I make with the tl;dr
I'm going to be posting a whole ton of the background to The White City story I've been working on, mostly to have a backup of it accessible wherever I happen to be, and as a diary of the creative process because I like that sort of thing. Feedback is not required unless you're really moved, because this journal will be deluged.
I, and the characters when they speak, refer to it as “Earth”, but it’s not OUR earth. It shares quite a lot, from sheep to strawberries to the Silk Road, but has followed a somewhat different evolutionary path. Wooly mammoths are still hunted for their bones and ivory, for instance, and when one prays, there’s a slim chance a god will sit up and notice.
When the story opens, the planet is entering a Little Ice Age after a comet struck the northern tundra. Glaciers are consuming the mountains in the north, and perpetual drought has struck the savannah in the south, turning formerly hearty farmland into barren dunes. Driven by cold or starvation, nomadic tribes are surging into the area controlled by an old, huge, highly advanced empire and clashing violently with its citizens, with disastrous consequences for all sides. Our heroine, Anha, was a princess (I use this word VERY loosely) of one of these tribes, from the pine forest and grassy valleys of the far north.
Character Profile: Anhavair
Firstborn daughter of the chieftain of the tribe of the Three Pines, and would have taken his place when he died. Nineteen years old in the prologue, twenty-one years old during the main story.
She has six arrow-shaped ritual scars on her torso: one on each breast, one on her sternum, one on each side of her belly, and one directly above her navel. They mark her as having a witch’s blood and power, called Shadow-working, which is passed on only though the female line. Her particular talents, and they are prodigious, lie in shapeshifting. She can take the form of an ermine, raven, or Siberian tiger at will, and while in that form retains every bit of her human intelligence. Mastering a new body takes years, and very few witches or wizards achieve more than three. In addition, she has somewhat weaker abilities to cross over into the Shadowlands, a realm of perpetual murky night where the gods and spirits dwell, very close to Dreams and Death.
She was a masterful hunter and extremely charismatic, flowering into a strong and competent leader her family, especially her father, was very proud of. She married at fifteen, became a mother at sixteen, and was widowed at nineteen when a plague burned through her tribe while she, her brother Fin, and small group of her warriors where out on a trading expedition. A rival chieftain, who did not approve of her father’s choice to trade with rather than raid the Imperial frontiersmen and teach his children their tongue, used it as an excuse to massacre those few of her family that survived the plague. She and her brother were exiled on pain of death. With nothing but their horses, their bows, and a few packs of trade goods, Anha saw no choice but to enter deeper into Imperial territory and hope her people’s reputation for bloodthirst would be enough to land her work as a guard or private mercenary.
It worked better than she hoped. She was noticed by a powerful Imperial duke who had directed many campaigns on the frontier against the encroaching horsemen and also knew the tales of their witchcraft were true. Unfortunately, his intentions were not altruistic. He was extremely power hungry, and saw in her magic an incredible tool to wield in his plot to overthrow the ruling dynasty. He trapped her with a curse, and now keeps her and her brother within the Imperial capital as spies, saboteurs, and assassins. She hates him for what he did to her, and hates herself even more for the cruelty and pain she has inflicted by his command.
I don't recall reading any stories that use a "minion of the Dark Lord" (as it were) as the main character. Does it just not occur to anybody?
digitaltart
I, and the characters when they speak, refer to it as “Earth”, but it’s not OUR earth. It shares quite a lot, from sheep to strawberries to the Silk Road, but has followed a somewhat different evolutionary path. Wooly mammoths are still hunted for their bones and ivory, for instance, and when one prays, there’s a slim chance a god will sit up and notice.
When the story opens, the planet is entering a Little Ice Age after a comet struck the northern tundra. Glaciers are consuming the mountains in the north, and perpetual drought has struck the savannah in the south, turning formerly hearty farmland into barren dunes. Driven by cold or starvation, nomadic tribes are surging into the area controlled by an old, huge, highly advanced empire and clashing violently with its citizens, with disastrous consequences for all sides. Our heroine, Anha, was a princess (I use this word VERY loosely) of one of these tribes, from the pine forest and grassy valleys of the far north.
Character Profile: Anhavair
Firstborn daughter of the chieftain of the tribe of the Three Pines, and would have taken his place when he died. Nineteen years old in the prologue, twenty-one years old during the main story.
She has six arrow-shaped ritual scars on her torso: one on each breast, one on her sternum, one on each side of her belly, and one directly above her navel. They mark her as having a witch’s blood and power, called Shadow-working, which is passed on only though the female line. Her particular talents, and they are prodigious, lie in shapeshifting. She can take the form of an ermine, raven, or Siberian tiger at will, and while in that form retains every bit of her human intelligence. Mastering a new body takes years, and very few witches or wizards achieve more than three. In addition, she has somewhat weaker abilities to cross over into the Shadowlands, a realm of perpetual murky night where the gods and spirits dwell, very close to Dreams and Death.
She was a masterful hunter and extremely charismatic, flowering into a strong and competent leader her family, especially her father, was very proud of. She married at fifteen, became a mother at sixteen, and was widowed at nineteen when a plague burned through her tribe while she, her brother Fin, and small group of her warriors where out on a trading expedition. A rival chieftain, who did not approve of her father’s choice to trade with rather than raid the Imperial frontiersmen and teach his children their tongue, used it as an excuse to massacre those few of her family that survived the plague. She and her brother were exiled on pain of death. With nothing but their horses, their bows, and a few packs of trade goods, Anha saw no choice but to enter deeper into Imperial territory and hope her people’s reputation for bloodthirst would be enough to land her work as a guard or private mercenary.
It worked better than she hoped. She was noticed by a powerful Imperial duke who had directed many campaigns on the frontier against the encroaching horsemen and also knew the tales of their witchcraft were true. Unfortunately, his intentions were not altruistic. He was extremely power hungry, and saw in her magic an incredible tool to wield in his plot to overthrow the ruling dynasty. He trapped her with a curse, and now keeps her and her brother within the Imperial capital as spies, saboteurs, and assassins. She hates him for what he did to her, and hates herself even more for the cruelty and pain she has inflicted by his command.
I don't recall reading any stories that use a "minion of the Dark Lord" (as it were) as the main character. Does it just not occur to anybody?
digitaltart