16. do any characters have distinctive birthmarks/scars?
The main POV character, Ejeh, has a big knotted slash up the left side of her face from her jaw up her cheek and eye and forehead and almost to the back of her head. It keeps keeps her hair from growing properly there, so it looks like she has an almost bald patch on about a quarter of her scalp on that left side. The patch is hidden whenever she wears her head covering, but you can still see the rest of the scar on her face. She gets it during the story, after she’s meddled a bit too much in the affairs of some minor gods, and one of them decides to teach her a lesson in humility. Her undead spirit/shoulder devil companion, Malik Tintilinic (or just Malik, probs), takes the brunt of the impact for her and probably saves her life.
A major POV character, Evren, was born with several birth defects and also bears a few birthmarks, most of them nowhere visible, but she does have a dark port-wine stain on her arm. What’s most distinctive about her is her deformities - her jaw is malformed and her limbs are shrunken and don’t quite bend the right way, keeping her from being able to walk on her own or take care of herself fully. She’s penniless, and she’s also Roma, and her family goes out on the streets with her to beg sometimes, and their own community frowns upon them because there’s cruel rumors that her parents had injured her as a baby to give her the malformations and the birthmark for begging purposes, though none of those allegations are true.
Those are two major ones for now. There will probably be more later though. When I lived in the Balkans, where the story takes place (or at least a fantasy version of it), I was surprised at just how many people had let old injuries go untreated, or how many had been born with birth defects but did nothing about them, while doing something about visible imperfections like that is much more common in the U.S. So many of my characters reflect that, even the very young ones.
