The Protagonist Speaks

Dear readers, tonight we are extremely excited to host a character from a fantasy series we’ve been following since childhood (ours, as well as hers).

Jamethiel’s Priest’s-bane, known as Jame to most, comes to us from down the chain of creation, where her people – the Kencyrath – have been fighting the encroaching evil of Perimal Darkling for millennia. She is here to tell us about her adventures, and about the thin and blurry line between life and death.

Jame:  Oh, my head.  What happened to me?

Voice out of the shadows:  You stormed the priests’ subterranean college at Wilden, tripped, and fell down the stairs.

Jame (sitting up, grumbling):  I’m usually more agile than that although, admittedly, prone to accidents.   Kindrie.  I came to rescue my cousin Kindrie.   Your voice is familiar.  Who are you?

Voice:  We met in Tai-tastigon.  You were hunting demons, also dead gods.  Some of them, in turn, were hunting you.  See if you can remember yourself first.  Where were you born?

Jame:  In a keep in the Haunted Lands where my father, the Highlord, had gone into exile.  I suppose it was a terrible place, but then it was simply home.  The gray grass cried.  So did the vegetables when put to the knife, and they tasted of watered blood.  Nothing was properly dead there, nor properly alive.  That’s what it means, to live under shadows’ eaves, because Gerridon’s monstrous House loomed over us, day and night.  He sent our mother, the Dream-weaver, to us.  After we were born and he reclaimed her, our father went mad.  He tried to kiss me once, and ended up smashing his knuckles against the stone wall beside my head.  Father hated me because I was Shanir, also because he said that I was too like my mother.  He must have known that my brother Tori was Shanir too, but he never admitted that.  Tori was his favorite.