Marchverse Side Stories

This page collects my side stories, one-shots and other random detours through the Marchverse. Friendship, Attraction and A Gift of Naming are set a couple of hundred years before the other Marchverse books, while Fletcher Ace is set a hundred years after.

* Indicates either bonus side stories or Patreon exclusive stories.

Cover image for Hallo, Aro: Allosexual Aromantic Flash Fiction by K. A. Cook. Cover features dark pink handwritten type on a mottled green background with a large line-drawn peacock feather, several sketch-style leaves and swirly text dividers. Green arrows sit underneath each line of text.Friendship

A sapphic aromantic wishes to partner a dragon’s handmaiden without the complications of a romantic relationship, but finds comfort in her friendship with her own dragon.

Links: PDF (read in browser) | Patreon | WordPress | Tumblr

PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions are available for download from Patreon.

Length: 993 words / 4 PDF pages.

Complete Azhra Reading Order: Friendship | Attraction | Kin of Mind

Cover image for Hallo, Aro: Allosexual Aromantic Flash Fiction by K. A. Cook. Cover features dark pink handwritten type on a mottled green background with a large line-drawn peacock feather, several sketch-style leaves and swirly text dividers. Green arrows sit underneath each line of text.Attraction

A sapphic aromantic fears that her interest in another girl may be best explained by a word she doesn’t wish applied to her–romance.

Links: PDF (read in browser) | Patreon | WordPress | Tumblr

PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions are available for download from Patreon.

Length: 989 words / 4 PDF pages.

Complete Azhra Reading Order: Friendship | Attraction | Kin of Mind

A Gift of Naming

Cover of A Gift of Naming by K. A. Cook. Cover shows cartoon-style tall-trunked trees growing on a green mountain slope with a high green canopy before a blue and grey clouded sky. Brushes and small green shrubs grow at the base of the trees in the foreground. Text is written in a white, handdrawn, fantasy-style type.If one’s parents provide a shirt that tears when tugged over their child’s shoulders, isn’t it cruelty to force the wearing of it, however well-intended the gift?

Even in the best of circumstances, it’s no easy thing to tell the parent who named you that your name no longer fits.

Contains: A genderless gardener wishing for a name that better describes hir and the trans mother who knows that such gifts should never become obligations.

Links: PDF (read in browser) | Patreon | WordPress

PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions are available for download from Patreon.

Length: 1200 words / 4 PDF pages.

Note: A stand-alone short story about a brand-new character.

What Makes Us Human

Cover image for What Makes Us Human: A Marchverse Short Story by K. A. Cook. Cover shows an archway set into a stone wall, the wall covered by a dull green creeper. A small peach sphere of light glows underneath part of the creeper at the top of the archway. Inside the archway is another stone wall behind a courtyard comprised of a few rocks, two spindly trees and a striped purple cushion. Title and author credit are written in a white, fantasy-style text, the type bright against the grey background.Moll of Sirenne needs prompts in their girdle book to navigate casual conversations, struggles to master facial expressions and feels safest weeding the monastery’s vegetable gardens. Following their call to service, however, means offering wanderers in need a priest’s support and guidance. A life free of social expectation to court, wed and befriend does outweigh their fear of causing harm—until forgetting the date of a holiday provokes a guest’s ire and three cutting words: lifeless and loveless.

A priest must expand a guest’s sense of human worth, but what do they do when their own comes under question? Can an autistic, aromantic priest ever expect to serve outside the garden? And what day is it…?

Contains: A middle-aged, agender priest set on defying social norms around love; an alloromantic guest with a journey to undergo in conquering her amatonormativity and ableism; an elderly aromantic priest providing irascible reassurance; and the story of how Moll became Esher’s guiding priest.

Links: PDF (read in browser) | Patreon (Part One, Part Two) | WordPress

Length: 8, 062 words / 32 PDF pages.

Kin of Mind

Cover of Bones, Belts and Bewitchments: A Marchverse Collection by K. A. Cook. Cover features a book open to a page on a wooden table, showing the title text written in antique black ink as if the book's own title page. The page is stained, inspotted and discoloured as if to show age.A dragon in need of a human attendant finds providence in the arrival of a magician in need of a library, but more than phalanges and history binds Azhra and Darius in companionship.

Contains: A library in some disarray; a young magician on a quest; a dragon reflecting on hir past human attendants; and a mythology celebrating the similarities between dragons and autistics.

Patreon Links: Part One | Part Two | WordPress Preview

PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions are available for subscribers on Patreon.

Length: 4, 047 words / 12 PDF pages.

Complete Azhra Reading Order: Friendship | Attraction | Kin of Mind

Complete Darius Reading Order: Kin of Mind* | Certain Eldritch Artefacts | Love in the House of the Ravens | One Strange Man | The Morning After* | The Skin Game* | King’s Pawn* | The Adventurer King

Catch a Man (Have the Girl)

Yuissa is the only partner Adelin wants, but survival in Ihrne requires both girls to keep secret their truth. No matter: they’re only a year away from having coin enough to escape to a cottage in Greenstone, a paradise of vegetable gardens, rescued cats and unrestrained affection. They can survive anything until then, right? Yet when Adelin’s worried mother and grandmother plot to solve Adelin’s unwed state by forcing her to court a male acquaintance, Yuissa thinks a beard the only answer.

A queer-seeming bookseller called Nevolin ein Yinne may do, but the process of asking isn’t quite so simple…

Contains: A cis, sapphic, probably-demiromantic shopgirl defying restrictive notions of good; a cis, bisexual, autistic shopgirl defying restrictive notions of abled; two older cishet women enduring and perpetrating misogyny; and a promise of a future possessed of a goodly number of cats.

Links: Part One | Part Two

Length: 4, 021 words (thus far).

Complete The Eagle Court Reading Order: Catch a Man (Have the Girl)* | Different in Other Ways* | Their Courts of Crows | Maybe When the Bones Crumble* | A Prince of the Dead | Loveless* | The King of Gears and Bone | Like the Other Prince

Complete Harper and Nevo Reading Order: Catch a Man (Have the Girl)* | Different in Other Ways* | Like the Other Prince

* Bonus side stories or Patreon exclusives.

Fletcher Ace: Magic and Mermaids

An expensive education and a growing eldritch library hasn’t helped Fletcher Ace, local witch, end the drought gripping the town of Shadowdale. The town council may have a better solution than waiting on hir magic, one that involves the selling of romance to people “out there”, but Fletch isn’t prepared for just how it will involve hir…

Contains: The ultimate collection of a-spec pun character names, lots of purple and green, a genderqueer witch who doesn’t mean to drive hir kin up the wall, a quest that exists for future snark on the subject of amatonormativity, a little relationship anarchy and capital-F family.

Links: WordPress

Length: 7, 549 words.

Note: A stand-alone piece set a hundred years after The King of Gears and Bone.