy, not in the fake-mystical way writers sometimes talk about craft, but in the practical way. She likes tropes because they create expectation. She likes structure because chaos needs somewhere to sit. She likes world-building enough to know the trade routes and coins, but she also knows the reader does not need to be waterboarded with the minting system on page seven.

That discipline becomes more interesting when she talks about young adult fantasy and the business pressure around age categories. Aveyard says her next idea is a YA duology inspired by Mary, Queen of Scots, with dragons, but her agent has already warned her to prepare for questions about aging a character from 17 or 18 to 19 so it can be sold as adult. That is the dreariest kind of publishing math, the kind that looks at a teen reader and sees a marketing problem.

So the old Red Queen ending is funny, yes. Shade with time travel. Future Mare. A first draft stomping around in boots two sizes too big. But it also makes Aveyard’s current problem sharper: she has spent a career learning exactly what kind of story each container can hold. Her next dragon book may have to answer a less fun question than who betrays whom: will publishing still let a YA book be YA?