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Afterword

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ANDRONIKOS SOSILOS


Among several challenges in crafting this volume for publication, one proved most persistent: locating an appropriate preamble.

Being intimately familiar with this portion of The Hanuvid, for it had been one of my favorite sections since my youth, I knew there was no part in the work where my great-great-uncle stepped outside the narrative to introduce Hanuvar’s entry into southern Tyvol. There were occasional transitions between the smaller “books” into which the old scrolls divided The Hanuvid, but because Antires had presented all of Hanuvar’s Tyvolian campaign as a continuous narrative he had never really stopped to assess matters upon Hanuvar’s arrival in Apicius.

I sought amongst the fragments of earlier drafts of The Hanuvid that have been passed down through my family, and poured through Antires’ surviving letters. While there were promising and even revealing moments, none was ideally suited for my needs. It seemed I would be forced to draft a preamble of my own, and while I thought myself capable of imitating Antires’ prose I was loath to do so, for I very much desired to let his own observations stand as the connective threads between each volume of this modern edition.

It was my wife who provided the solution. Her memory is superior to my own, and she recalled seeing amongst Silenus’ papers a letter Antires had once sent in response to her query seeking perspective on Hanuvar’s state of mind before his encounters with Calenius and the revenants. My wife’s recollection proved entirely accurate—such a letter not only existed among Silenus’ own archives, it almost perfectly suited my needs. And so I adopted it, altering the letter in only a few places to remove references to Silenus’ inquiry, and to add occasional linking text from another of Antires’ letters when unrelated paragraphs needed to be excised.

Those familiar with the original Hanuvid were likely surprised by the events that took place within the theatre of Apicius. Antires wrote of them in detail but referred to them only in passing within The Hanuvid itself, for he had excised them from the work before ever sharing it. He seems to have believed that to include an adventure of his own smacked of self-aggrandizement. In this he erred, perhaps being too close to the events to see how important both he and Izivar had become to the saga as a whole. He certainly thought it necessary to introduce Ishana into the narrative, given her coming importance, but did so only in passing, probably concerned that his romance with her, too, drew too much attention from the subject of his work. I think Hanuvar would have disagreed and told him that many of his greatest victories could not have been accomplished without his friends and allies.

In any case, I added Antires’ personal account of the events of that day and threaded it into this new Hanuvid with a few small changes to Antires’ closing narrative, and I feel it makes the work more cohesive. Because Silenus had never read these pages, I attempted to elucidate points I thought she would have found worthy of comment.

As always, if my own efforts have failed to please, blame not the story, but the teller, who seeks only to bring The Hanuvid to life for a new generation.


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