A Note from the Author

For readers who would like to know how this book was written.

This book took three years.

The idea came first. I wanted to retell Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, not as a festival we already know how to celebrate, but as something my characters had to find, and in the finding, discover something deeply relevant to our modern problems: the understanding of balance. I wanted the reader to walk with a fifteen-year-old shepherd-boy named Yima through seven trials, in a world that had forgotten what spring sounded like, and to arrive at the first Nowruz the way the first people who celebrated it might have arrived at it: tired, surprised, unsure whether they had earned it.

This book is only the first of three. What I wanted the trilogy to be, in the end, is a kind of long walk through Iranian culture: its history, its mythology, its music, its architecture, its geography, the texture of the land and the names people gave it. Years of reading and listening sit on its back: years inside books related to our history and culture, understanding our roots, years inside Sufi metaphysics, years staring at the reliefs of Persepolis, years asking grandmothers what they remember. And I wanted the trilogy to speak, above all, to the next generation, to the kids who will inherit these stories, so that one of them might grow up to be a wisdom-keeper too, one of the ones who keeps the fire lit.

For three years I drafted, rewrote, abandoned, and re-began. There were versions in which Yima was younger; versions in which the antagonist was a king and not a grieving boy; versions in which the journey was longer, shorter, structured around battles instead of musical modes; versions in which the Mithal realm, the in-between world of Sufi metaphysics, was the main theatre of the book, with our world only flickering at the edges; versions pitched at pre-teens, and others at children younger still. I wrote a draft in the third person; a draft in which the reed itself spoke for whole chapters at a time; a draft in which the whole story was framed as a grandmother telling it to her grandchildren around a fire. Most of them were not good. Some of them taught me what the book was not. Eventually the structure that survived all the drafts was the seven wisdoms, the seven dastgah of Persian classical music, each one tied to one trial and one lesson, all of them building toward an ending that was never about defeating an enemy but about remembering something that had been forgotten.

This is also my first book, and a great deal of those three years was spent learning what a story has to do to land with a younger reader. I was lucky in this. I have a daughter who reads the way only a real bookworm reads, and we have spent years now in a running conversation about every book she picks up: Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Keeper of the Lost Cities, dozens more. She read drafts. She told me, with the patience of a saint and the honesty of a kid who actually knows what kids like, what worked and what did not. A great deal of what is in this book is in it because of those conversations.

I should also say, plainly: English is my second language. I wanted this book to be in English anyway, and I want to explain why. So many of our kids are growing up in the West, in classrooms and libraries where there is not a single book telling our story in a language they can actually read. Not the warmth of it. Not the music of it. Not the names. I wanted a book that the daughter of an Iranian family in Vancouver, or a Persian-American boy in Chicago, could pull off a school-library shelf and meet Yima and Yameh inside, with no one needing to translate it for him. I wanted them to have that. But I am not a native English writer. I can think and feel in English; I cannot write English prose at the level this book needed. So I asked for help.

Throughout the last two years of that work, I used large language models as a writing collaborator. The book is mine. The plot is mine; the characters are mine; the choices about who lives, who dies, who walks away, what is named and what is left unnamed, are mine. The Persian and Zoroastrian sources are sources I have read and lived with. The decision to retell Yima/Jamshid as a shepherd, the decision to braid the seven dastgah into seven wisdoms, the decision to make the antagonist a boy with a dead sister and a love so heavy it had nowhere to go: those decisions are mine, made over years. So are the decisions to bring spring back through music rather than war or sword; to set Rumi’s Nay, the reed cut from the reed-bed and crying for its home, at the heart of every character’s growth; to draw the line from Zoroastrianism into Sufism by way of the Mithal world; to thread the ancient Khosravani wisdom and the lore of the Magi into the spine of the book.

What the AI did was help me write the prose. It helped me find a sentence that landed when my own draft of the sentence was wooden. It helped me keep the voice steady across twenty-one chapters. It helped me notice when I was repeating myself. It is a tool, in the way that a thesaurus is a tool, or a beta reader, or an editor. A tool whose suggestions I accepted, refused, modified, and argued with, page by page.

I know that some readers feel that books written with the help of AI are not real books, or that they hollow out the work of writers. I have thought about that too, and I respect the worry. I will tell you what I think.

I think a book is the meeting of an idea and a sentence. The idea has to come from a person, from years of reading, of grief, of attention to the world. No machine can do that. The sentence, in our time, has many sources: the writer’s own ear, the editors who push them, the friends who read drafts, the teachers whose voices live in their head, and now, sometimes, a model that has been trained on every sentence ever written. What the writer is responsible for is the meeting. What the writer is responsible for is making sure the sentence carries the idea: that the prose says what the writer means, and that what the writer means is honest, and that what is honest is also worth saying.

I have done that work. I have done it for three years. I have done it page by page and revision by revision. The sentences in this book have been weighed, accepted, rejected, and re-weighed by me. The story is the story I wanted to tell. The book is the book I wanted to write.

If you would prefer not to read books written with this kind of help, I understand. I respect that, and I would rather you put this book down and pick up another than read it with that worry on your shoulder.

But if you would like to read it: please do. Come and walk with Yima from Hawraman to the cave to the river to the mountain. Meet the people he meets. Learn the names of the wisdoms with him. Stay until the children dance around the seven fires at the end. The journey is honest. I have walked it many times. I would like to walk it with you once more.

Mohsen Alimomeni Author’s note, 2026