Hello, it’s Kakeru Takamine. I tried to come up with a nice way to begin the afterword, but nothing came to mind. Whoops.
From a purely narrative perspective, I’d consider this volume to conclude the main theme of this little story.
In volume one, Asahi and Fuyuka go from being strangers to becoming friends. In this volume, the relationship deepens into a romantic one. Fuyuka opens up about her past to Asahi, and he, in turn, becomes her confidant and trusted partner. Every relationship has a story behind it, and these two are no exception. Sure, they had to go through a couple extra hurdles along the way compared to others, but the result was still a happy one, right?
Although the continuation of this series has yet to be decided by my publisher, if it were to happen, I’d like to expand on what happens after this volume. Would Fuyuka and Asahi stay as they are, or would they grow even closer?
There’s also been word of an English translation for this series to be released soon, which comes as a surprise to me. I’ve always been terrible at English, and it was never something I took very seriously back in school. I never would’ve guessed that it would come back to haunt my dreams, hahaha. I wish Fuyuka or Asahi could teach me how English works—that’d be great.
Some other people I’d like to thank...
To Mr. Takada, my editor in charge of the series—we haven’t had as much time to meet, but I feel as if we’ve grown closer in the past few months working on the novel together. I appreciate that you gave me complete creative freedom. I also appreciated the idle conversations we had about random subjects, which helped me come up with a lot of ideas for this novel, as well as many others. Thank you very much. Let’s make these conversations more frequent!
I also want to thank my Illustrator, Ichigo Kagawa. Even though Kagawa is a busy person, he managed to completely blow my expectations away with his breathtaking illustrations. He also made one of the most beautiful covers I’ve ever seen—I would seriously like to turn it into a family heirloom.
Thank you to everyone involved in the production of this book in any way, shape, or form, as well as to the readers who decided to get their hands on this book.
I think that’s enough rambling, so I’ll finish the afterword here. Let’s hope we meet again in another story—or potentially another volume of Ice Queen—in the future.