Folk Tales of the Lowlands of Cekon
by Margaret Killjoy
Zine #34 — October 2024
I’ve been reading folklore a lot recently, especially for the podcast Cool Zone Media Bookclub. I’ve become vaguely obsessed with these strange short tales, from all over the world, each one worn smooth by retelling, then set into stone usually sometime in the 18th or 19th century by this or that busybody (busybodies to whom I am grateful, but busybodies nonetheless). It’s impossible to know what these stories looked like before ideas like christianity wherever the stories were from, but it’s easy to imagine they’d be different.
I’ve been reading all this folklore, and I just released a book set in a fantasy world, and I thought… I want to write the folklore from that country. I owe the Kkickstarter backers stories set in the world, after all. So I started writing folklore, set in the lowlands of Cekon, the backwaters of the country. Here are three of these stories. Eventually, we’ll be publishing a much thicker zine of these stories, and maybe these ones will shift or change between now and then. But that’s what folk tales do: they change.
These three stories tell the story of the Good Knight Rockdaw. I hope you enjoy them.
— Margaret Killjoy
About the Author
Margaret Killjoy (She/They) is a transfeminine author and musician living in the Appalachian mountains with her dog. She is the author of A Country of Ghosts as well as the Danielle Cain series of novellas; she plays piano, synth, and harp in the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl; and she is the host of the community and individual preparedness podcast Live Like the World is Dying and the history podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.