Chapter 46

Afterword Every reader has the liberty to decide where they begin reading or where they stop reading. However, just as stories are rarely constructed with the assumption that the reader will begin reading from the end, I write this afterword with the presumption that it will be read last (there are many spoilers this time). Please keep that in mind. As is clear from the title, Dragon and Ceremony 3: God’s Many Forms, this book is the third volume in the series, following the first and the second. As before, the Dragon and Ceremony part denotes the series, while the subtitle accurately describes the content. We have gods, ghosts, and people in the running, but all those words point to essentially the same thing. It felt a bit strange writing this winter tale in the height of summer for a fall release. Those of you who have been reading from the very beginning (not that I think anyone would only read this specific volume) will be able to tell this novel has a different feel overall. If I had to put it into one word, I would say that Volume 3 is calmer. There wasn’t much in the way of skillful research or thrilling action. It was a bit more relaxed and “everyday” than its predecessors. I’ve been writing about wandmakers for so long, but now the characters are actually crafting them, so you could also say this is a story about work. Or maybe craftspeople? Well, there’s probably no real point in making a distinction between those themes. In terms of keywords, this book is different as well. Instead of the “inside and outside” themes from Volumes 1 and 2, we have the main theme of “above and below.” Inside and outside is a separation along a plane, a frame put in place by others. If you think about stepping “outside,” you’ve only got the three-dimensional directions to choose from. So which direction do you go in? No matter which you choose, there will be things you can see only from that point, information you can learn only from there. Several new characters appeared in this volume, but I’d originally planned on debuting Shuno in Volume 2. There were a number of reasons why I decided to put them in this novel instead. The circumstances around their personal pronouns made some of the prose rather tricky. I got used to it by the second half, but in the beginning, I was somewhat careless with my writing, which made it a bit questionable. Speaking of people, I originally started writing Dragon and Ceremony to try out writing a story in third-person narration. Now that I’ve made it all the way here, I finally feel like I’ve given that type of narration meaning (though the perspective in that last scene was just a bit of me playing around). I also feel like I’ve largely wrapped up the random foreshadowing I threw into the first volume, the application volume, and like I’ve reached a stopping point in terms of the story. August 2020, Ichimei Tsukushi