Thank you so much for picking up this book, the thirty-second volume of Cooking with Wild Game.
It has now been three whole volumes since the twenty-ninth, which was a sort of turning point in the series. I really am incredibly grateful to all of you who have continued reading.
The two-volume story involving the observers from the capital is over, but now things are moving in a different direction with the introduction of the red savage girl Tia. There are a lot of characters who have appeared in this series, but I see Tia as particularly important, and I’m quite fond of her too.
The three great beasts of Morga and the mountain being a sacred land were something I had established before I even started writing. Those terms showed up in the very first chapter of the first volume, and a giant madarama snake appeared and was taken down not long after. However, I wasn’t able to find the time to go back to that stuff again for some time after, so it all faded into the background after Dan Rutim’s bonus story from volume fourteen, “The White King of Morga.”
The reason the content relating to the sacred land of Morga got delayed for so long was because the scope of the main story ended up growing far beyond what I had originally expected. As I fleshed out the Amusehorn continent and the four great kingdoms over the course of years of writing, the sacred land and its three great beasts changed a fair bit as well. One example of that is how I just wrote “savages” at first, but it eventually evolved into “red savages.” That was so long ago that it’s hard to remember when I made that change, but it was definitely before I wrote “The White King of Morga.”
At any rate, Tia’s debut is something I’ve been waiting a very long time for. Things have changed a lot since my initial planning phase, but she was always going to appear eventually. She may be a few years late, but I’ve really enjoyed getting to see her interact with Asuta and Ai Fa, and I hope the same will be true for all of you.
Finally, I want to thank everyone involved with the production of this book, and of course, all of you who purchased it.
See you again in the next volume!
December 2023,
EDA