I’ve introduced and talked about this character, so I’m going to end the non-Legends of Windemere posts with an explanation of how this character came to be:

Back in 1999, a young woman with a chip on her shoulder and penchant for hitting people for the slightest verbal transgression joined the Dungeons & Dragon game that I was in.  This is the game where I played Luke Callindor (at that point, I still hadn’t given him a last name) and it was the semester where the other players began to leave the game.  This would leave me and this young woman as the only players until the following semester.  This young woman had never played this type of game, so she did what any normal person would do.  Sorry, I meant wouldn’t do.  She created a magic-using warrior, which basically boils down to a character who can cast magic and is slightly stronger with a dagger or a long stick.  Noticing how Luke ran into battle, she thought she could do the same.  Unfortunately, there was only a handful of offensive spells she had and the only one that did damage was the magical equivalent of a kick to the shins.  As for her warrior skills . . . she may have hit 10 things with a weapon over the course of the entire game.  So, this young woman would charge in ahead of those who could do the job and make a mess of any plan that we had.  Hence, the tradition of Nyx being the first to rush into battle and getting knocked out began.  As the game progressed and Nyx gained better spells and a magic crossbow, she improved. It helped that this young woman and I started dating, which meant she started listening to me when I tried to explain the game.  By the time the game fell apart, Nyx was pretty strong.  She still got knocked out a lot because the guy running the game always forgot that she couldn’t take a hit and put her up against some incredibly strong monsters.

Nyx was in a worse spot than the other characters when it came time to transform her into a book character.  As I said, beginning spells in a D&D game aren’t that impressive and the way you’re supposed to learn new spells is by finding someone to teach them.  In book terms, this would require that Nyx end every adventure going back to her masters and returning with new spells at the beginning of the next adventure.  The alternative would be for her to constantly stumble onto spellbooks, which would get ridiculous after a while.  There was also that problem of her being knocked and injured more often than the other characters.  I didn’t like that the first female hero I used had the durability of a paper plane in a tornado.  Still, I couldn’t make her a great warrior and a great magic-user because that would overshadow the other characters.  This is what led to Nyx becoming a magical prodigy that is able to cast without gestures, incantations, and spell components. She became incredibly powerful right from the beginning, which was tempered by the fact that she had to restrain herself and there was a matching villain who could rival her.  At first, I was afraid that she would be too powerful, but she still found ways to get in trouble and get knocked out.

There was also the depth of her character that made her so much fun to write.  In the game, she was moody and quick to anger, which didn’t fade as time went on.  This is how she started in the book, but Nyx began to develop a big sister role for the other heroes.  Being an orphan, she seemed to be trying to create a family out of the main characters, so I let her do this.  This brought out a protective nature in her and also revealed an internal sorrow and loneliness that she was fighting to dispose of.  She had her ups and downs, but they never seemed to be random.  There was always a trigger to set her off and she has gradually gotten stronger through her friendships.  She’s also adopted Luke’s level of cockiness and mouthing off to enemies, but Nyx has also given him a stable friendship that is impossible to break.

I have to admit that out of all of my characters, I’m currently proudest of Nyx.  She’s grown the most from her D&D days and she is always growing and evolving.  (For anyone wondering what happened to the young woman, she’s my wife, which is weird because Luke and Nyx don’t hook up in the books.  For some reason, the closest we ever came to playing a couple was a pair of vampires who used to date and would occasionally bicker about old issues.)