Though it was more than a decade ago, I can still remember the day I first shared what would become The City of Brass with my writing group back in Brooklyn. New to the group, new to writing, and extremely new to sitting on a stranger’s couch while presenting my heart’s work, I shared the kind of manuscript I thought epic fantasy was supposed to be: one including at least a dozen character viewpoints, multiple cross-country treks, and scores of different cities, villages, and expansive magical vistas, all with pages upon pages of detailed backstory, convoluted histories, and exhaustive descriptions.
You might say they disagreed.
There are certainly epic fantasy stories that require that kind of exploration, they argued, but at its heart, The City of Brass was about Nahri’s and Ali’s journeys. About a young woman ripped away from everything she knows, forced to rebuild her life again and again—and yet who finds in that survival a fierce determination to fight for her people and her happiness. About a young man who struggles to reconcile his faith and his ideals of justice with the reality that the city he loves is built on oppression—and that dismantling it will mean bringing down his own family’s rule. And while I wanted to set them in a fully realized world among a rich constellation of friends and family, lovers and enemies, all with their own histories, quirks, and agendas, I did decide early on that this particular story would focus on Nahri and Ali, and later Dara.
I have a great affection for my side characters, however, and a firm belief that writing things out is the most organic way to let stories grow and breathe. So in the course of working on the trilogy, I’ve gone on parallel quests with unnamed scouts and charted Muntadhir and Jamshid’s relationship in their own words, seen Zaynab rise as a rebel leader, and dived into Dara’s youth in a far more ancient Daevabad. I’ve written scenes that informed my own understanding of the books, even if all I took from them was a line or a sentiment. They were my own form of research notes, but not ones that I intended to share.
Then came the pandemic. Without diving too deeply into my personal experience of a crisis that still isn’t over, suffice to say that for the first few months of lockdown, I couldn’t write a thing. The world was on fire, my family needed me, and I was supposed to create? In a desperate attempt to get literally any words down, I found myself returning to my old Daevabad scenes. Working on something familiar and already partially drafted, in a world I loved and knew intimately, proved much less intimidating than the blank page of a new project. Slowly the words began to return so I went further, envisioning the lives of my characters beyond the conclusion of The Empire of Gold and the tales of people long gone before The City of Brass begins.
I share some of those tales with you now. The stories are arranged chronologically, with a short introduction to let you place them in the context of the trilogy. I hope that you enjoy this brief return to Daevabad as much as I did and know that I am forever grateful you decided to give my books a chance.
May the fires burn brightly for you,
Shannon Chakraborty