There are books that sparkle with surface magic—and then there are books like A Sister to Butterflies, which glow from within. This is a quiet, aching story of transformation, told through the lens of grief and memory.

The narrator, an ancient voice speaking to an infant, reveals the story of a fateful choice: the moment she left her realm of light for the world of flesh. There, she met a boy who taught her about love—but also about loss. The relationship between them becomes a thread that pulls at the seams of reality, and what begins as a fairy tale becomes something deeper, sadder, and far more human.

Aaron Christopher Drown is a multidisciplinary storyteller with a deep love for nuance and language. With roots in Maine and a home in Washington, he’s published widely in fantasy and speculative fiction. He’s received numerous literary accolades, including the Darrell Award, BIBA, and Imadjinn Awards. When not writing, he speaks at events on topics like branding, authorship, and design. His creative world blends art, myth, and emotional truth—and this latest novel may be his most resonant yet.

Enjoy a guest post from the author:

You’ve heard it before. A hundred times. A thousand times.

It’s the track that almost didn’t make the album that wins the Grammy. It’s the actress who’d been passed over but then given one last look who takes home the Oscar. It’s the idea just about everyone dismissed as crazy that ends up taking the world by storm.

For writers, amateur and established alike, the lesson there is that it takes just one person to say yes. Just one person who’s willing to accept a little risk on your behalf is often all that lies between you and your deserved triumph. Which is why the task that’s even more arduous than all the long days and late nights of writing, editing, and changing is simply not to give up until you find that one person who recognizes your work for the worthy thing it is.

Someone told me early on that if you’re not receiving a steady supply of rejection letters, then you’re not doing it right. You’re not really trying to break through as a writer. Because everyone gets rejected, repeatedly and mercilessly. But that’s the game. That’s the lottery you can’t win if you don’t play. And as you persist, take comfort in the impressive company of rebuffed authors you’re keeping:

Stephen King’s Carrie received dozens of rejections before finally selling—but only because his wife found the manuscript in the trash and insisted he try one more time. The Lord of the Flies was turned down twenty times. One publisher who read Anne Frank’s diary found it scarcely worth reading because it didn’t “have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.” John Grisham’s A Time to Kill had to make its way through a dozen publishers and sixteen agents before seeing the light of day. Dune received twenty-three rejections. Publishers dismissed Watership Down repeatedly because no one thought children would understand its prose. A Wrinkle in Time has twenty-six rejection letters under its belt. Gone with the Wind has that beat with thirty-eight. A publisher thought the collective verdict of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds would be, “Oh, don’t read that horrid book.” Even Chicken Soup of the Soul, which went on to sell a metric-gazillion of copies, let alone its infinite list of follow-ups, was turned down more than one hundred times. And the first book of the Harry Potter series was rejected by nearly every publisher in the U.K. before going on to make J.K. Rowling literally richer than the Queen of England.

If you believe in your work, if you can look in the mirror and say wholeheartedly what you’re submitting is the cleanest, tightest, absolute best you can possibly make it, then keep going. Don’t stop. Send it out again. And again. And again. Don’t dare let those interested in merely capitalizing on what’s safe—on what others have heard before a hundred times; a thousand times—decide whether your writing is worth being read by the world. That one person’s out there. Right now.

But keep in mind, sometimes that one person is you.

About the book:

There are lures irresistible regardless of peril, because some yearnings renounce all wisdom.

There are bonds that compel no matter how faraway, because some needs are dire enough to defy all cost.

But when reason, distance, and danger go unheeded, that price can be devastating despite all the magic in one’s grasp.

A Sister to Butterflies tells a different sort of once upon a time, a shimmering tale of a creature torn between worlds, whose wondrous deeds would become fable, and whose terrible mistakes would alter the destinies of everyone around her.

Enjoy an excerpt:

This is not the first time you’ve heard this. Nor, I hope, will it be the last.

What’s amusing—or shameful, depending on how you come to see it—is how often I think I’ve sufficiently untangled my mind to tell my tale, yet still find myself uncertain where to begin. Part of me wishes not to have to begin at all since you’re too tiny to understand it anyhow. But the rest of me knows this is much more for my own benefit than yours—for the time being—and that as far as penance goes, what I’ve apportioned myself can hardly be considered severe.

So, for both our sakes, I’ll muddle through as best I can. Again.

The thing I always try to explain first, so that what I have to tell you makes any sense at all, is that there are indeed other worlds than this. A great many people take a great deal of comfort from believing that what they can reconcile with their eyes and ears constitutes the summation of existence. But I dearly hope you believe me when I say that creation is much too grand to contain but a single realm and a single way of being.

Some of these other worlds are far removed from here. Others press right up against this particular where and when but lie hidden—in the shade of a high hill, within the eddies of a brook, or even under one’s bed at a certain time of day. A drifting speck of dust flaring in a beam of afternoon sun might easily be the birth, life, and demise of an entire civilization.

And how can I state this so unequivocally?

Because one of those other worlds is mine.

And though it still grieves me to think about my home, worse is knowing I no longer remember it correctly. Not the tall, prismatic grasses of the countryside through which I ran and hid. Not the apricot scent of my father’s pipe after supper each evening. I know there are colors there that simply cannot exist here, hues so vibrant and tinges so subtle no mortal could ever appreciate them, but I also know they are beyond me now even in my imagination. The distance between myself and what I once held most dear has grown so great, it’s become nonsensical.

But my tale begins not so much with my world as it does with what lies at its edge, with what separates it from yours—
A shimmering veil of mist.

The first time I ever crossed the mists is still as clear to me as the day you were born. Of course, as I said, there’s little comfort in that clarity since I’m certain my recollection is entirely wrong.

I finished my regular chores that bright blue morning as quickly as I could. I threw some odds and ends into a knapsack and slipped away before my father could invent more for me to do. Father, a broad man browned and bleached by the sun, disapproved of my gadding about. He believed the best ways in life were fashioned from hard work and sweat and that, as far as he was concerned, having a few tasks too many was just the right amount to keep me out of trouble. That’s not to suggest any sort of cruelty on his part, though he could be quite stern—and quite remote—and he was most assuredly set in his ways.

The dew still clung cold and heavy on the ground as I headed out, so I sloshed to the nearby meadow to meet up with my two best friends—my two only friends, really—Whistle and Smudge.

Those weren’t actually their names, mind you. Just the names my human self has given them.

I most often picture Whistle as tall and spindly with a disheveled tabby coat of white and orange fur. His face was long and oval, and on either side of his mouth drooped lengthy mustaches like a catfish. When he spoke it was the merry chirp of a piccolo, which belied his normally dour nature.

Smudge, however, never let anything bother him, and among us he was often the voice of reason. While all of my kind can work magic to an extent, those who display exceptional talent are schooled in the deeper arts, and Smudge was that sort. I remember him looking like a field mouse that some prankster had inflated into a sphere. The ends of his grey fur always seemed strangely indistinct, as though he’d been scribbled with charcoal and then blurred by the artist’s thumb. That made staring at Smudge uncomfortable and might be why Whistle rarely won arguments with him. Smudge had a low, soothing croak of a voice and a fondness for peppering his language with mild vulgarities—a harmless and amusing trait, because he didn’t do it very well.

I found my friends that morning where we normally gathered—amidst the pink and tangerine hillocks by the forest’s edge—already engaged in some game. Against a backdrop of crimson trees, Whistle brandished with theatrical flourishes a sword he’d made from two bits of stick tied together. Smudge stood impassively facing the opposite way with a wooden shield strapped to his back. Whistle bellowed things like, “Have at you!” and “Back, foul beast!” and then for all he was worth whacked the shield Smudge wore. Rather than respond in kind, Smudge instead gave his attentions to conversing with a speckled butterfly wobbling past. Like most apprentice magicians, he preferred games like Stone, Paper, Dagger—which, by the way, he never, ever lost.

“Good morning!” I called.

Smudge turned, causing Whistle to miss his target and tumble into the wet grass.

“Good morning!” he replied, with a smile.

Whistle picked himself up, brushing dirty clots from his soggy fur.

“Yes, yes,” he muttered. “Good morning, good morning.”

“Did you have a lovely breakfast?” Smudge asked. For some reason he’d always concerned himself with whether I’d eaten recently and whether what I’d eaten had been sufficiently nourishing. Well, not for some reason; I’d been known to make myself sick by getting so caught up in whatever I happened to be doing that I simply forgot to eat.

“Yes, thanks,” I said. “Berry jam on toast and orange blossom tea.”

“Oh, that does damn sound lovely,” Smudge agreed.

“So, what’s in store for us this time?” Whistle asked, ignoring Smudge and sounding impatient to get the day started.

Of the three, it usually fell to me to make the plans. Smudge was happy to go along with whatever activities crossed his path, and Whistle knew that if he thought something up and it turned out less than entertaining it’d be his fault, leaving him no room to complain. Normally, I concocted our amusements on the spot, whether it was a game or contest or other such sport. But that day I’d arrived with an aim already well in mind.

“Today,” I said, “we undertake a harrowing expedition.”

Smudge seemed intrigued. “What sort of expedition?”

“Another trip out to the Duchess’s cottage, I’ll wager,” Whistle said.

It was true that our missions to the Duchess’s summer home had been numerous, but it was also true those missions yielded Whistle a considerable haul of underwear from her laundry line. The Duchess, being rather gigantic, had unwittingly provided him enough material to fashion a roomy tent after only our second trip, so in my opinion Whistle had no room to grouse—unlike Smudge, who’d toppled headfirst into her fishpond trying to yank down a particularly heavy garment.

But the Duchess was not what I had planned.

“My comrades,” I said, “today I am heading deep into the forests … to cross the mists!”

Whistle sighed loudly. Smudge looked disappointed.

“Oh, pleh,” Whistle grumbled. “We do that almost as much as we go to the Duchess’s.”

“We damn do go there a lot,” Smudge agreed.

“Ah,” I said, “but this time will be different.”

Whistle crossed his arms. “And how’s that?”

“Because today,” I said, “I really am going to venture through.”

My friends looked at one another, then at me.

“Like we haven’t heard that before, either.” Whistle said.

I’m obliged to admit he had another point. Many times, my boasting had painted me into corners from which there’d been no escape without considerable bruising to my pride. This particular corner had one wall comprised of my incessant desire to explore the mists and the other of my unfailing reluctance to actually do so. I still can’t say what it was about that morning that set my mind to finally going through with it. I don’t recall the sky being any bluer or myself feeling any taller. All I know is I awoke that day with an unshakable certainty of what I wanted to do, and there was no question in my mind that in the end, one way or another, I’d be doing it.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose the only way you’ll find out is to come along and see for yourself.”

With that, I strode between the two of them, pushing Whistle’s stick sword aside, and headed toward the forest. They didn’t take long to fall into step behind me.

About the Author:

Aaron Christopher Drown is a native of Brunswick, Maine, who’s lived all over and whose stories have appeared in equally numerous magazines and anthologies. His debut novel, A Mage of None Magic, won the 2010 Darrell Award for Best Novel, and as he’s promised his publisher for years, he’s hard at work on the follow-up. An award-winning graphic designer as well, Aaron resides in Washington state with his wife, Sarah, their dog and cat, and his trusty Macbook, Sancho.

 aaronchristopherdrown.com
 @aaronchristopherdrown
 Facebook

Amazon: https://bit.ly/4desf8s

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232027101-a-sister-to-butterflies