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.

Friendship

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.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.

Contains: A girl struggling with amatonormativity, a dragon who exits to comment on the strange relationship rules and assumptions had by humans.

Links: PDF | EPUB | WordPress | Tumblr

Length: 993 words / 4 PDF pages.

Azhra Reading Order: Friendship | Attraction | Kin of Mind

Attraction

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.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.

Contains: A girl smushing hard on another girl, further dragon commentary on humanity’s absurd tendency to assign behaviours to relationship types.

Links: PDF | EPUB | WordPress | Tumblr

Length: 989 words / 4 PDF pages.

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 | EPUB | Web

Length: 1200 words / 4 PDF pages.

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

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.

Links: Part One | Part Two | Preview

Length: 4, 047 words / 12 PDF pages.

Note: A Patreon exclusive.

Azhra Reading Order: Friendship | Attraction | Kin of Mind

Darius Reading Order: Kin of Mind | Certain Eldritch Artefacts | Love in the House of the Ravens | One Strange Man | The Adventurer King

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.

 

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