Since some people have reached out via DMs and comments to complain about the latest chapters. I want to take a moment to clarify something important.
As a Brazilian who has personally experienced prejudice while living abroad simply because of my name, I can say this with complete honesty: I am not writing this novel to push a political ideology. Not this story, not any other story.
What I am trying to do is write something difficult.
I am ambitious. Maybe even greedy as a writer. I want to try things. I will make mistakes. I will write bad chapters. I will write good chapters. Some choices will work. Some will not. But at the end of the day, I will keep trying to make the story better. Where better to me is more engaging, that brings more emotions.
I do not want to write something simple.
I want the story to feel complete. I want it to be uncomfortable when it needs to be uncomfortable. I want it to be morally difficult. I do not want everything to be black and white, because people are not black and white. War is not black and white. History is not black and white. And Kaspar is not black and white.
Kaspar is human.
The Empire, the Sultanate, and even their enemies are refugees and survivors. Germans are not native to California. Arabs are not native to New Mexico. Everyone in this world came from somewhere else.
The difference is not about nationality, culture, or origin.
It is whether they are human or not.
Whether they belong to this world or came through a portal.
That is the brutal line their societies have drawn after centuries of war. Not a line I am asking readers to agree with, but a line Kaspar was thrown into.
In that kind of world, hatred and prejudice can become deep, old, and almost reasonable to the people living inside it.
Not right.
But understandable.
That distinction matters.
Kaspar may make decisions that, from a 21st-century perspective, feel horrifying. But from inside his world, with the information he has, the wounds his society carries, and the enemies he has been taught to see, those decisions may feel necessary.
That does not mean the story endorses him every time.
That does not mean I endorse him every time.
It means I am trying to write a character trapped inside history, fear, propaganda, trauma, survival, and power.
This is a fantasy story about portals, monsters, elves, magic, war, and survival. If some readers draw lines between the story and the real world, I understand that. Literature almost always invites interpretation, and fantasy rarely exists in a vacuum.
But my intention is not to bring modern politics into the novel.
My intention is to write a story where the answers are not easy.
As George R. R. Martin once put it, “the villain is the hero of the other side.”
That is the kind of story I am trying to write.