Thanks for reading Love and Loss, the fourth volume of my Subjects and Singers of the Song series. A special thanks to those of you who took the time to review and let me know your thoughts as you went along, and a HUGELY special thanks to ZosiaDetroit, who left me in-depth essays on every chapter, frequently gave me some much-needed encouragement along the way, and once helped me determine how to handle a very sticky subject in the middle of circumstances in the real world that offered an all-too-present mirror. If you like your fantasy stories with a whopping dose of realism, Zosia's work in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain fandom is beautifully written and characterized, well-researched, and entrenched in both history and legend. I recommend it.
This volume had its amorphous focus on first romances and different kinds of grief, and the characters of Varric Tethras, Gwyn Cousland, Tirrian Tabris, and Alistair. It also saw the introduction of parallelism between some of the characters and our first mini story arcs. The next volume, Shifting Paradigm: 9:26–9:28 Dragon, is more about these characters' changing attitudes toward adult responsibility, and the stars of the show, so to speak, will be Cullen Rutherford and Kaycee Hawke. It also, of course, covers what happened in the three years immediately before the Grey Wardens discovered there was an incoming Blight, and even my youngest characters, Estral Lavellan and Tirrian Tabris, become teenagers here. There will be more parallelism, more story arcs, and, for the first time, one character will respond directly to the events in someone else's story.
The fifth volume of the series is now posting Wednesdays. You can find it on my profile.
Love you all. Stay safe. Stay sane.
LMSharp