We all want to be loved, and to love. But finding true and lasting love is not always easy, and sometimes comes at a cost. Sometimes, love hurts. Sometimes, the obstacles separating us from true love may seem insurmountable. In this collection by best-selling gay fantasy author Warren Rochelle, love is found next door as well as twelve lightyears away.
In the title story, Edvard is the accident, the unplanned child. His mother is the Ambassador of the Human Community to the Great Forest on the planet Wertynger, a forest of sentient trees. His father is the Embassy's chief legal counsel. His golden brothers are on other worlds in the Human Community, bound for success. Not Edvard, to the despair of his parents. When he meets Luc, who loves Ed for who he is, everything changes. His parents separate them, sending Edvard to school lightyears away on Earth. Ed promises to come back and marry Luc. When Luc is taken by the minions of the Holy Trees, their love is sorely tested. Happily ever after is no longer certain. It may even be impossible.
Throughout other stories, love is tested in many ways. Can a man trust a mysterious voice on the radio, calling for him? What if your lover asks you to make a curse? Or if your husband is hearing voices in his dreams, voices somehow connected to a comet? Can promises made in one universe be kept in another? Will these lovers have a happily ever after, or at least, for now?
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Warren Rochelle lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his husband and their little dog, Gypsy. He has just retired from teaching English at the University of Mary Washington. His short fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Icarus, North Carolina Literary Review, Forbidden Lines, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Collective Fallout, Queer Fish 2, Empty Oaks, Quantum Fairy Tales, Migration, The Silver Gryphon, Jaelle Her Book, Colonnades, and Graffiti, as well as the Asheville Poetry Review, GW Magazine, Crucible, The Charlotte Poetry Review, and Romance and Beyond.
His short story "The Golden Boy" was a finalist for the 2004 Spectrum Award for Short Fiction. His short story "Mirrors" was just published in Under a Green Rose, a queering romance anthology from Cuil Press. "The Latest Thing," a flash fiction story, is forthcoming in the Queer Sci Fi anthology, Innovation.
Rochelle is also the author of four novels: The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press, and The Werewolf and His Boy, published by Samhain Publishing in September 2016 and re-released from JMS Books in August 2020.