**Spoilers ahead for the series finale of Outlander, “And the World Was All Around Us.”**

Nearly 12 years after it first premiered, Outlander has ended. But Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire’s (Caitriona Balfe) story is far from over. Even with Jamie’s death scare, the Outlander series finale ending implied the couple will live out the rest of their lives together. And, as the post-credits scene reminded fans, they’ll also continue to live on through Outlander author Diana Gabaldon, who spoke to DECIDER while on the road to California about the series finale and her top-secret cameo.

Fans have now had time to process the Outlander finale, which had Jamie dying, Jamie’s ghost leading Claire through the stones, and Claire bringing Jamie back to life. But Gabaldon says, despite the overall good reception, a small percentage of fans were left confused and asking, “Are they alive? Are they not alive? Where are they? Are they in the future?”

Gabaldon confirms that both Sam Heughan’s Jamie and Caitríona Balfe’s Claire survived the ending after Jamie was shot by Patrick Ferguson in the Battle of Kings Mountain. As a consultant on the show, Gabaldon had made some suggestions on the finale script, and she says that episode writer and showrunner Matthew B. Roberts took most of them, including that Claire “start trying to actively heal [Jamie], such as lying on him, and they are both gradually covered with the blue glow.”

If you were looking for the blue glow (the telltale sign of Claire’s healing power, as revealed by Dominique Pinon’s Master Raymond back in Season 2) and missed it, you weren’t alone. “[Roberts] did it very tastefully, with the blue glow being just this flash,” Gabaldon says. “I only know this because somebody told me.” The blue glow can be spotted when Claire takes a (presuambly final?) breath, right before the episode jumps back to the Highlander ghost watching Claire in the window from the series premiere, “Sassenach.” (More on that ghost in a bit.)

**Book spoilers ahead.** Claire’s healing powers also brought back Jamie from the brink of death at Kings Mountain in the ninth book of the series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone. But it was a slightly different telling of events.

“The thing in Bees took like four days, but when you’re writing, you could compress it without people being bothered by it, whereas you really can’t do that if you’re looking at it,” Gabaldon says. “In Bees, there were several other people involved, who were kind of supporting Claire, bringing her water and things like that. And for the show, it needs to be simpler so you can be focused in just on the two.”

Since she had already done all the research on the Battle of Kings Mountain for Bees, the author also advised that the show make its depiction a bit more historically accurate — for instance, the guns that Brianna (Sophie Skelton) helped update ahead of the battle. In the original script for 808, “In the Forest,” Gabaldon says Bree had been upgrading Jamie’s militia’s guns to breech loaders — a mechanism Ferguson created due to an arm injury — which she wouldn’t have had the capability to do on the Ridge. “So instead, [the TV writers] very wisely went and looked back into the history of rifles to find a rifle that was an improvement over the original flintlock long guns, but wasn’t a machine gun or breech loader or something that was grossly out of time,” she says. “And so they had her come up with the Hall rifle.”

She also gave Roberts feedback on his depiction of Major Ferguson (Charles Aitken). Originally, Roberts had him as a “gigantic, terrifying man.” 

“He was an extremely puny little man. His voice didn’t carry far enough to rally his men, which is why he wore a whistle around his neck when he had to summon his soldiers,” she says. In the end, the show mostly applied her feedback, as evidenced by Ferguson’s whistle. While being, for the most part, overwhelmingly satisfied with the finale, the only thing she had a “quibble” with was some of the finer points of Ferguson’s depiction, including his voice and uniform. Though she does confirm that his not surrendering to Jamie felt true to her research on him, “He was extremely fierce.” 

And she certainly didn’t mind that Buck (Diarmaid Murtagh) was there to shoot Ferguson after he shot Jamie (similar to how he shot Captain Cunningham in 805), even though that was not his character’s trajectory in the book. “He’s a very appealing character — a great actor. And they managed to fit him in without disrupting the story to do so,” she says. “[His actions] are not in the original story, but they’re not out of place.”

But the biggest change by far that Gabaldon recommended for the finale script was the confirmation that Jamie was the ghost that Frank (Tobias Menzies) saw watching Claire in Inverness in 1945. Gabaldon says the first version of Roberts’ script that she saw hadn’t contained the ghost at all. The author encouraged Roberts to rethink that. “I read the script, which had a version of Claire refusing to believe he was dead and so forth. And then it just sort of ended inconclusively there,” Gabaldon says. “I sent [Roberts] this message that said, ‘You’re paying me to tell you these kinds of things, but — ‘ in bold face, ‘they’re going to crucify you if they don’t get the ghost,'” she says with a laugh, referencing how she imagined the fandom would react. “That was mostly a joke, but it was important. And he did it very nicely.”

The show combined the original series premiere footage of Jamie’s ghost with newly-shot footage of Heughan, including him going to the stones at Craigh na Dun. When he leaves the stones, blue forget-me-nots grow in his wake, which are the very same flowers that Claire was picking when she time-traveled through the stones to Jamie in 1743.

“I did suggest the flowers springing up from Jamie’s footprints,” Gabaldon says. “If you read a lot of old legends, especially from the British Isles, the idea of flowers springing up from a hero’s blood or footsteps and so forth is not universal, but you see it more than once. “

After the ghost, the entire story of Jamie and Claire plays back in flashbacks until they’re back on the stone at Kings Mountain and wake up together with a gasp, with Claire’s hair turned completely white.

But the finale didn’t end there! In a charming post-credits scene, Gabaldon signs copies of Outlander for fans, and the author is happy that the meta-ending has been so well-received by her real-life fans. “I was really surprised and very pleased that they liked it so much because I was thinking of this [as a] little comedy skit kind of thing,” she says. “But people took it seriously and enjoyed it.”

Some viewers might not have seen it if they didn’t hang around after the credits, and that includes Gabaldon. “I didn’t because I was watching it on the Starz app, and they don’t bother showing you the after credits, so I didn’t see it at all until much later,” she says. “I mean, of course, I was there when they filmed it.”

They filmed it in the back of the costume department at the Outlander studios in Glasgow when the author was in Scotland a couple of years ago. “They had set it up to look like their imagination of what the Poisoned Pen Bookstore looks like,” she says, referencing her local independent bookstore in Scottsdale, Ariz., which is the go-to place for signed copies of her Outlander books. “I go by there every couple of weeks and sign all their back stock,” she says. “If anyone needs a personalized book, they can order it from them, and I’ll just personalize it for them next time I drop in.”

“I used to just come in and buy books, and now I sell them for them,” she says. In fact, she’ll be emceeing an event for the bookstore today, June 1, which just so happens to be World Outlander Day. “There will be a lot of Outlanders around to be signed.”

The 40-year-old relationship she has with the bookseller gets its visual shoutout in the background of the post-credits scene. The Poisoned Pen sign can be spotted above a glass case displaying a puppet show. Gabaldon says the puppets are depicting a scene from the book, though she doesn’t remember which one. But even that is an Easter egg within an Easter egg since the episode title card for Episode 114, “The Search,” showed a puppet show of Claire at the stones. Roberts wrote that Season 1 episode, and he just so happens to walk by the puppet show in the post-credits scene (which he revealed to Entertainment Weekly was added in post). 

“I think he was actually filming one of the last scenes somewhere else out on the mountain,” Gabaldon says of why Roberts wasn’t there that day to film her scene. “Because Sam apologized for not being there and said he spent the whole day on the mountain — ‘lying on a mountain’ is how he put it.”

Though Heughan and Roberts couldn’t be there in person, there was no lack of TV production folks present, including Balfe, who directed the scene. Crew and department heads primarily made up the cast for the scene, including head makeup and hair designer Ann McEwan, executive producer Maril Davis, and executive producer and writer Toni Graphia. The bookshelves are full of custom-made covers that are “jokes referencing the various department heads,” Gabaldon says. “There was one whose title was How to Throw Yourself Downstairs by Dominic Preece, who is the stunt coordinator.”

All of the references in the post-credit scene, including the blue vase Claire coveted in “Sassenach” (located behind Gabaldon), were the brainchild of the production team. “They put a lot of thought into it, and they had a lot of fun with it,” she says. 

She says they did a couple of walkthroughs and 10-15 minutes of filming. Compared to the last scene that Gabaldon appeared in — as Iona MacTavish in 104, “The Gathering” — this one was much simpler to film. “That was a lot of fun, too. It took a lot more time and effort,” she says. “The costuming took a lot longer because I was wearing the authentic stuff with the bodice and corset and double skirts and whatnot and so on. Whereas for this little playlet, I was just wearing my normal clothes.”

The post-credits scene is supposed to take place in 1991 — the year Outlander was published. “It was very funny, everybody dressed up to look as though they were from the 1990s, or what the costume department conceived to be costumes appropriate to that time period,” Gabaldon says. “I didn’t have to worry about it since I was just wearing book-signing clothes. But everybody else had the jeans of the moment and T-shirts. And Maril had this huge fall of black curls.”

Gabaldon doesn’t remember an official script for her cameo scene. “They had rehearsed lines and I could kind of wing it as to what I said to them,” she says. “Just the usual book-signing chat.” But one line that had to be included was Gabaldon claiming that she used Claire’s journal (featured in the penultimate episode, “Pharos,” written by the author) as her inspiration for the book series.

Gabaldon says she’s gotten a number of questions about how Claire’s journal ended up with her in the 20th century, with fans wondering if she’s Claire’s descendant or a time traveler herself. All of which the author denies. So how did Gabaldon come into possession of the journal? 

“Probably I found it in the bookshop or antique shop or something of that nature,” she offers. “On the other hand, it might have been passed down to me from some of my ancestors … in fact, one branch of my family is from the British Isles, from Yorkshire — but still, that’s close enough to Scotland.”

So no, neither Gabaldon nor Claire time-traveled to engage in a book swap. After all, Claire made it crystal clear in the finale that she had no intention of leaving the 18th century again, and Gabaldon previously confirmed to DECIDER that the journal being her inspiration was for the TV series only.

As for keeping her scene a secret for years, Gabaldon didn’t sweat it — “It’s not that hard. I keep a lot of secrets. Especially what the end of the next book is.”

For fans who need to be reassured once again that the show hasn’t spoiled the forthcoming final book in the main Outlander series, A Blessing For A Warrior Going Out, Gabaldon confirms that her ending, including Jamie’s ghost, is different. She also says Book 10 is “coming along really well,” but that her finishing the writing portion is only the “first step in its actual production.”

But when she does finish? “There’s no better feeling — well, there’s very few better feelings — than finishing a large book.”

And if you’re not a book reader, there’s also Season 2 of the prequel series, Blood of My Blood, to look forward to, which Gabaldon wrote another episode for. “They had a lot of real-life politics to go on. It uses a lot of historical characters, who are very good, and also they used historical events. So we get the Battle of Sheriffmuir, which is excellent. I love battle scenes and they do a really good job with them,” she says. “I really liked everything I’ve seen of Season 2.”

So though you may not see Jamie and Claire onscreen again, Gabaldon and Starz continue to breathe fresh life into the Outlander universe.