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If Jaylene doesn't grow into her role, there's no character arc.  But Behira needs now-Jaylene -as well as- new-Jaylene.

I wouldn't rush quite so hard to get Jaylene underground.  You can nibble a little out of the Tazar rescue, but if -his- character arc is important, you can't implode it.

Sulder should have a reason to send Jaylene underground.  If -he- believes the Horror is now too dangerous, and if in his Slash-weakened state, Behira warns him of dangers the cannot now fight, Jaylene's mission becomes desperate.

I would instead look to condense the journey belowground.  As much as you like Zylph and the antlion, they don't say as much about Jaylene's development as her handling of Tazar's release in all it's stages.

Why are you concerned about 100,000 words?  Fantasy novels can go much longer, as long as they are interesting.  You've got plenty of meat, in character as well as action and mystery.  Give yourself 110,000 words.

I'm on the smartphone now, so it's hard to hold a good discussion.

Where shall I start?  With the bitterest, most brutal, cruelest, and least relevant thing.

My feelings are irrelevant because they come from the perspective of I, Reader.  They're also impossible for me to shake off completely.  You've brought me into a story which I love, in spite of some serious flaws in the telling.  Now you're telling me that this wasn't the story after all.  How could you do that to me, Reader?

With that hurtful bellow out of my chest, I the writer will struggle to be heard, and I the writer will try to shake a little sense into you.

Bollocks!

Okay, I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'vibrant'.  Matt Bird's first criterion is that The reader must empathize with the character.  Fail that, and all is lost.  Succeed, and you can get by with fifth-rate work everywhere else.  (See Evanovitch, Janet, or the early mysteries that Sarah Hoyt was persuaded to issue under the name Elise Hyatt--now back in Kindleprint.)  I'm not suggesting that you do it that way.  You, Amy_s, would have to work hard to write that badly.  Please don't.  But it could be done.  There's more than enough Jaylene to make it work.

In every human interaction, in every bitter decision, I identify--empathize--with Jaylene.  Her weaknesses are as leader and fighter.  Guess what?  She grows into that position and that's her character journey.  Yes, it needs tweaking, near the middle of the story to show it wakening, near the end because her insides are masked rather than shown by how you write many of her actions.  But when she tells Alda "I want you to know that every one of us vouched for you.  It wasn't enough."  I could cry.  At times like that, Jaylene is real.

You've got something very good.  You just need to see it clearly in order to finish it.

Jaylene's journey isn't the Hero's Journey because she's already in a position of responsibility.  She's not Lucy Skywalker, growing up in a backwater.  She's already lived one dream, an adventurer, one of the Wolves who saved their civilization.  Now she has to become two things: a war leader and the true Lance Of Behira.  She has to take her place beside Elston and Sulder.  (And this is a reason not to kill Sulder.)

As to Jaylene's backstory: It probably doesn't belong in this narrative, but it shapes who she is.  If you don't have one written, you should at least sketch it out so it will feel like she's coming from the place of a whole person--the exact opposite of Alda.  Alda acts when she doesn't know what to do.  Jaylene must learn what to do in order to act.

Alda ... it will be hard to paint Alda as a compelled mind in a way that the reader can fit into, much less empathize with.  In fact, making her 'relateable' (as other authorities say) could take over the book.  That would be bad.

Why?  Because this is part of a large story about Events.  In the end, this adventure is an Event story, as opposed to Milieu, Idea, or Character.  Yes, you need characters, so that the reader can experience the story through them.  They are the reader's magic carpet flying through the story.  But the real story is in the events, the mysteries, the conflicts of powers.  Whether you say that the point is the magic carpet or the panorama it flies through, neither has any value without the other.  Neither can reach its full telos if it tries to take over the other's job.

In Acts, Anver is the protagonist.  But Kha dominates the story when present and by his absence.  This is as it should be, and it's fitting that the story opens and closes with Kha.

Jaylene starts out as Tilly.  She must end the master story as Kha and Sil combined, but still the caring Jaylene in whom Behira can place her desperate hope.  (And this is where memories of Jaylene's appointment as Lance might play a part.)

You want an early death?  Make it clear that Alda cares about Puppy, more than she admits.  Then let her suffer when Puppy dies.  And build an implicit link between the Jaylene that Puppy died to save and the Jaylene whose gratitude Alda doesn't want.  Let Alda admit, just a little, that Puppy was worth caring about.  Somehow Jaylene must get over that shock, too.  As important as Tazar is to Jaylene, rescuing Tazar is the first step in Jaylene's coming back into life--a life that will have to be different from her old one.

Remember how Hedwig the owl died near the start of Deathly Hollows?  Hedwig wasn't a minor character.  She was hardly a character at all.  But her death stung.  It said 'this is serious'.

And, rambling on, the whole rest of Dictates is about Jaylene slowly discovering why Behira kept her alive and sent her back.  In fact, that's another way to look at her character arc.

Perfection is impossible--but it's all around us!

You've got greatness in front of you.  You're piled high with it.  You don't need a midnight run to Writer's Depot!

Is your Chronomancer going to appear anywhere else?

Magelight and/on Shadowbook.

Founders' Fulfillment
Mage and Priest War
The End of the Guild and Temple War
Staff and Spear at War
Defiler Rising
Defiler and Wolves
War (or Battle) of Two (Three?) Ages  (The Age of Magic gave way to the Age of Diminishment.  But what would the next Age be: Redemption or Death?)

I wouldn't bet on that.  I usually get good response via my home wifi access, which comes off Optimum.  But off Optimum's hotspots, I get worse delays ... and Windows sometimes ends up resetting its own wireless adaptor to fix things.

My conclusion is that there's some constellation of weakensses covering the endpoints and the network links between, and nobody writes software robust enough to deal with the issues.  (Just go digging though the RFCs for all the problems with jumbo frames and you'll see why exceptionally thorough problem analysis and program design is needed.  As for testing ... you have to be willing to spend the time it takes to figure out how to test for all the various problems.  Between programmers who don't realize how hard their job really is and management that sets deadlines without caring about what their products will do to the customer, it's a miracle that anything works.)

In the 1980s, with the help of Congress, DoD contracting became exceptionally adversarial.  At some point, DoD would ask the prospective contractors for their Best And Final Offer (BAFO).  If none fit the budget, the agency would invite the contractors to suggest ways to save money by submitting a Best And Revised Final Offfer.  Yes, they called it a BARFO.

How well does it represent rhe story to the reader?

So diivide up/those in darkness/from the ones who/walk in light./
Line em up boys/There's your picture./Crop the shadows/out of sight.

Which creates double flashes in a medium-high power LED, each single flash a train of pulses whose width increases as the voltage available from the batteries driving them drops.  My 'icon' image is an earlier version of the circuit.  The changes to it are tweaks, though important tweaks.

It's 57 parts times twelve.  The point is to find ways to do it in parts so that I can be sure with each one that the sections completed are working, rather than trying to debug each one whole.

The original model 747 had over a million rivets.  That's a million rivets flying in close formation.  And the paperwork documenting the plane's construction was heavier than the plane.

Status: badly dislocated.

Before I try picking up loose threads, I'm going to catch up a bit on reviews.  I've lost count of how many I owe, but I'll try to do six today.  After that, I have about four hours of physical design work to do ... and some hope that it will work out.  If not, it's a big delay while I think more things out.  If it does work, then I can move on to the next part--about 700 parts on twelve copies of a circuit board.  I'm planning how to order the work so I can test it section by section.

I've got three boxes inside my front door with expensive shelf parts.  Wire shelves, the kind you put together with a rubber mallet.  It's too noisy to do at night, so I have to figure out when to do it.  And this is a too-clever splice job, for space for all the boxes and bins of resistors and capacitors and diodes ... and badly needed.  Actually, I need about sixty feet of shelf space.  This will get me about twelve--and not all of it within easy reach.

My little constant-current circuit works so well that I can try reversing it to operate off the Vcc rail, skipping the current mirror.  It will drop only about 400 mV more,  and I can spare that.  That is, if it works using the complementary transistors I've got.   Worst case is that it works, but barely well enough.  That's one more thing to breadboard and test.

I lost most of Monday and Tuesday to that mystery contest.  I've got an entry that could have used more editing--but I got it in just under the wire.  If anybody cares to have a look at it, I'd be grateful, even though it's too late to put changes in.

With the small number of entries, I decided about 36 hours ago to give this a try.  The restrictions are a killer.  The reader has to understand the 'world' well enough to see that the solution was possible and credible, and not a handwave invention.  That means extraordinary cleverness within an existing world--Sherlock Holmes in Oz, but blind or deaf--or near sci-fi   I know that one entry already is outright Fantasy, and it does work, but it has the flavor of a pastiche.