I want to have strong female characters in my story that aren't "Strong Female Characters"™
Testing ‘Notes’ with a character sketch…meet Raga Sway.
Warning! Rough draft. Also graphic at one point.
Raga would be famous long after her death. And this for many reasons.
She would certainly be infamous for the ruthless efficiency with which she barreled through whatever distance separated where she stood for where she intended to be. Whatever her target, she riveted the steel of her mind to its fulfillment.
A second thing was the cold, quick manner with which she dispatched with men when got in the way.
A third was the peculiar expression of plaintive stoicism while she did it. She didn’t mind killing. And killing had all been men up until this point, which was a happy state of affairs. If she ever had to kill another woman, Raga wondered, would it be as easy with a woman as it was with a man for her to thread a screwdriver1 through her victim’s right temple so thoroughly that the tip of the tool2 made blood vomit out the head’s left side?
But her main fame would come not from any act of violence or vengeance, but from a comprehensively epic test of endurance.
The run she made on Ol’ Rel’s back across the Teran frontier was what her name would be associated with far into the future. She rode 5,0003 miles of rough Teran frontier backcountry east to west, until the sun made her mustang’s buckskin coat sparkle in clinquant edges of silver along the curves of her sturdy muscles.
To everyone else, Ol’ Rel was homely.
To Raga, Ol’ was freedom. She was the capacity and the opportunity to fly, to dance like a hart through woods, to soar and to cut across the oceangrass like the birds that slowed to keep pace with the rider and her mustang.
She was not in the rolling, reedy sea of Central Tera now.
It was not 75°F4 now, like it was when she and Rel leapt like a rolling forest fire loosed from a longbow.
Raga was a witch. Ol’ Rel was her fell broom. Together they were savage hearts that would never die.
Dying was what Raga made other people do.
Did they have screwdrivers in 1190? I have to assume so.
Yeah I know.
8,046 kilometers; just under 191 consecutive marathons
24°C