I’ve spent most of August working on lore and character bios for the DemonWIP instead of, you know, writing the damn book and I created this new aesthetic for Nodira the Deathless, my lethal assassin turned Steppe Queen.

Nodira is one of the characters I know the least about, but god do I love her. She is an opaque character who’s motives are a mystery even to me, but she is working towards something. She feels that something is owed to her and the rest is improvising along the way? Like this thing is attainable and so I’ll go for it, but she’s pretty adaptable in terms of what she’s going for? But at the same time, there is some calculation, some sense of what would be enough. But I think we’re still working on what it is, haha.

Nodira has had a rough life. Her mother cut her right arm off to prevent the Gargoyles from conscripting her into the army but she was conscripted anyway and then she became a gun for fire for local Steppe warlords after the First Shadow War. May have fallen in love with her secret wife before taking on the job to wipe out an entire royal, Gargoyle family. May have tortured another major character who was hiding the Gargoyle family but was then chased off by Gargoyle guards. Returned home long enough to piss off a major Gargoyle lord and was forced to flee into the mountains without her secret wife. Took a job to kill poor Rashid but ended up marrying him instead because he is the only person in the world who can surprise her. Now she and Rashid are on their way to a city they don’t know is swarming with Demons…

Her relationship with Rashid is difficult considering she was hired to kill him, but it’s also sort of sweet? In a Nodira sort of way. She is fond of him even though he is going to drive her to a mental breakdown with his unpredictability and his magical ability to attract the worse trouble possible and just when you think he’s a dead man, he somehow manages to survive and everything else around him is in utter ruins.

But their relationship is built around violence because it started with violence and because Nodira is tightly restrained violence. She never kills gratuitously, but has engaged in a bit of nasty torture now and then. Her kills, however, are usually quick and clean because it’s business, but it is still a business dealing death. Most of her life has been surrounded by death but she is the only inflicting it (until Rashid who is the one on the receiving end of many death threats). She can’t imagine a world without it (which raises a lot of questions about her relationship with the secret wife…maybe there’s a reason they’re estranged…although secret wife is definitely going to be pissed about Rashid…it’s just a mess overall)

But, yeah, that’s Nodira. The woman who can’t die, who only deals death, and has a secret wife and a husband who is determined to get himself killed than deal with all his problems. I love her so much, but also feel so bad for her, haha.