Author’s notes
As I stated in Book One of this series, I created a mythical country as the setting of the story, which is located between Guam and Hawaii. I am a Filipino author and I haven’t quite experienced yet the four seasons of weather that is why it would be difficult for me to describe them in my writing (like how snow falls in winter or how plants and trees begin to grow in the spring). So I chose a geographic location where I could relate to, much like my home country, and that was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean near the equator, where only rainy and sunny seasons happen.
I am a proud Filipino, and you will notice that our culture, traditions, history, and even our witticisms are reflected in my writing. I pursued it as a gesture of love and respect for my home country, and in the hope of bringing a fresh backdrop to international readers.
In Book One, I hadn’t stated much about the origin of the outlandish creatures, the Vangkekans, because I was in the middle of an extensive research on how to make them realistically based, (and not just the typical fictional characters like westernized vampires or werewolves, but creatures that could actually be supported by History, Biology, Philosophy, and even Astro-Physics).
Now that I have gathered enough information to tell their origin, they will now be mentioned in the Prologue of this book. Certainly, some readers won’t be open to some of the details but this book is only a product of fiction, after all.
Appendices A and B of this book describe the fictional country setting and the strange creatures respectively, while Appendix C defines the strange words found throughout the story. The three appendices are excerpts from Book One and were added only here, for the reader’s reference.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading the story and learn some lessons from it, as I did.