#slayd

Okay so I really fucking love my story and my characters so I’m going to talk about them because our love-hate affair is STRONG and INTENSE and honestly they mean more to me than the entirety of the Star Wars Universe ever could.

I started writing their story, Insect Kings, in 2005 as both my first NaNoWriMo challenge and also as a let’s-try-to-make-sense-of-this-mess record of recurring dreams I’ve had since I was 6 or 7 years old. I started out strong, but then life things happened and for the past 4 years I haven’t really done much more than a smattering of new chapters and a few sketches here and there. BUT I finally got the kick in the ass I needed, finished writing and consolidating the outline and my copious notes, and have started working on the next chapters again. It’s entirely Guile’s fault. But that is neither here nor there. Anyway.

The dynamic between these two is kind of difficult to pinpoint because they don’t really like each other all that much, but there’s a rather intense lifelong relationship they share in regardless, and they’ve pretty much been bound together by their lord/master/sire whether they want to be or not. There’s a lot of mutual brutality and violence between the two of them, lots of anger, jealousy, and fear going on but they also have some pretty tender moments together, can’t imagine life without the other, and share the same morbid sense of humor. Gods help anyone who gets between them or gets in their way. They are both devoted to the Lich King Moroloth, who pretty much has the whole Benevolent Despot thing going on in the world they live in. Slayd is his heir, and Guile was chosen to be his guardian when Slayd was born.

Guile’s got a second mouth in his stomach complete with double tongues that look more like tentacles, and he tends to eat people with it if they piss him off too much. The three gashes in his skull won’t ever heal. His left wing got broken off early on in-story, and his eyes or lack-thereof are a recurring plot point.

Slayd has a grate bolted over his chest to protect an open wound that exposes his heart. His hair is obviously not actual hair, it’s ribbons of dried blood (that sounds really off, out of context). For much of the actual story, Slayd appears a LOT younger than he looks here because Perceptions and Magic and Plot etc. etc. etc.