Legends of Windemere

Drusilla from Buffy

Figure I should do to this character since I already did Xavier Tempest.  What’s the connection?  At least in the books, they’re husband and wife.  Nadia was a little mystery to me, which allowed me to have some fun.  All I knew was that she was elegant, noble, and respected.  Honestly, I’m not even sure what her original hair color was.  This did allow me to make her one of the few pre-existing characters that went from human to another vampirized species.

I made her a female orc, which I’m sure will throw off a few people that haven’t read Windemere books.  In this world, female orcs are tall and beautiful while retaining the strength of their more bestial male counterparts.  The gods made the orcs as a beauty and beast species where they don’t care about appearances.  Females were also made this way because the early elves tried to sabotage their resurrection (the species had been wiped out) and make the female orcs hideous to the males.  The curse was stopped and the punishment was that the female orcs were made to be more beautiful than the female elves.  The best comparison to them would be the Amazons, but that’s stretching it and going off topic.  We’re here to talk about Nadia and where she came from.  Might be difficult since I didn’t really interact with her much until she was handed to me for the books.

Back in college, a big LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) game had started up and I was kind of late to the party.  My wife had joined rather quickly with another version of Mab, who brought my first character in.  Something happened and Mab ended up having to leave the area a few sessions later, so she brought in Nadia Sylvan.  A Russian noblewoman who . . . looked pretty and hung out with the other rulers of the area?  This is where things get a little weird here.  My character ended up with the outcasts within his first session because my timing sucked that badly.  So, my wife and I never got to interact when we were these characters.  We’d see each other and maybe say hello, but that was it.  Due to the nature of the game, we couldn’t really talk about what our characters were doing afterwards because we weren’t allowed to know.  Eventually, I got offed and came back as a new one who then left because things went south in one session.  Nadia stuck around longer than all 3 of my characters and she ended up leaving soon after my third got dusted.  Neither of us went back, but we still didn’t really talk about what happened.  Because of all this, Nadia remained a mystery and I was given another blank slate.

My decision to pair her off with Xavier was because they were the two nobles in my cast of characters.  This helped evolve her alongside him since both were starting from fresh.  It became similar to the Clyde and Mab relationships in that they complimented each other in terms of temperament and powers.  Nadia is definitely the more physically powerful even though she isn’t a fighter.  Like her husband, she’s more comfortable using magic than brute force.  Yet, she is a little faster to throw a punch.  There are times she also comes off as the smarter of the two since she hangs back and listens more often than Xavier.  Honestly, she’s still growing and might become the character that surprises me the most like Kira did in Legends of Windemere.  This also means there really isn’t much else I can say about her.

I don’t even have a funny story for her because I didn’t know her in the games.  All I have is something that popped out of nowhere when writing the book.  Nadia Sylvan and Clyde were made by the same vampire.  This kind of makes them siblings even though they’re so different.  Not that either of them really act this way, but it may color their future interactions a bit more.  Who’s their maker?  That would be Gregorio Roman who considers Nadia his favorite daughter and Clyde his favorite son.  Although, there is no indication that any of his other ‘children’ have survived, so they might have the titles by default.