Legends of Windemere

Cover Art by Jason Pedersen

Sari entered Legends of Windemere with a vicious impact.  She comes from a nomadic people who are called gypsies.  This is the fantasy version where they are almost thief-like, but I never got far into the culture.  Mostly because Sari clan was attacked and slaughtered in the Prologue of her debut book.  She escaped only to be captured, handed over to a vampire, and put through a nightmarish life until Luke and Nyx stumbled onto her during their own adventure.  This is where things changed from the paper version.

I should point out something from the beginning.  Like the other champions, Sari was in the Dungeons & Dragons game.  She started up a relationship with Luke Callindor and  then . . . the player left college after most of a semester.  This left Sari in limbo, which was a challenge because she’d already been revealed as essential to the prophecy.  She spent the rest of her time either captured, comatose, or quietly following the group.  Due to being barely there in the game, I only had that first adventure to work with when it came to the books.  Honestly, I don’t even remember if the clan slaughtering was part of the game or something I added. Unfortunately, this didn’t really work in Sari’s favor and I kind of regret that.

Being a champion fueled by love, Sari spends a lot of her time being involved in the groups’ relationships.  She’s either struggling with being the third member of the Luke and Kira open relationship or meddling in Nyx’s love life.  This leads to more heartbreak and pain for her, but she never really dulls in power.  Sari always manages to find a new source of love to gain energy from even though she doesn’t notice this power.  It took me until near the end of the series to figure out why, but I don’t think it ever came across because she never learned this herself.  Another downside to Sari is that she is so focused on the outside world that she doesn’t really look at her internal world unless plagued by visions and spirits.

The thing I realized about Sari is that she never healed from her first trauma.  Similar to Nyx, her childhood friend, she is creating a family, but there is still a distance.  She fears losing loved ones again, so she ignores how deep her feelings run.  This doesn’t always come about because she’s a very loving and playful character, but you can see that she doesn’t spend a lot of time on herself.  I tried several times to give her more, but nothing stuck.  Sari routinely found a way to slip out of the deep relationships and became more of a cheerleader for the others.  Part of this might be caused by the addition of Kira Grasdon, which gave Sari competition for her original, uncontested relationship with Luke Callindor.  It was a shocker when I found that Sari wasn’t the better match and I tried to force it a few times with disastrous results.

I would actually say that Chastity Sullivan from War of Nytefall is closer to what Sari was originally going to be.  Seductive, playful, charming, powerful, and having no shame to counter the more uptight characters.  It never happened because I could never convince her to shed the emotional scars of losing everything.  Even if she ended up with Luke Callindor, I couldn’t see her being entirely happy because she’d wake up every day thinking it was the one where he would die.  Sari hated being alone and needed someone with her when she slept, but she could never let herself get so close that the loneliness would go away entirely.  I’m torn between thinking of her as a lost opportunity or accepting that some characters, much like people, can’t be put back to 100%.

A fun aside for Sari is that she still had a better post-prophecy plan than Nyx.  It ran contrary to Luke Callindor who wanted to settle down, which was another nail in their relationship’s coffin.  Sari wanted to build a magical cart that contained every candy in the world.  She would travel around to villages and throw parties where she would give the candy away.  It really worked for her and I did give her something similar to that, but it had to be changed to accommodate her situation.