Character Post - Aiken Timhamér

Hannah!
Character Posts are fun! So I'm doing another one. I was going to do one on Armen (my favorite bloke in the whole series). But I'm not, yet, saving the best for... later. For now I'm going to do... Aiken!

Aiken Timhamér

I don't know how his name is actually pronounced, so I just call him

(Ay-kin Tim-ham-mur)

Elf, Leader of 'Aiken's Gang'

At a desk in the center of the large tent, sat a dark-skinned, dark-haired elf intently studying a map.

Standing, Aiken was taller than Lina and even taller than Falk, who was over six feet tall.

That was my original description of Aiken, though my idea of him has changed over time. I can't find a perfect picture of him, one of those where I can look at it and go, "Hey, that's Aiken!" If I find one, I'll let you know. But for now, of all the pictures I can find that remind me of his character, this is his basic description.

Aiken was tall and fit, with tanned skin and a half-amused expression on his face at all times. His hair was a dark brown, cut short at the sides and longer on top, giving him a careless rugged look.



Kind of like this. In appearance, and maybe in personality.

Aiken was a strange character to write. He started out as a serious, abrupt elf. He wasn't a very nice man. But as time went on (outside of the story timeline) he slowly became a stern but cheerful, likeable guy, a big brother-type that everyone wants to be around.

Inversely, there was another amiable, friendly minor character who gradually became the living rock, flinty and grumpy all the time, but he's another story.

Aiken is the leader of a travelling group, informally called "Aiken's Gang".
Aiken's Gang is hard to explain. Basically, they're... a volunteer medieval-time police vigilante Robin Hood's Merry Men group who travel around Eyra (the land of the elves) to protect the innocent and bring justice to evil-doers. A little different, though.
I know, it sounds like your run-of-the-mill vigilante group. I'm trying to give it a distinction from the other bands.
Okay, here's the deal. Aiken has no real family. When he was a teenager, he came home to see the bodies of his brutally murdered parents, along with blood trails leading out of the house. His older brother and twin sister were completely gone. The authorities of the city at the time ordered searches for Aiken's siblings and for the murders, but nothing turned up.
Over the years, he met several others who had been through similar tragedies. They were all of the same mind - they all wanted to prevent others from going through that sort of misfortune. Currently there are twelve "members" in the Gang, including Blessing Laliso, Ciaran Kagan, and Eitan Haroun. Lina and the aforementioned Armen have been friends of Aiken, since before the murders of his family, and are informal members of the gang.

Concerning Aiken's personality.
Aiken is a leader at heart. He is serious, but not bad-tempered. He feels an urge to be responsible for and protective of those in his close circle. On occasion he can also be a bit silly and juvenile, showing a sense of humor that is lacking in some of the others. Sarcasm is not unheard of around him, and he may find the need to laugh at very inopportune times, but when his surrogate family is threatened, he will drop all frivolities to defend them.

Aiken's weapon of choice is a broadsword. He has not been as well-trained as Lina, but he can be very destructive and dangerous if he chooses.

Time to stop so I can get ready for bed. Hope you enjoyed it! Please realize that I am still learning about these characters, they aren't crystal clear to me yet. These character posts are really helping.

Character Post - Lina Aylward

It's Hannah.
In looking over the blog, I have discovered that I blog very infrequently compared to my sister. She has, oh, 12 posts, while I have a third of that.
(Which is 4, in case you didn't care to do that math).
Anyway, I am in the obvious minority, so I'm going to try to do more over the next couple... weeks? And hope that I don't just seem like a creep... like the creep I am, I guess.

This one is done under the impression that I'm allowed to do a character post, which kind of seems like Trinity's thing. Since I'm copying her, I can put a proper name on this post. I had been wrestling between the names "Jill" and "Bocephus" (maybe that's supposed to be Bucephalus?).

Lina Aylward

(Lee-nah Ayul-wurd)

Swordswoman, Elf, Warrior

I don't like the description I gave her in my first book, so here's "off the cuff".

No, just kidding, I just found out that I can't do proper "off the cuff", so I'm going to find a description somewhere in my files.

Ooohhh-kay, I have no good descriptions in my files, so back to off the cuff. I don't even know if I'm using that term correctly, but I hope you know what I mean, so here we go.

Lina has long, curly, red hair, which is her most remarkable trait. Her eyes are a vivid forest green, and her skin is light and clear. She's taller than most elves, and she stands with a straight and ready stance. She's hot-tempered, but usually cheerful.

Lina is also an accomplished swordsmaster and is often seen with a longsword in hand.

Lina... was kind of an accident. In my first book, there was this part in which I thought, oh, I need a character here.

Plop, there's Lina. No background, no last name. She was kinda disturbing and strange because you knew absolutely nothing about her and at the end of the book (a few pages after) you still knew next to nothing. She just showed up, did some strange things, then wasn't heard from again.

This is the first description that I wasn't going to put on here.

(Lina's) head was covered in long, bright red hair, she had pointed ears that stuck out slightly, and a skeptical expression on her face.

You see, she appeared first as a random swordswoman that my friend (the main character) was introduced to. She seemed serious, practical, and pretty perceptive, but she didn't really have a personality apart from that. She was only my second made-up character in the whole book.

After that book, I decided to write a sequel. I didn't want to trash the old characters and start over with new ones, but I did know that they definitely need something else. Like last names, personalities, backgrounds, and actual lives.

Lina is a athletic swordswoman, which means she has spent a lot of time training. More than a decade, in fact. Currently she's 38 years old (pretty young) and she's been training since around age nine with her soldier father, and with legend Ptera Aretino, the elf who practically created the 'modern' elvish self-defense.

Now, elves are much stronger and faster than humans, so their form of fighting is different. Much more elegant and graceful, but also much more violent. Lina, for instance, in good form, could easily leap over an enemy's head, twist over in mid-air, and take off their head before landing, provided the enemy was not another well-trained elf. In that case, it could get very dangerous and bloody.

Lina is also a teacher. She enjoys instructing others, primarily the main character, in the skill she loves so much, though her personality can cause her to get frustrated or carried away when the student does not learn in the way Lina wants them to. It would probably be accurate to say that Lina desires control. She wants things to be correct, and to be going her way, and can get angry or upset when something unexpected or beyond her control occurs. 

She's a little like my sister (sorry, Trinity), in that she can be easily annoyed. There's something about her that lets her friends easily push her buttons. Lina's also a hot-head, quick to snap at someone or lash out when they make her mad. Patience is a necessary trait in her friends.



Anatomy of a longsword (Lina's weapon of choice)

 Then there are Lina's weaknesses. One of them is her tendency towards emotion, unfortunately coupled with her wish to not show weakness. She can be easily angered or hurt, but she'll just brush people off when they try to talk to her.

Another weakness is her archery. No matter how good she is with a blade, she can't shoot a bow to save her life. Also, her cooking is notoriously bad. Her friends are encouraging, but politely tell her that she either needs lessons, or that eventually she must marry someone who cooks for themself.

It's time for me to wind this up, but I enjoyed writing this, and it has helped me to know a little about Lina that I didn't know before. For instance, I think I may have subconciously based her off of Trinity... I'll be generous and say that Trinity inspired just the good parts. Her archery is actually pretty good.



Character Post - Deidre Traviat

Deidre Traviat ~ The Sorrowful Wanderer
(Dead-dray Trav-ee-ought)

She had dark hair that was lightly streaked with gray, which seemed out of place around her youthful face. Her clothing was rough and sturdy, but skillfully cut, and she handled her heavy staff with practiced ease.- Tribes of the Earth

Deidre is quite an interesting character to me. She is the first character that I created for TOTE, aside from the characters in the prologue, which I had a hard time abandoning. I have to consciously make sure that I don't just duplicate her from other characters that I've created, because there are similarities to Rienna (from Aouthentica). 

Deidre's a traveler. She doesn't stay in any one place for very long, and she lives in an age where travel is very dangerous. Not only have all the animals of the past century been turned loose and become wild and bloodthirsty, but the tribes are slow to trust strangers, and often the safest course of action is just to remove any possible threat, meaning that strangers are often killed on sight.

She travels the same route every year, or every season-cycle, depending on which tribe you're from. She goes from tribe to tribe, so she's safer than most travelers because the tribes know her. She keeps her past to herself, rarely gives out her name to anyone, so she's known merely as the Sorrowful Wanderer, which happens to be the literal meaning of her name (quelle coinky-dink, eh?).

She has dark hair with grey streaks, though it's because of genetics, not age. (Pay attention to that.) In her past life, she was fairly well off, as evidenced by her clothing, which is stylish and flattering but made of leather, wool, and other materials better suited for her rough lifestyle. On that note, she wears a cape and cowl, which I find a little difficult to describe. It looks like the picture above combined with ←this picture.

Pictures really are worth a thousand words, and because I had the freedom to create Deidre however I pleased and my brain didn't have any preconceived notions of what she should be like, I based her off a couple of different pictures. The two up there and this one → which I've posted before. 

Mostly the first and last one. Those are the ones I look at as I write (Scrivener!) for inspiration. 

Okay, now a little more about her personality. 

Deidre's ultimate goal is to have complete self-control. She doesn't want to let anyone know that they made her angry, or made her sad unless she wants them to know. She wants to be in control of herself. Not that she desires not to have emotions, but she wants to keep a tight leash on them instead of letting them flow. She wants to cry when it's appropriate to cry, laugh when it's appropriate to laugh, and be angry when it's appropriate to be angry.  

Which I think is something that I myself desire, especially being a teenage girl. Sometimes you get upset and when you think about it, you have no idea why.

She is a woman of many skills and when her control slips, she sometimes finding herself doing things she wouldn't have done had she thought it out rationally. And she prefers to be very rational and logical.

She has a great respect for the sanctity of life, both animal and human. However, if it's a choice between an animal's life and her own, she will always choose her own. If it's a choice between another human's life and her own, she will do her utmost to choose both.

As for why she's called the Sorrowful Wanderer (I keep writing "warrior" instead of "wanderer" for some unknown reason. Please ignore that mistake if you come across it.), she's seen a lot of terrible things in her relatively short time. At one point (that is yet to be posted) she tells someone that she comes from "a scattered tribe". She's seen many tribes rise, fall, and reform, usually violently. Sometimes, I imagine, she was even involved.

She has had to develop the skills to fend for and defend herself. Some she learned, and some she was taught. Her weapon of choice is her iron staff, which when manipulated correctly becomes more like a trident, only with the tines in a circle, like a claw, rather than lined up. If that makes sense.

For lack of a better explanation it looks like this, but on a staff. Then, when she's finished, or when she needs more of a javelin than a trident, she can slip the tines back in, close to the core, so it becomes a spear. It's very precious to her, as it was designed and crafted by someone she loved very much.

Deidre reached over and picked up her staff, holding it up for him to see. It was about an inch and a half wide on one end, narrowing to a point on the other. Near the sharp end, a wide leather band was wrapped around it. Deidre set it upright, wide end in the dirt and grasped around the leather band, pulling it downward in a quick motion. The top split apart into three razor sharp prongs.  

~Tribes Of The Earth

She also carries a long knife, which becomes very useful to her in the near future of the book. She also uses it for skinning, making tinder, and chopping small branches. Very useful. In a pinch, she won't hesitate to use it in self defense, though she prefers to use her staff.

Deidre's goal in her travels is basically justice. She intends to prevent what happened in her own tribe if at all possible.

And that's about it. I decided against putting any spoilers in this time, though I did hint vaguely at some things, which may not make sense until you've read the rest of what I've written. Besides, what's more fun than trying to figure out what's going to happen before it's happened when you actually had possible clues and hints to go on?

Sé onr sverdar sitja hvass! 

~ Trinity