The Romantic, Pedantic, Ride-or-Die Words of Jolene Verdun

The Verdun Chronicles, Prologue Part II

Did y’all like the first chapter?? Did it draw you in? Do you want more?? Well, regardless of your answer I have more!

btw do y’all rember that I’m trying to make it to 300 paid subscribers? Well, as of today I have 13, and you could make it 14 by clicking this one button:

if you clicked, I really appreciate it. I’m just a writer trying to pay her bills in this world <3

and now, onto the chapter!

---

Anastasia Verdun has hardly had time to register much of anything about her life except that her body no longer craves opiates or amphetamines and that Jolene is alive and smiling. It takes her nearly a week of this to have any secondary thoughts.

Jolene Verdun thinks her wife might have one of those strange colds that make their way up north from the dwarven mines. Thinking her wife ill, Jolene spares a few unkind thoughts for the way those dwarves run their mines, the haphazard way they’ll just dig up any old rock. It’s not as though there hasn’t been illnesses from the mysterious and occasionally extra-terrestrial things the dwarves dig up! There was a Yaletian flu that made the rounds a few years ago. Yaletian, of all things! How the Yaletians managed to drop the equivalent of an airplane bathroom spillage on a planet two solar systems away is beyond Jolene.

Still, she presses, gently, “Dearest, maybe you should visit a doctor.”

“Doctor? Why?” Anastasia replies, tone clipped as ever and eyes cast out the window at a fleet of hot air balloons in the distance, taking tourists along to see the unfamiliar horizons of the Appalachian mountains. “I feel fit as a fiddle.”

Jolene knows her wife to be just about the stubbornest thing on two legs, so she instead rolls herself over to the front table, where their mail pile is growing day-by-day with requests for Anastasia’s services. Despite the way she’s staring out windows and pacing and over-analyzing the coffee maker, Anastasia hasn’t opened a single request. So Jolene opens them, sorting them into piles for uninteresting requests, which she leaves on the front table, and interesting ones, which she sets in her lap.