Character Sketch: L'rea – Ashen Auditor
The second of the characters we'll be following in October.
Yesterday, we met Ithirian Blackbird the first of the characters we’ll be following as I write 500 words with these characters each day in October:
Character Sketch: Ithirian Blackbird – Raven from the West
I mentioned that I’d be spending October putting together a story with some new characters by writing 500(ish) words a day:
Today, we’re meeting L’rea. Unlike Ithirian, I haven’t had a solid concept of her as a character for very long, though I’ve had the name “L’rea” kicking around for a while. And, in fact, used it for a Baldur’s Gate character.
For reference, L’rea is pronounced like ‘La Brea’ (i.e. the Tar Pits) if the B wasn’t there.
The only really concrete thing I had in mind for L’rea was “is a Dark Elf,” but I’ve tried not to fall into the Generic Fantasy version of Dark Elves too much, and it might be more accurate to just say “Grey-Skinned Elf,” which doesn’t really have the same baggage as “Dark Elf.”
In general, I try to make the names I use in my Fantasy stories have some semblance of real-world etymology. I basically decided to entirely jettison that for L’rea and the… whatever I’m going to end up calling her people as a whole, and embrace a really alien language with a lot of hyphenated and apostrophised names, which is pretty fun in its own way.
I really struggled to come up with a word for what I wanted “Auditor” to convey. Something like “Inquisitor” might be better grammatically – in that the Auditors are literally answering inquiries made by the Anax (which, incidentally, is a Bronze Age-Era Greek word for ‘king’) - but Inquisitor inevitably has religious connotations that don’t really fit with what the job actually is. I ultimately decided on Auditor on the basis that it etymologically means like ‘examiner’ or even ‘witness’, which I think fits the role.
Incidentally, that header image is a recoloured photo of Petra. I’m trying to convey that Xu-Nan-Thaal is a very ancient city, I like the image of a city carved straight into the rock, and I recoloured the image both because the real Petra is really recognisable and because I’m trying to really lean into the association with the colour grey.
L’rea – Ashen Auditor
All her life, L’rea – like all her people – has proudly borne the ashes of the fiery wrath of the great goddess En-An the War-Mother written upon her flesh. Now, serving the as the witness of the Anax in the green lands of the young, upstart nations, her ashen skin itches and crawls under the weight of so many hostile eyes.
L’rea will bear the contempt of the barbarians no less proudly. She has no reason to be ashamed. She is a child of fair and mighty En-An. She is the favourite daughter of the Iron Archivist of of the Great Library of Xu-Nan-Thaal.
She serves the Anax as an Auditor, trusted to venture beyond the stark and stony canyons of her homeland into barbarian lands and to carve all that she witness into the iron-bound chronicles of Xu-Nan-Thaal.
Knowledge is power, and the Auditors are the foremost weapon of her people. It has been this way since En-An laid the cornerstone of the first and greatest city in all the mortal world for her children.
Even after two thousand years, the iron chronicles still hold much that the younger nations have already forgotten.
There is not a single soul in Xu-Nan-Thaal better for the task than her.
As the daughter of the Iron Archivist, the books of the Great Library have been her constant companions rom the great iron-bound tomes to the ragged, faded moth-eaten pages forgotten in dusty corners. And those books have been better friends than her own sisters. The books never tugged her braids, or ripped apart her dolls, or locked her in dank cellars.
Few but the Anax himself, or his most trusted servants, are allowed to even touch the iron-bound chronicles, but L’rea’s father dotes on his favourite daughter, entrusting her with the quicksilver key that unlocks the great work of generations of Xu-Nan-Thaal Auditor’s, servants of the Anax entrusted with venturing out into the barbarian lands of the young, upstart nations and reporting back with all the witness.
She has come with a delegation from Xu-Nan-Thaal to the city of Mariburg in the Twice-Crowned Empire of Karolai. Even the grandest city on the eastern marches of Karoli feels small and quaint against the antiquity and glory of Xu-Nan-Thaal, but she has found the city’s libraries and archives to be adequate, at least. It is galling to find knowledge she has never read in the iron chronicles among the accounts of a nation so much younger than her homeland, but that gives her so much more reason to bring it back to the Great Library.
L’rea suspects he is playing a prank on her, but the envoy leading the delegation has conspired for L’rea to be granted membership in Mariburg’s Adventurers’ Guild. He says work as an adventurer will give her plenty to record in the iron chronicles.
Lately, L’rea has been contemplating the best way to record that the envoy is a smug, despicable wretch for all generations to remember when he adds him to her part of the iron-bound books in the Great Library…
I’ll be sharing at least a few days of my October writing days with these characters for free here, on Patreon, and on my blog — but the bulk of them will be exclusive to my paid Patreon subscribers, at least initially.
I am planning on making all of my Patreon-exclusive stuff available to the general public eventually, so stay tuned for news on that.
And please consider subscribing here, on my blog, and on Patreon.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
