On journals, testimony, memory, and the stories history leaves behind.
I've been asking questions about history and belief since I was a child. Not simply about the great events that shaped civilizations, but about the people who lived through them. Those who endured wars, witnessed extraordinary change, raised families, loved, believed, questioned, and died.
We remember kings, conquerors, religious leaders, and those whose decisions changed the course of history. Their names become the stories we study, the victories we celebrate, and the tragedies we struggle to understand. But I've always wondered about the others.
The people who stood beside them. Those who carried out their wishes, suffered the consequences of their decisions, or simply tried to live their lives in a world being changed around them.
What did they believe? What happened to those who believed differently? And how much of what we understand as history might change if we could hear their voices alongside those whose names have endured?
As a child, I often didn't know how to ask those questions aloud. But they never left me. If anything, they've only deepened. And in many ways, they became the foundation of the Durajan Series.
When I began writing The Chronicles of Durajan, I knew I wanted to tell an epic story. One that would span years, follow the rise of nations, and explore how people and civilizations are shaped by hardship, faith, love, and power. But I didn't want that history to belong to a single narrator. I wanted it to emerge from the people living through it.
Dothemides is a man who has endured war, servitude, and banishment. His life changes because of a decision, an act of conscience that carries consequences far beyond anything he could have imagined.
He is an important voice in the story, certainly. But his understanding of the world is not the only one that matters.
Samike brings her own history, her own beliefs, and a very different understanding of what it means to survive. Umaru, Svirva, Bianzhi, and the many others who enter the story carry experiences shaped by different cultures, loyalties, relationships, and circumstances.
Their voices reveal things that no single character could know or fully understand.
Something regarded as an act of mercy by one person might be seen as weakness by another. A victory might bring joy to those who fought for it and grief to those who stood against them. Even among people who love one another, beliefs and memories may differ in profound ways. I find that fascinating because it's so deeply human.
We rarely experience the world in precisely the same way, even when we stand beside one another. And yet, together, those different experiences become something larger than any individual account. They become a history.
Within the story, Dothemides encourages the people of Dothemia to keep journals. To write about their experiences, their fears, their hopes, their beliefs, and the lives they are building. This was never intended to be a simple cultural detail.
These are people who have been banished from their nations. Some have been condemned for crimes, others for their beliefs, their circumstances, or acts that placed them beyond the boundaries of what their societies would accept.
They have been sent to the Durajan to disappear. To be forgotten. And so the act of writing becomes something meaningful. A declaration that their lives mattered, that their experiences were real, and that someone, someday, might know they existed.
In Dothemia, memory becomes more than recollection. It becomes part of the community's identity, its emerging traditions, and eventually its understanding of faith. I wanted the reader to experience something of that same intimacy.
To be present when events unfold, but also to understand what those moments meant to the people who lived through them. To explore the thoughts that precede a decision, the uncertainty within it, and the reflections that follow.
Because I believe there is something profoundly different about knowing what someone did and understanding what it meant to them.
A journal allows us to sit with a person in a way that history often cannot. And sometimes, the quietest of those reflections carries more weight than the event itself.
The Durajan Series combines traditional narrative and dialogue with signed journals, personal recollections, records, and testimony. These aren't separate stories collected together, but different forms of storytelling woven into one continuous narrative. That distinction was important to me.
I wanted readers to experience events as they happened. The tension of conflict, the warmth of friendships, the intimacy of relationships, and the ordinary moments that allow a community to feel alive. But I also wanted them to experience what follows.
The thoughts that remain when the excitement has passed. When the battle is over, the celebration has ended, or a difficult choice has been made. I've always been fascinated by those moments.
What happens when a warrior returns home? When a leader is left alone with the consequences of a decision? When someone realizes that the life they once knew has changed forever?
I've often thought that the most meaningful part of heroism begins before an act becomes visible, with the choice to do something extraordinary. And that it continues long afterward, when the person who made that choice must live with what they've done. Those moments are every bit as important to me as the great events themselves.
The journals give me a way to explore them with patience and intimacy. To allow a character to reflect, question, remember, or simply acknowledge something they might never say aloud. The scale of Durajan may be epic, but the people living within it experience their lives one day, one relationship, and one decision at a time.
I wanted the storytelling to honor both.
There is another aspect of writing through multiple voices that I find particularly compelling. Memory is not perfect. We remember things through the experiences we've had, the people we've loved, the pain we've endured, and the beliefs we've come to hold.
Time changes our understanding. Age and experience bring perspectives we may not have possessed when something first occurred. And sometimes, what we believe to be true is shaped as much by what we cannot see as by what stands directly before us. This opens an interesting dimension within Durajan.
The journals don't need to contradict one another to reveal differences in perspective. A character may record an event with absolute conviction, unaware of what another person was experiencing at that very moment. Someone may remember an act of courage without knowing the fear that preceded it. Another may carry sorrow from a decision that someone else still believes was necessary. Neither perspective needs to be dishonest for both to be incomplete.
I've found that allowing these understandings to coexist gives the characters greater humanity. They aren't simply instruments carrying the plot forward. They're people trying to understand the world and their place within it. And as the series expands, so too does the number of voices contributing to its history.
In The Empires of Durajan, the story moves beyond the foundation of Dothemia and into a world where new powers are emerging, cultures are confronting one another, and decisions made years earlier continue to shape the present.
The journals and testimonies remain, but the history they are recording has become far more complex. What one generation creates, another must inherit. What one people remembers, another may challenge. And what eventually becomes legend may have begun as something far more ordinary, uncertain, and human.
One of the central tensions in the Durajan Series is the struggle between remembrance and erasure.
The Nakarran Creed, through its devotion to the Hollow, seeks to overcome the divisions and identities that define the peoples of the Awakened World. To surrender the self, its history, and its attachments is, to the Creed, a path toward something greater. To them, it is salvation.
The people of Dothemia have come to believe something very different. Their histories, beliefs, experiences, and memories are not burdens to be discarded. They are the things that make them who they are. That tension is deeply personal to me.
Throughout human history, cultures have risen and vanished. Beliefs have spread, absorbed others, and sometimes erased what came before. Nations have been forged through conquest, conversion, migration, and the shifting boundaries of power. And somewhere within all of that change are the people whose stories we will never know.
I don't believe the answers to these questions are simple. Nor do I believe that those who emerge victorious are always wholly right, or those who stand against them wholly wrong. People are far more complicated than that. Their convictions may be sincere, their intentions honorable, and their actions devastating.
I wanted Durajan to have room for those contradictions. For people of different backgrounds and beliefs to speak, to question, to misunderstand, to grow, and sometimes to find common ground. The journals give them that room. They allow the story to remember people who might otherwise exist only as names in a chronology, casualties of a battle, or subjects of a kingdom. And in doing so, they become a quiet form of resistance against the very forces that seek to erase them.
As I've continued writing the series, I've come to appreciate something I couldn't have fully understood when I began. The story has grown beyond the experiences of any single character, and in many ways beyond the original questions that gave it life.
Each new voice brings another perspective. Another relationship. Another understanding of what has happened and what may yet come.
Writing them has challenged me to consider the world through beliefs and experiences different from my own. To explore how people can arrive at conflicting conclusions while remaining entirely sincere in what they believe. And sometimes, as I write, the characters surprise me.
I may know where the larger story is going, but discovering how its people experience that journey continues to be one of the most rewarding parts of the process. It's something I've come to love about writing Durajan. And perhaps that's the most important reason I've chosen to tell the story this way.
I don't want readers to know this world only through its great leaders, its wars, or the rise and fall of its empires. I want them to know its people. To understand their hopes and failings, the bonds they form, the things they believe, and the ways they struggle to make sense of lives that are often beyond their control. I want the story to feel as though it has been lived, not simply told.
And when readers eventually look back across the years of the Durajan, I hope they won't remember only what happened. I hope they'll remember the people who lived through it. Because in the end, a history is more than a record of events. It is the sum of the lives that gave those events meaning.
A. H. Lewis
Author and Creator of The Durajan Series
Explore the series: Where to Begin with The Durajan Series
Discover The Chronicles of Durajan and The Empires of Durajan, or explore the cultures, faiths, and histories of the Awakened World.
