The fourth part of Wake the Dragon is called “This Is the End”. Your protagonist hit bottom in “Rock Bottom”, and now it’s time to get up: understand, act differently and live with whatever comes. It takes up roughly the last quarter of the book.
There are three pieces. Plenty of novels get planned starting from here.
Beat 12: Now It All Makes Sense
They see their lie inside out. After the blow, in a quiet moment, your protagonist understands something they’ve spent the whole novel refusing to see. Mara, in the dark library, realizes nobody shut her out: she always left before anyone had the chance to invite her in.
It’s a flexible piece, and it’s covered together with the one before it in Rock Bottom.
Beat 13: Go Big or Go Home
They do what they’d never have done at the start. It’s the end of the plot: the rescue, the trial, the confession, the dash to the airport. And what resolves it is that your protagonist isn’t who they used to be.
Mara, who always did everything alone, asks for help. In the middle of the festival they rescue the dragon with half the town as accomplices.
Notice that the big action (the rescue) comes tied to the small one (asking for help). Without the small one, it would just be an action scene. With it, it’s Mara’s ending.
Sometimes what they do is stop doing something: not running, not lying, not going back. That works too.
Tip: if you don’t know what your protagonist does at the end, look at what happened to them in “All Hell Breaks Loose” and what they lost in “Rock Bottom”. The answer is usually there.
Beat 14: A Lot Has Happened Here
Life afterwards. A picture of how everything stands when the story ends. And it’s the same picture as in “Nothing Happening Here Yet”, with a different person in it.
A year later, at the summer dance, Mara dances with Alex in the square and the dragon sleeps on the library roof. At the start of the book, on that same night, she was locking up the library alone.
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge starts out rationing his clerk’s coal and ends up telling him to buy another coal-scuttle “before you dot another i”.
“A lot” doesn’t mean “all good”. Sad, bitter or halfway endings fit here too: what matters is that you can tell how much the picture has changed.
Tip: it’s a short scene. If it’s taking up a whole chapter, you might be resolving things that belonged in “Go Big or Go Home”.
In Sunday Plot, these three pieces are in the Structure, under “This Is the End”. Guided mode asks about the last one very early, because knowing where you’re headed helps with everything else. And in Wanted: One Dragon you can see them all filled in.