#karyai

[the-lunar-library]

TO THE RAVENS

All of the character portraits together -- all of the major-ish characters. I'm really pleased with how this series came out, and it's so nice seeing them all collected like this.

Akantha / Alexandros / Genesius

Kokkonas / Tanais / Buca

Brixia / Karyai / Pas

Lykedon / Galana

[the-lunar-library]

TO THE RAVENS

Akantha's elder sister Karyai is everything a Kynthian woman should be – married, a mother, industrious within the home – and, because of it, just as the philosophers promise, happy. Or so Akantha's always thought, and resented when comparing their lives. But despite her beautiful twins, despite her adoring husband, despite having nothing to fear from the gods, Karyai is restless. And any philosopher would tell you that a restless woman is a woman doomed to trouble.

Karyai appeared very early in the creative process, there to be a more conventional foil to the heroine Akantha. But I was a little unclear on what shape her life should take. One of my notes reads “Maybe she tends the lions?” (There are lions in the story – at that stage they were religious ceremonial lions, though in the final draft their role is much reduced, poor things, and Karyai doesn't have anything to do with them.) But pretty quickly Karyai became a fairly typical Kynthian woman, there to demonstrate what the culture wants, expects, and insists women be. She married young, she had children, she keeps her husband's household running smoothly. She does what she's supposed to – she lives the life Akantha feels she, for whatever reason, cannot. But, as it turns out, doing the right thing hasn't left Karyai as happy as she should be.

For a big chunk of the pre-writing process, Karyai was named Tykhera (“lucky; by chance”), which, along with maybe being too literal, seemed like it would be hard for readers to mentally say over and over again as they read. And then in my research I ran across the city of Caryae (if you like your classical art, the origin of the word caryatid) which in Greek would be Karyai. And I thought it was really pretty, and Caryae is associated with Artemis, thus, the Moon. And, having established that Kynthians like to use Earth place-names, I went with it. I have since been told that Karyai is also difficult to say. Pronounce it however you like, but I say kar-yigh.

She and Akantha are half sisters, so they're meant to look alike, but Karyai's somewhat more elegant and delicate in her bone structure. She has red hair and a lighter skin tone from her more fair-skinned mother. Most Kynthian women wear their hair short, but Karyai follows the trend of wrapping a purchased hair-piece around her head. She was born with gold eyes like Akantha, but has switched them out (it makes sense in the book) for green-hazel, hoping one day to be able to afford true green eyes.

[vino-means-wine]

the erechtheum, the acropolis, athens, greece.

this sketch shows the famous caryatids, an architectural element that functions as a column but replaces the columnar shaft with a sculpture of a female figure. (the male equivalent are called telamons.) 

caryatids are named after the women of the ancient city of karyai. vitruvius claims that they betrayed athens by siding with persia during wartime and are thus symbolically condemned to bear the weight of buildings on their heads, but others believe that the column capital atop the heads of the women figures are meant to mimic the basket the women of karyai would carry on their heads during their ritual dance to the goddess artemis.

[defira85]

My crazy Warden Karyai tried to summon a Trogdor to fight the dire wolves but it ended up looking more like a vampire duck. Instead she has to make do with Gascard, her fire drake. She has a crippling fear of fire. They have a love hate relationship.