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The Courting Dance: (AO3 version) Marriage is a bit more complicated than quarreling and making it up again, especially for the crown prince of Archenland and an exiled Calormene Tarkheena. Aravis/Cor. [21,100 words]

This was my 2016 WIP Big Bang entry! I started writing it back in 2010, only to stall out after ch. 8 in 2012. There were several reasons for my woes. First, I wrote ch. 1 as a oneshot and ch. 2 as an only semi-connected sequel, so the fic was structured awkwardly from the beginning and I had to construct an outline after the fact instead of going in with a plot or character arc (however vague). Second, genre romance is really not my strong point. Third, I have a tendency to get carried away by worldbuilding if given half a chance, and stirred potentially ridiculous quantities of fictional history and culture clashes into the mix. It should be obvious that these factors were a bad combination.

The story ended up being two chapters shorter than planned, because Lune and Corin's second POV chapters wound up shifting the focus away from Aravis and Cor in a way I didn't like. (They were also impossible to write, in the sense of being dead on the page.) I had to make heavy revisions to ch. 1-8 in order to get ch. 9-13 to make sense, so even if you've read the story up to this point, I'd advise starting over from the beginning.

Also, there is some wonderful art by [archiveofourown.org profile] Hecateae which you should go check out before or after you read the fic. :D

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edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)
Elizabeth Culmer

July 2025

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