It's time for another character spotlight, and this time we're turning to Sarkahn's Fingers, and an embittered woman who has seen too much violence over the span of her life, who is close to giving up.
A Brief History of Sarkahn
Lisandra Almaine grew up in Sarkahn's Fingers, a series of peninsulas in southwestern Ul Sadh. In her youth, the Fingers were at peace, but this peace coincided with a violent civil war in the neighboring nation of Saodein. During that period, refugees seeking a safer and quieter life emigrated into the fingers in waves, bringing their traditions and cultural norms with them, and the region was gifted a brief renaissance in which it saw itself reformed into something better, perhaps, than had been.
However, shortly after the civil war ended, Saodein turned its eyes on the region Lisandra called home, and set out for conquest.
What followed was several decades of intermittent fighting and negotiations for peace which either stalled or devolved into yet more violence. Sarkahn sought to defend itself against Saodein's increasing hostility, and Lisandra saw many people she held dear die during that time. She herself became a soldier, a gifted swordswoman, and one of the great strategical minds among her people in the war effort to hold Saodein back. But age has a way of breaking people down, and it came for her like a thief, leaving her a husk of who she was in time for a final attack on her people from her hated enemy.
An Old Woman with a Sword
At the beginning of Tears for the Moon God, Lisandra Almaine is in her sixties. Her narrative most resembles the classic adventure story you might get with older works of fantasy, and carries her far away from home in pursuit of a power to defend her people. I enjoyed writing her arc because it provided me an opportunity to show an capable old woman navigating the kind of arc you would usually see given to a teenage or early twenty something boy.
Lisandra quickly became a complex individual I couldn't stop writing about, because she is at a stage in her life wherein much of her worldview is informed by those things that haunt her, and those complexes she has developed because of them are largely calcified. She is a person who remembers what peace was like, but whom has lived so much of her life expecting sudden, unwarranted violence that she has lost her ability to romanticize it. She cannot stop hoping for a brighter future, but doesn't trust in the idea of peace, or the possibility that she could somehow fit into a peacetime society. These deeply entrenched values and beliefs made something that seemed so simple when I set out to write it into something far more complex than I could have imagined.
Women in Uniform
While not my intention, it does seem so much more relevant now to highlight a woman warrior's journey in light of the recent election and the policies the soon to be (potentially) Secretary of Defense wants to implement in the military. My parents are both combat veterans. My dad was a medic assigned to a company of Army Rangers during the Gulf War in the 1990s, and my mom was an M16 specialist who herself met all the qualifications to be a Ranger when she was in her early twenties. She deployed to Basrah, Iraq in my junior year of high school. Then did a second tour in a humanitarian role which took her through Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan almost ten years later. Lisandra is not based on my mother, nor does she share much in common with her, but she is a strong, independent woman who is perfectly capable of fighting for what she believes in, and fighting to protect her people.
Lately, I've been thinking about all the women serving in our military, and how moronic it seems to have a fox news host dictating to them whether they are capable of handling the stresses of combat when many of them have already done just that. How much of an insult it must be to tell them that they cannot do what they have already done so effectively. I did not write Lisandra as a takedown of this concept, but once again, it seems more relevant and not less in light of current circumstances that her story should be told. It's icing on the cake, then, that I enjoy writing her as much as I do.
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