For some, trauma and sorrow dictate the tides of life. Those demons speak to you and sit with your heartache when so many others stop listening or inquiring about your well being. My literary journey began in these sagas and fought to bring me back into the land of the living and challenged me to find joy in the beauty and profound wonder that is this thing called LIFE. Love, humor, passion, camaraderie and adventure have always been a part of my world and I've infused these seductive traits into stories and lush characters that leap off the pages and into your psyche, to live with you as they do with me, day in and day out. A decade of transcribing my dreamscapes into the written word has caused me to delve into two separate realms of The Stellate and Hellan Affiliates. Both are irrevocably scarred by war, death and atrocities against their kind by the actions of the other. Although all four short tales are tangential to the main storylines, two wade into the tragedy of life without even a hint of the otherworldly beings that reside immediately out of sight yet deeply embedded into their very existence. The tales are tethered to the depths of passion, romance, heartache, and the intrigue of life within, and outside, the realm of the paranormal. It's up to you to decide if that hint of 'other' is the driving force that makes these stories insatiable, or if the characters do that all on their own. Voyage with me into this new world and see if you can come out unscathed by the events of their lives and how they share whispers of the pleasures and horrors that happen to us all. Cheers, Stella Jones, October 2022