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@karthmin

Haha, thanks. XD It’s a painful struggle when you write out something so nice and flowery and long and pretty and then it gets deleted…. *sigh*

Thanks again! Theme is something that… I can’t even describe it. It’s just something that without it, there is no purpose to a story in my opinion. If there’s no meaning behind what you have to write…. then what’s the point of writing it, really? Writing is about… giving. Showing. Imagination. Meaning. Great books have heart. Theme. Meaning.

On to Kirin’s backstory–I’ll have to explain the whole thing for you to really get it, so bear with me. It’s long.

Kirin was born to the newly-wed couple of Aram and Mirne, in the peaceful valley of Eret in north-central Westrim Earth, in a small village named Kalt.  His story really starts 14 years before the novel starts, when Kirin is three, just as the Blood War was slowly starting to come to a close and elven war parties that were situated on the western coast of the continent were starting to travel back overland due to the winter storms incoming. And despite the fact that the war was coming to a close, the elves were still not in agreement with humans. So when one of the elven guards that was with the elven lord negotiating peace with humans was found dead without a killer, the elves grew angered and sent word to their soldiers still traveling out of the continents to kill any human they met.

Unfortunately, such a troupe happened to be heading towards Kirin’s village. The village was massacred, and Kirin only managed to survive because his parents drugged him to sleep(no cliche crying giving away baby chosen one’s hiding place lol) and hid him. His parents were killed, and then Kirin was picked up by traders who came through on their winter route a few days later to check on the village(they had been hiding and watching from the mountains). Despite rescuing him and saving his life, the traders were not good people and sold him off to a wealthy noble in Rhen, Westrim Earth, as soon as they could. Kirin lived with this man until he was 7 years old, when the man died due to heart attack and Kirin managed to run away.

From then on, he lived on the streets begging his bread and starving to the point of passing out from severe malnutrition only 5 months after running away. He was then taken in by a poor man and his granddaughter. They fed him, raised him, taught him to read, and all was pretty well with the world until Kirin was 9. The man treated Kirin like his own son, and his granddaughter treated him like her own brother, giving Kirin the family he’d never had long enough to remember.

Then the man, who had fallen into extreme debt, and due to the laws of Westrim Earth, was expected to give his precious granddaughter over to the noble who ruled over the town to sell or keep as a slave to pay off his debt, instead gave them Kirin. Kirin was sold to a man named Janak, who owned him up for two years then sold him to a man named Sloen. Sloen was not a nice man, in the least. He took pleasure in mocking his slaves and treating them as little more than animals, as was the habit in Westrim Earth. He beat them, starved them often, and wouldn’t allow them to speak. Sloen was a very rich man, yet his slaves were dressed in rags often and ate scraps and poor food. Kirin is with Sloen until the beginning of the novel.

So, basically what I wanted to do with Kirin’s life was give him everything and then rip it away, leaving him worse off each time. He was born with a loving family, but they were murdered. He was sold and into slavery and shown the meaning of poverty and pain, and then he finally managed to run away and be found by a kind man and his sweet granddaughter–only for that man to turn on him and send him straight back to his pain and suffering after the man treated him like his own son(and Kirin thought that the man thought of him as his own son…). He was sold to a cruel master and then an even crueler master, each time just getting worse and worse. He is mocked and belittled and treated like an animal. So naturally, I think this is enough to invoke the response in Kirin that as soon as he is free, he’ll naturally protect that freedom at all costs and seek to find a way to make that permanent–and the only way he’s seen that done so far is with power and wealth. So I think if given some extraordinary opportunity to guarantee his position as free and human, he’d fight for it with all he’s got.

Another interesting thing is his magical power–people with this ability are often called beasts or monsters because they are feared for their odd powers, and Kirin was also treated as less than human while he was a slave. So it’s interesting to me that no matter how his standing is socially and money-wise, he’ll still be considered an animal by society. But what I really want to bring to light her is the fact that over the course of the three novels, Kirin comes to realize that it’s not power or wealth he’s searching for, but family. And he has one–his friends. And once he realizes that, he begins to shift from protecting himself at all costs with money and power to protecting his family at all costs because he can’t bear to loose someone close to him again or see them get hurt.

So, there we go. Rant over, I hope this cleared it up for you. XD