And now we return to the forgotten realm of Darkover fan fiction and art. Long ago, it was a thriving cottage industry and I did dozens of illustrations for these publications. This one illustrates a story by the equally forgotten author Patricia G. Cirone. Darkover, Marion Zimmer Bradley's world of the Red Sun, had many native sentient races, both humanoid and non-humanoid. The human colonists, in a familiar story, subjugated most of them and turned them into servants. The girl in the picture belongs to one of these races. She works in a pharmacy or botanica and is a secret devotee of Avarra, the Darkovan native Goddess of Darkness. It doesn't sound like it will end well. Somewhere in my archives I still have all the zines I illustrated, including this one.
A Blognote: Patricia B. Cirone (not Patricia G. Cirone as I put on the title page) is still active as a writer and was last published, in a "Sword and Sorceress" anthology, as late as 2012.
Original illustration is ink on illustration board, about 8" x 10", January 1987.
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