> She probably considered me her friend. And that… friendship? Such a wild concept. I’d never had friends before.

Looks like I missed my September update. Did I mention yet that I am bad at keeping people informed? But no worries, work is continuing regardless.

As I mentioned in a previous update, volume two has ballooned from my initial estimate of 80k words to something much closer to a massive 160k words. That's a lot. Twice as long as volume one was. It's too much to prepare in advance. It would simply take too long. So I've split the second volume into two halves. The first draft of the first half is complete. I am now working on the second draft.

I initially planned an epilogue/side story shortly after the completion of volume one. I had to postpone that as it needed tighter integration with volume two. Now that I have a good grasp on all the details of volume two, the first draft of this side story (10k words / 6 chapters) has been written as well. There as well I am now working on the second draft. The little snippet above is from the side story.

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There have been a lot of small edit suggestions and spelling/grammar corrections. I've worked through most of those and combined them with my own corrections. I'll apply the last of these corrections to my master doc somewhere in the coming months and then update the chapters here to match. Sorry if I didn't reply to your edit suggestions personally, and sorry that I left them for so long. I do appreciate all of them. It is merely that processing them in bulk like this is a little easier for me.

I have already revealed the volume two cover in an earlier update. The cover for volume one has now been redone to match. The updated volume one cover is what's currently on the story.

And finally, and most importantly, the new timeline: I hope to begin posting the side story somewhere in January or February 2023. It will be going up at a very sedate pace, 1 chapter every 3 or 4 weeks probably. This will give me until May or June to finish up the first half of volume two. Once I finally start posting volume two it will be at a much faster release schedule (probably two chapters per week).