Chapter 16

Afterword Every reader has the liberty to decide where they’ll start reading and where they’ll stop. However, just as stories are rarely constructed with the assumption that the reader will begin at the end, I write this afterword with the presumption that it will be read last (I don’t mean to imply there will be crucial spoilers here, but some may feel otherwise). Please understand. This novel is based on Dragon and Festival: From a Wandmaker’s Perspective, which received an honorable mention at the 11th GA Bunko Awards. Besides some rewriting and editing, the biggest difference between this book and the manuscript I applied with is, of course, the inclusion of Enji’s incredible illustrations. I wrote the first manuscript in January 2018, and I remember it taking me about two or three weeks to complete. Just now, I realize that was already a year ago. That’s so long ago, in fact, that I really don’t remember much of what I penned. Reading over it, I felt like I was reading someone else’s work and kept asking myself, “I wrote this?” When they contacted me about the contest, I was locked in a battle to the death with Genichiro Ashina at the castle tower, and now I’m devoting myself to rebuilding the United States. In that way, too, I can feel the passing of the months and days. I composed this story almost entirely in my room, but somehow, the night I finished writing, there was a sudden blackout, which shocked me. Not long after that, a brilliant light started to shine through my curtains. Thinking it strange, I opened them to find a nearly sixteen-foot-tall angler fish staring back at me. “It’s not dark now, is it?” said the angler fish. “Isn’t that to lure prey?” I inquired. “It’s case by case. I can change how I use it depending on the situation,” he told me, which was reassuring. “Look up at the water’s surface.” I did as he said and was surprised to see the surface of the water glowing red, almost as though it were on fire. It must have been a fairly strong light to have made it all the way down here in the ocean. “What is that?” I asked. “We’re disposing of the overproduced light,” replied the angler fish. “Last year, we set the light to be two percent stronger than shadow. Unfortunately, the person in charge of it last year failed to pass the baton properly, so the same settings have carried over to the current year.” “I see—so you’re equalizing them.” “No, we actually plan to prioritize shadow by one percent this year.” The angler fish’s job was to adjust the amount of light on the ocean floor. Normally, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the light on the surface, but apparently, they were short-staffed, so they asked him to lend a hand. That kind of thing happens all the time. I waited there until he finished the disposal. Thankfully, my room was completely sealed, so no seawater leaked in, but I worried that the water pressure would crush my room at any moment. After this whole fiasco ended, I heard that some dumbo octopuses were kind enough to support the walls from the outside. It’s really unfortunate I wasn’t able to speak with them directly. After some time, the ocean floor tour boat, the Giant Oarfish, came around and picked up my room. It was massive, over half a mile long, and the melancholy generator’s low rumbling was oppressive. Of course, I wasn’t the only passenger, so after they took me on board, I had to return home via the Aleutian Islands. The inside of the ship was just as opulent as people say it is. There was a reverse thousand-person bath made of Japanese cypress, a seven-hundred-square-foot backgammon board, and a special live performance by the Purple Albatrosses. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. While doing all that, I hit it off with another passenger named Murase, and they would sometimes sit beside me. Murase gave me a bottle of lemon-flavored Ramune when I left, but it feels like I would lose a precious memory if I drank it, so I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. Once I returned home, I found a tree growing where my room used to be, which was a bit of an inconvenience. I felt bad chopping it down, so I decided to cut a hole in the floor of my room and raise the tree. Then I picked a cacao bean from it, which I then made into a chair—the very same one I am sitting on as I compose this afterword. So unlike in reality where all sorts of things happen (such as being asked to write a four-page afterword even though you have nothing to write about), the various things in a narrative must be presented in a coherent manner. You have to show the characters, the setting, and parts of the plot, all while transitioning smoothly between them. But with this novel, I somewhat narrowed the field of what I would actually depict. I decided that would be more sincere, considering the themes I was dealing with, and of course, just better overall. There may be some readers who finish this book and find some things unclear. That is intentional. We have our two protagonists, our hero and heroine, and the story mostly advances through their points of view. The genre (not that there’s any real point in defining it) would most likely be fantasy. There are many terms and a setting made specially for this work. The question is, Who or what does this story, told through the medium of an entire novel, revolve around? This in itself isn’t the theme, but it is a thread that directly outlines the theme. At the time of writing this afterword, preparations for Volume 2 are underway, but we’ll see how that goes. There is still so much that is uncertain. December 2019, Ichimei Tsukushi