photo by wolfgang
The gods had forsaken this land long ago. If the scorching prime-light of the Patriad was not enough to prove this, then certainly the dust-storms were. Evensong’s cloak was pulled tight across her body, though every bit of loose fabric whipped furiously about her. The pack full of instruments rested heavily upon her back, triple wrapped. But a few hours ago the streets of the Patriad had been a cornocopia of sights, sounds and smells. Incense, fruits, and the fumes of a nearby flame swallower. The thick gray clouds of the storm had swallowed everything beyond an arm’s reach. Evensong could not even see that far, for her face was covered with two thick silken cloths. Yet still she could taste the tiny particles of bone and ash on her lips. Bone and ash, she laughed to herself. At least that’s what that overzealous friar had always said they were; the bones of gods long slain and forgotten, the ash of their funeral pyres, lit by mortal men. It didn’t matter how many thousands of times Evensong had heard the tales; it all tasted like sand to her.
I’m starting Daughters of Oyr completely over. Whisper, as a main protagonist truly was too uninteresting, too passive. Her replacement in the tale, Evensong, is over-confident, cocky, and powerful. She’s unreliable, selfish and dangerous. Though she has money and power now, she still clings to her gypsy-wanderer roots. Already, within ten pages I feel more confident in her as a character than Whisper had in some hundred. Like it is often said, all that had to be written to find the real story. But that never makes scrapping it all easy…
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