The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,487

Vance, my audiobook narrator. With your skills, you bring all the benefits of adding talents together and none of the drawbacks. I am so glad you were brought to this project under false pretenses.

Thanks to Joseph Mondragon. I came across your synopses of Lightbringer online and realized to my great chagrin and greater delight that they were better than mine. (Turns out that writing a huge book and describing briefly what happens in it are different skills. Who’da thunk?) So I did what people do on the Internet and stole your work. I hope you never read this. Please don’t sue me. (I’m kidding. I got his permission.) Joseph’s (somewhat edited) work appears here. Any errors are mine—but would be seriously ironic.

Thank you to my assistant, the Dread Pirate CAPSLOCK. Though your predecessor should have most likely killed you in the morning, I’m flabbergasted by your unending brilliance and towering intellect. You’re a paragon of strength, resilience, humility, and hilarity. Thank you for being the person who makes those last-second edits and additions to the manuscript that sometimes even I don’t see before they show up in print.

Going a bit further afield now—no, no, go ahead, you can quit reading anytime! Thank you to Dante Alighieri, for literally writing a character named ‘Dante’ meeting the greatest poets of all human history in the afterlife and having them welcome him to join them at their fire as an equal. Whenever I worry my pride may be getting the better of me, I think of your—

Dante: Hey! It’s not arrogance if it’s accurate!

Brent: I’m not so sure about that, bucko. And putting your enemies in literal hell?

Dante: Bucko? Psh. Call me Dan. Now, come on, why don’t you join us at the fire? I’ll introduce you to everyone you don’t know. Oh, don’t worry. They all know you! We were just having a great discussion about how amazing Lightbringer is.

Brent: Yessir, whatever you say, Master Alighieri, sir . . . uh, Dan.

But seriously, I’ve always had a keen understanding of which fire I don’t belong at, and—more’s the pity—that’s one of ’em. But my sincere thanks to you and Homie and Bill and Eddie for showing me how high the bar can be. Even if you are laughing at me as I Fosbury Flop right under it.

Tim Mackie, thank you for the glimpses into the Ur. My thanks to the Monday Night Irregulars, and my thanks to those who have stood in the gap for me when it seemed my help was caught up over Babylon.

My deepest gratitude to the one who ended that storm at the exact right moment and brought me diamonds in moonlight. I’ve been a lot of trouble.

My thanks to Dr. Jacob Klein for decades of dumbing down ancient Greek and Latin and philosophy for me. Some of it is going to stick any day now. Call it purgatory for that impressive jumping spinning sidekick on the racquetball court that was supposed to miss my face.

Thanks to my brother, Kevin. Kristi says whenever I speak Andross Guile’s lines, I imitate your voice. (Weird!) Without the dirt-clod incident, the pitch-black locked closet with the spiders crawling under the door with their glowing red eyes, and the plastic zippered under-the-bed laundry bags, I’d probably have a lot more brain cells, but I wouldn’t be able to write claustrophobic terror nearly so well. Huh, this makes you sound mean. Sorry. Please don’t hurt me.

Sorry to that one guy who wrote me the angriest e-mail I’ve ever gotten—for writing a world in which color differentiation is so important that color-blind drafters are discriminated against. I appreciate your yearning for a kinder world. A world where all people knew what was true and beautiful and acted on it would have only one drawback: writing fiction there would be impossible—and probably unnecessary. In my worlds, characters believe many ugly things that I don’t. Indeed, some even believe beautiful things I don’t. Some authors confront the truth that people suck by imagining a world in which people don’t suck in some particular way; I choose to say, “People suck. What do we do about that?”

Thanks to my akhuya Ishak Micheil for the Arabic translations. Any errors are either Teia’s, because she was doing her best to translate phonetically what she heard, or your practical joke on me. But you wouldn’t do that, right?

Thank you to Thomas McCarthy, for the Irish pronunciations, translations, and the patience with our Internet-translated (i.e., wrong) declensions.

Thank you to the late