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Hi Noah! @noah-cochran

The three hundred word limit is very tough.  Can we get a vote for upping it to 350? 🙂

Here’s my second character part:
(349 words)

My name is Will.  Not that you’d care.  I don’t know why I keep getting jerked back here.  Wherever this place is.

Now that Dad is dead, I never wanted to come back here again.  I saw him die here and awoke to find him dead there.  I’ve had nightmares about this place.  This between place.  I can still hear the growling of the wolves.  See their bloody muzzles.  See them leap for me.  If I’d only had a gun.

But there are no guns here.  This world is savage and brutal.  Being weak here gets you dead…eaten.

At least back in the other world, it doesn’t take much to pull a trigger.  The victim can sometimes get the upper hand.  So the strong and cruel hesitate.  No one knows whose carrying these days.

Turn the other cheek. Ha!  You turn the other cheek, where I come from, you’ll get shot right in the…

Mom doesn’t like me to say that word.  What does she know?  Mom could do nothing, and dad came home in a box.

I need me some payback.  I hate those who did this to him.  Hate ‘em!

Just four more years and I can join up.  Get me that payback.

But the dreams keep coming back, and I end up here again.  Now, dad is no longer here.  Only the lingering ache of me watching him die here and I can do nothing but cling to the frozen tree.  So cold.

I feel it even now.  I can hear the growls.  The silence.  Dear God, the silence.  I can’t look down.  I just can’t.

Where was God that night?  Where was God when dad was shot by that Wolf Pack unit?

The wolves seem to always win.  Why would I ever want to be a sheep among wolves?

For all mom’s talk of God, she is still only a sheep.  But I am not.  The Good Shephard never came that night, so the wolves ate him. Hate is all I have left.  I cannot love anyone or anything anymore.  I must become a wolf.

———————-
You are correct.

GrumBlud was once human but is now a Troll.  He is a pariah.  He is simple-minded and mostly driven by raw, negative emotions, and resentful fear of punishment.  He hates those he serves because he fears them.  He would double-cross them in a minute if he thought he could get away with it. He doesn’t particularly like filth, but he will not let filth and stench prevent him from acting, and slogging through it to get whatever he wants.  He does whatever he must to survive and has no particular loyalties to anyone or anything.  His language is a kind of broken cockney.  He moves like a gorilla, alternating between feet and knuckles.  He is a short and squatty fellow, chubby with a rubbery face, fat-lipped with broken teeth, a bulbous nose under a thick brow, with piggish, inset eyes.  He has a cartoonish appearance. The black water that transformed him into what he became, also gave him the mystical ability to look into someone’s eyes and see their fears and torment them with a rush of their own unwanted memories.  Never lock eyes with a troll. They will wound you from within.  And they have a fondness for knives.

Hey Jared, @jared-williams
Thanks for the shout-out.

You are correct. GrumBlud is a creature of base intelligence and has his own dialectic, calling things as he perceives them from his own context.  He assumes everyone knows what he is talking about because he has zero empathy for anyone but himself.  He is sullen and takes very little pleasure in anything but trickery and cruelty. His insults are the most colorful thing about his language.

Your character 1 appears to be female.  She has some sort of herbalist gifting that allows her to mature a plant in her hand.  She seems to have a strong empathic nature but does seem to be a bit naive in the ways of war. 

This seems intriguing, because she hesitantly appears to refer to “counselor Shemokeen” as, what one can assume to be her “father”, but she backs off of that affectation and formalizes his title in her own private musings.  I wonder what might cause her to do so.

Her primary thought seems to be about her feelings for this man whom she has been separated from for years, but she is having trouble reconciling rumors about him with the image she has maintained about him.

The passage also references that she has recently been promoted to “royal vedette”:

Was she promoted by the man she is thinking about or someone else?

This does exactly what any passage of this short length should do.  It hints at and raises intriguing questions, making a reader want to lean in to find out more about the character and what concerns them. Good job!

Character 2, “Yaxkin”, is male and appears to be a scout on night patrol, because he is aware of diminishing his night vision by coming to close into the firelight.  The woman must have been looking into the fire, for when he speaks she cannot see him in the shadow and instead scans the forest.  This tells me she is relying on others for her own safety, and not attentive to it herself.  The king’s immediately locating him tells me the king is avoiding looking into the fire and is mightful of his own protection as well, finding Yaxkin easily to address him.
Yaxkin appears to be able to camouflage or make his body invisible at will with some sort of “essence” magic.  This ability may disturb others without this gift and make his kind suspect and distrusted.  A potential spy.  He seems to want the king to be more suspicious because he is ashamed of how his own brother “takes advantage”.  He seems sincere in his appreciation for the king, yet conflicted by it too.  He is also drawn to the woman seeing in her a resemblance to his own mother.  He wonders at his brother’s willingness to resist affectation, and dismiss feelings of nostalgia.

If this quality was indeed a tribal thing, what makes Yaxkin feel differently from his brother and the rest of his tribe?  This is one of those intriguing points that draw us deeper into Yaxkin’s character.  Why does he seem to care more about the welfare of the king and this woman?

Good job, sir!