He has two dogs, Cúén and Faendie. They are Cabalusian Bear Dogs, originally bred for hunting big game like bears, but also used by the Cabalusian cavalry class íochiar, which Valeri is too, for warfare. Valeri's dogs are trained for war. They are black, though Faendie has white in her chest, big and they are basically a fantasy world version of Karelian Bear Dogs. He loves them a lot. They sleep with him and go with him basically everywhere. They have a hierarchy since Faedie is older, so she gets to sleep on Valeri's back as his weight blanket, while Cúén sleeps on his feet.
Cúén shares his name with Cúén cor Faélci, though Valeri doesn't know that yet, since Faélci is going with his cousin's name. Once they become hated allies and Valeri learns Faélci's real first name, he absolutely will not let it go that they share a name. What makes it funnier to Valeri is that Faélci is very cold and prickly, while Cúén the dog is extremely eager to please, hyper-active and always demanding affection from Valeri. The amount of times Valeri makes the "Do you want scratches, Cúén?" *turns to Faélci* "I'm talking to the dog" joke as if it never gets old is many.
He has a nice singing voice, but he has too much social anxiety to ever sing in front of other people.
He has extensive burn scars in his back. The worst burns have caused nerve damage, which causes him chronic pain. It's worst in summer, since the pain flares with temperature changes, but it's usually fairly manageable with pain medication.
He's religious. He was raised for several years in an orphanage run by a temple, so he became quite devout Arkhonite, which is the main religion in the Angusian Empire. The main god worshipped in Arkhonity is the Sun God (there's two gods) and a lot of the rituals involve fire, which is a problem for Valeri, since he has pretty bad phobia for fire, and cannot even light a candle himself.
Bear Castle Cycle Masterpost
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I decided to do Creators Club's Fun Fact Friday for Valeri too, since I didn't have the time to do it last week! Tagging @creators-club @bardic-tales!
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Yeah I didn’t finish the whole thing this year but here’s still some I did. I’ll just publish them in this one post :D
Day 16: Scar
Valeri has a big part of his back covered in burn scars, but he also has gotten into some trouble in the army thanks to his *ahem* temperament (kindly put), and if your offence is not bad enough to get an dishonorable discharge, you’ll get flogged. Some areas of his burns were 3rd degree burns and so his skin’s nerves got damaged. The damaged nerves causes him chronic pain. His back doesn’t hurt constantly, it comes and goes often.
Day 17: Bloodied
Valeri is acquiring some new scars lol. It’s from a scene where he’s fighting a small band of Imperial troops with Agrippa and nearly getting himself killed. They are in the middle of Dir’ahin’s wilderness, where he hasn’t gotten change to shave (which explains the beard) but they have gotten some ahinian clothing already.
Day 18 & 19: Feather & Bone
This is a tiny death spirit. They born from lingering feeling of fear of death and they poorly imitate scavenger birds. They gather in places with a lot of dying people which is why they can be often seen in hospitals and battle fields for example. They are not dangerous for people normally, since they are mainly scavengers and just wait for their victims to die before eating their souls. Though they might eat souls of birds who are not yet dead, causing weird and destructive behavior in them. If there’s a lot of them, they might try to gang up and take down a human too.
Pre-Civil War and Post-Civil War Marcus K'irhimzaham
Marcus at age 30 (roughly) as a general and then at age 48 as a disgraced traitor. I've been thinking of the uniforms a lot lately, which is one of the reasons I made Pre-Civil War Marcus in his Cabalusian uniform.
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I finally spent some time researching Napoleonic era warfare and cavalry because I reached the chapters where the war actually starts and like I would have to write battle scenes. I'm not super interested in war history, which is why I had put that off, but it was more interesting than I expected! I found the perfect very 2005-core website with all the information I need and more. I could kiss on the mouth the nerd who made it. Unfortunately it was very illuminating and now I have many ideas on how to make the worldbuilding and the beginning of Valeri's storyline stronger. So I started his storyline again. I removed around 11K words :') Well, not actually in reality, I'll still be able to use many of the passages and some scenes fully, so I'll quickly catch up to my earlier word count. I already wrote 679 words.
I did reach my weakly goal on the time spend on writing (in Thursday so at the end of the first week I had written for 9h 25 mins)! I included the research and worldbuilding and replanning of Valeri's early storyline, which amounted to 5 hours in total.
Words written: 679
Current word count: 5 937 (-11 089)
Time written: 10h 25m
I won't give a new excerpt since I have written very little actual words to the manuscript after the last update, but here's a new uniform I drew for Valeri to figure that out. For context the old uniform is the second drawing.
The old uniform on the right is still the uniform of the heavy cavalry, but I did learn about the different kinds of cavalry, and decided Valeri is light/medium cavalry. Valeri is an íochair, a cavalry class originating from Cabalusia, and their uniform is also based on the traditional gear of the Cerfi horsemen.
Here's some worldbuilding regarding military and uniforms I've been thinking about lately. I'll present that through story relevant case studies - Marcus before the Civil War (first image) and Valeri (second image). Marcus was the general of the Cabalusian Guard, a personal army of the Mantgamia clan, which was under direct command of the Mantgamia clan and separate from the Imperial Army. And Valeri is in the Virénian army, which is part of the Imperial Army.
The Imperial Army
A little background is needed. The Imperial Army is raised from each province and therefore consists basically of four independent armies. The emperor is the supreme commander. Each province is allowed to keep an elite force under the command of the duke, since they tend to be too loyal to their local rulers and historically assimilating them to the Imperial Army has been met with heavy resistance. Imperial rulers who have attempted to do that have at worst almost caused civil wars, and at best lost battles to mutiny. So instead heavy restrictions is placed on the size and resources of these personal armies to ensure they can never be a threat to the imperial forces. Disbanding them entirely is for sure an option (and has been done sometimes as we'll get to), but keeping them around is beneficial to the empire since these personal armies consist of very skilled forces. The Imperial House also has it's own personal elite force, the Imperial Legion, or just the Legion more familiarly. There's no restriction for it, and it's kept always in higher numbers than the Provincial Guards.
Cabalusian Guard was of course fighting on the Mantgamian side of the civil war and fully disbanded after it. Prince Lucretius, uncle to the young emperor, became the Duke of Cabalusia and uses part of the Legion as his personal army.
Íochiars
Almost half of Cabalusia is steppe, therefore it has a strong horse culture and renowned cavalry. Íochiar cavalry class originates from there. It's a medium (or light) cavalry class and generally very flexible and can be used for a lot of purposes of both heavy and light cavalry, though usually it's more suited for light cavalry purposes. Cerfi (the majority cultural/ethnic group of Cabalusia) are on average pretty tall people, so even their light cavalry tends to have taller cavalrymen. For that reason the local Cabalusian horse is a bit bigger than the typical pretty small light cavalry horse. They don't use sabers, like most light cavalry, but instead carry Cabalusian style broadswords, which can be used fairly flexibly just as íochiars themselves. Their units also employ Cabalusian Bear Dogs, which are bred for hunting big game, like bears, but has historically been used for war too. They are primarily employed for skirmishing, scouting and pursuit.
Íochiars have a strong internal culture with long historical roots, which helps their units in operating effectively, even though they lack the discipline many other cavalry classes, especially heavy cavalry classes possess. That culture is heavily rooted in the Cabalusian Cerfi culture. Even though all of the provincial armies have íochiar regiments, most íochiars are still Cerfi. After the Civil War a lot of the officers of imperial íochiars were purged or demoted, since many of them were Mantgamia sympathizers or outright joined their ranks in the civil war, so more of the officers are now not Cerfi, while still majority of the troops are Cerfi. The Cabalusian army also has light íochiars, whose riders and horses are smaller and who carry sabers, but otherwise are the same. This version is not used outside Cabalusia, since scimitars, a class which originates from Merus, is the primary lightest cavalry used in the Imperial Army.
Uniforms
Finally we arrive at the uniforms. The standard imperial uniform has breeches, doublet and a tailed jerkin, but íochiar uniform as well as a lot of Cabalusian Guard uniforms has a short fur lined pelisse instead of jerkin. Pelisse is what Marcus is wearing on his shoulder and Valeri under his cloak. There's a bit of shift in men's fashion between the roughly 20 years that are between these outfits. The tops have become shorter and the breeches more high-waisted and the collars slightly taller.
Pelisse originates from traditional Cabalusian fashion, which is very wool based (the steppe economy in Cabalusia has long been relying on sheep a lot). The two traditional ways to pattern fabrics were felting and sewing metal decorations into it. Scale armor was developed by the Cerfi early on and was made similarly as the decorative method. They sewed small metallic scales overlapping to clothing, creating full body armor like that too. The result was fairly light and a pretty effective armor, which still had good movement and flexibility. Felted clothing with fur lining as the base for the scale armor provided padding and extra protection. Metal working has been integral part of Cerfi culture since ancient times, and before their conversion to Arkhonity, it was also part of their magic rituals. Gold magic was practiced by the Cerfi and golden pearls, amulets and lamellae were sewn into clothing to imbue them with magical properties. The scales for the armor (especially for a very fine armor) could be coated with gold to imbue them too with magic. While the gold magic is now considered heresy and it's practice has died out, gold still has a lot of cultural significance and it's thought of as a lucky and protective metal. That's why uniforms still heavily use patterns made with sewn in gold pieces.
Medium weight íochiars use pelisse, which has scaling on the front panels. It gives them a bit of armor for the torso, but is still much lighter than the plate armor the heavy cavalry uses. See Valeri's pelisse. Marcus however, being Merusian and quite short, was originally a scimitar, but after he joined the Cabalusian Guard, he became light íochiar. His pelisse on the illustration is a high ranking officer's pelisse with gold decorations though, since uniforms of the Cabalusian Guard are also were more influenced by Cerfi dress than imperial uniforms. Light íochiars also use pelisse without scale armor, though much less decorated. Valeri is wearing not a helmet exactly, but something between a felt hat and a helmet. The base is felt and like the clothes, it has sewn in lamellae and other metallic parts, in this case visor and other protective gear for the head. It's another compromise between light weight and protection, using metal only for the strategic spots while lighting it with felt, which also gives padding under the metal.
Cabalusian colours come from the Mantgamia clan, which has long been the ruling clan of Cabalusia, long before it was conquered by the empire. They are green and black, and gold for the broader cultural significance is of course also heavily used in Cabalusian armors. Horse is naturally a significant animal to Cabalusia and is in their coat of arms, but the Mantgamian coat of arms has a bear, and as the Cabalusian Guard was originally specifically Matgamian army, it's also in their coat of arms and heavily included in all it's symbolism. For example the pelisse of the general is lined with bear fur. Bear fur is only used by very high ranking officers though. Even though bear worship (which the Mangamias practiced before Arkhonity) is infidel, the superstitions around bears are still widely believed. Bear fur is treated with utmost respect and needs to be earned, otherwise there will be bad luck.
Valeri, being íochiar in the imperial army, is wearing the imperial red and gold. Due to their association with Mantgamia colours, black is also used in many íochiar regiment uniforms. Typically the pelisse at least is black.
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He got into revolutionary politics through lesbianism. As a 17 yo he had a lesbian phase so he got into lesbian poet circles, where he met all kinds of lesbians - working class, republican, revolutionary, Cabalusian separatist. He also met trans masc people and quickly realized he was a) not a woman b) not into women.
He's really good at archery, including horse archery. He won archery contests as a teenager. They have guns so archery is basically a sport of the nobles, not used in warfare. Cabalusian nobles use archery for hunting too. He's also a very good marksman with rifle.
He has conspired with his sister, who along with her husband are also Cabalusian separatists, to keep the fact that he's been infiltrating the Virénian army for several years hidden from their mother and the rest of the clan. His mother thinks he's living with his sister and studying poetry in Virén. He also hasn't told his mother he has yeeted the teet (had top surgery), and he's not sure at this point how he will do that.
He's very pretentious about poetry and literature. He's kinda pretentious in general. He hates popular literature, and especially Julie noé Maupin, who among many things (opera singer, fencer, infamously hot lesbian) is a writer, who writes very popular very fun chivalric romances, which every self-respecting pretentious literature enjoyer thinks are trashy.
He has an on-and-off affair with Aerich, the leader of the separatist group he's part of. On and off, because since he's infiltrating the army they are regularly separated for multiple months and can't have any correspondence either, since Aerich is very much a wanted enemy of the empire. Faélci has said to Aerich that he's free to have other affairs while he's away, but in reality he's stressed that Aerich will fall in love with someone else. He would not admit that under torture, because being in love is very embarrassing and being jealous on top of it is even more so.
Aerich calls him "Little Wolf" (Faénie in Cerfi) because Cúén means wolf cub in Cerfi. It makes Faélci extremely soft and weak when he does it so casually (especially when he says "my Little Wolf"). He would not admit that either under torture.
Bear Castle Cycle Masterpost
Tag list under the cut! Let me know if you want to be added/removed!
BCC tag list: @siarven @worldbuildng @emilyoracle @frvnwrites @kainablue
The real reason is drew young!Marcus was so I could put all the Mantgamia parents as they were when they were all alive on the same image and appreciate how short Marcus is.
We love all our blorbos but who'se your current favorite and how hard is it to be them? ;)
Happy BB!! Thank you for the question! :D
Valeri, who is one of the main characters of Bear Castle Cycle, has been living rent free in my head for a while now as I've been writing his storyline. You're definitely making the correct assumptions here, it's not fun being him. Since the common wisdom is that you should set the expectations for the story in the first chapter, his storyline start with him getting beaten up :) And it's just downhill from there. He's a tough stoic soldier type, or like that's what he tries to seem like, when in reality he's an anxious emotional mess, but basically it's a story of him getting into Situations and witnessing the Horrors until he has a proper mental breakdown and cry. And then he can be put in more Situations, but now with a little less repression!
I like to make warm ups of the characters I'm currently writing whenever I'm painting so I think these warmups I've made illustrate quite well how not good time Valeri is having. First one is from the beginning of the story, second is from roughly the 2/3 point of the story.
