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The Last King of Akkora
The story behind the story. This was originally written in 1985 in what I used to call "invented time and place". People washed their laundry in rivers and moved around on horseback, but had guns and helicopters. And the lovers ran away to a forest where lions lived, and joined a pride led by a male. Yeah, the "invented" part was really huge, including the use of animals without studying their actual behavior.
I considered leaving the lions in, but a study of lions and mostly the Asiatic lion behavior made me change my mind. I considered using tigers, but they don't have prides and are even less tamable than lions.
I also had the bad guy burning down the forest to find the runaways, but as I decided to set the story in the Southern Kingdoms barely after the destruction of Arquon depicted in Books of the Immortals – Air, I thought that was enough of burning trees. The future Desert of the South is already made anyway.
I kept most of the original, adapting it to a fantasy setting, and more specifically to the Southern Kingdoms. This novella starts right after the novel Air and ends twenty-five years later with interactions only with a secondary character of the novel, Kumar's childhood friend Jayanta, who can be found also in The Orphans and Yash.
As for Kunal's brothers, Yash's fate is told in the namesake story mentioned above, Karan's fate is in Air and his only sister Lalita is killed in Tarun, another Tale of the Southern Kingdoms.
And the dog collar chained to the wall of a room at Agharek's palace will be used again in two hundred years' time by another crazy young man for his unfortunate victim. But the Kingdom of Akkora will be no more, then, and Agharek is only head of the most southern province of the Varian Empire. It's the story told in Books of the Immortals – Water.
The Prince Heir
This was written in the same period as the above, in what was supposed to be science-fiction. With no aliens, on a single planet. That's why it was easy to turn it into a story of the Southern Kingdoms, again substituting guns with scimitars.
Apart from changing names and the setting, I stuck mostly to the original story. And then I had to modify The Dancer that mentioned Prince Anjaan as still alive five years after Air... Now you know how he ended, and his story starts in the novel.
The courtesan's son
Originally titled, quite literally, "Son of a Bitch", this was one of my Outsiders-like stories of 1984, when I was heavily influenced by Francis Ford Coppola's movies and Matt Dillon. So of course it was set in a so-called present with rich kids and poor kids and whatnot. I had to take out the going to school and other modern stuff, but the plot is basically the same.
The only things I changed were Rohan's father – in the original he was Jaiden's father as well and Deepika wasn't a whore before having her baby and needing to feed him, and the ugly accident involving Nihar and Rohan at the end, when Nihar is drunk. That's because it involved cars, and I couldn't figure out an equivalent of a car accident – besides the consequences for Nihar were way too dramatic – he became impotent, and I didn't know how to have that happen in a less technological setting.
It was fun to tie the story to The Last King of Akkora and resetting it to the ex-kingdom of Akkora. The courtesan Deepika is now inspired by Chandramuki of Devdas and Umrao Jaan of the Aishwarya Rai movie.
The Dancer and The Lords of War are original stories that I wrote for these characters. The Dancer was originally the epilogue of Air, but beta-readers said it spoiled the ending of the novel, so I took it out. Still, you can guess who was my favorite character in the novel and how I couldn’t let him live happily ever after!
I wrote The Lords of War after watching one too many Bollywood movies and discovering Hritik Roshan’s dancing skills. He looked like the perfect son of Bella and Kumar, so there you have it. he collar wasn’t mentioned in the Sect stories because I made it up for this story, but then – I never really went into details about Kumar’s training because I felt it would be too sadistic on my part. And after all I’ve put him through, I felt he deserved a peaceful death!
So, there you have it. Farewell, Southern Kingdoms. I might explore you again in a graphic novel, but it will take some years... so I bow out now and will start working on the Chronicles of the Varian Empire.