The Spine of the Worlds
Ink & Elsewhere: The Origin Story
Some doors open with keys. Others with ink.
Buried deep in the Archive, where forgotten languages flicker and stitched scrolls whisper themselves out of memory, Anserin Mirelow mends broken spines and minds her silence. She’s a librarian—not a heroine. Not a chosen one. Just a keeper of things half-lost.
Until the day a nameless folio appears on her desk. Uncatalogued. Untouched. Impossible.
When she writes in its pages, the words write back.
So begins a quiet unraveling—of memory, identity, and the boundary between imagination and reality. A girl named Selwyne steps through a dream Anserin never meant to share. A man called Orlen waits in a storm-born archive. And the folio, sentient and strange, begins to build something from the pieces of all her half-forgotten longings.
This is not a story about escape. It is a story about return.
The Spine of the Worlds is the origin novella in the Ink & Elsewhere series by Kohana Vale—a delicate, dream-woven blend of Isekai-style portal fantasy and romantic metafiction, where librarians hold the line between worlds and every page is a threshold.
If you’ve ever whispered to a book hoping it might whisper back… you’re not alone.
Watch for the first full-length novel in the Ink & Elsewhere series, coming June 2025 from Novel Concepts Publishing.
Read. Remember. Follow the ink.
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Your Application to be Understood Has Been Denied
You’ve reached the wrong queue—but somehow, it’s exactly where you belong.
Step into a world where love requires paperwork, memories bloom into physical objects, and hold music might be a metaphysical trap. Your Application to be Understood Has Been Denied is a surreal, emotionally intelligent collection of speculative short stories that blend absurdist bureaucracy, melancholy wonder, and romantic impossibility.
Whether you're negotiating ghost suffrage, falling for a deprecated paladin, or trying to archive a feeling that never quite happened, these tales understand one thing: being unprocessable might just be what makes us human.
With dry wit, aching precision, and a gentle defiance of narrative formality, this collection is for readers who laugh at metaphysical policy memos and cry at forgotten side quests. If you’ve ever been misfiled, misclassified, or mistaken for something beautiful—this is your summons.
Submit to the narrative. File your feelings. Read the fine print.
Click “Add to Cart” and begin processing.
—— Why buy from books.by?
When you buy from a traditional bookstore like Amazon, the bookstore receives a 55% commission. When you buy from Books.by, these proceeds stay with the author. Books.by is the author's own personal on-demand bookstore, which means that when you purchase from here, you're supporting the author directly.