#karyai

Karyai appeared very early in the creative process, there to be a more conventional foil to the heroine Akantha. But I was a little unclear on what shape her life should take. One of my notes reads “Maybe she tends the lions?” (There are lions in the story – at that stage they were religious ceremonial lions, though in the final draft their role is much reduced, poor things, and Karyai doesn't have anything to do with them.) But pretty quickly Karyai became a fairly typical Kynthian woman, there to demonstrate what the culture wants, expects, and insists women be. She married young, she had children, she keeps her husband's household running smoothly. She does what she's supposed to – she lives the life Akantha feels she, for whatever reason, cannot. But, as it turns out, doing the right thing hasn't left Karyai as happy as she should be.

For a big chunk of the pre-writing process, Karyai was named Tykhera (“lucky; by chance”), which, along with maybe being too literal, seemed like it would be hard for readers to mentally say over and over again as they read. And then in my research I ran across the city of Caryae (if you like your classical art, the origin of the word caryatid) which in Greek would be Karyai. And I thought it was really pretty, and Caryae is associated with Artemis, thus, the Moon. And, having established that Kynthians like to use Earth place-names, I went with it. I have since been told that Karyai is also difficult to say. Pronounce it however you like, but I say kar-yigh.