Hayr of Tokhar, the Ruby in the Rough
My birthday is the last day of March and to honor myself I am posting one of my own favorite OCs every day of March: The OC Jubilee.
Hayr shrugged. “You are the one who is cold, on a warm night, in a cloak, next to a fire so big as the moon! I’m obliged to help, I suppose.” He threw the voluminous folds of his own cloak over Barsamin and pulled him closer. “There! Be warmed by my pure and righteous heart. Rashk said I am innocent, you know, and he is never wrong.”
“I promised myself I wouldn’t kill anyone at this wedding,” Barsamin told him through gritted teeth.
Hayr’s good mood was punctured. “I was just being nice! You really do look really cold.”
“I hate being touched, all right,” Barsamin snapped as he stepped away. “Especially when people don’t ask!”
“Just like you didn’t ask before you grabbed me and kissed me just to get your way,” said Hayr with strong annoyance.
“You’re still mad about that?!”
“Yeah,” said Hayr, looking the other way, “a bit.”
False-born and blatantly queer in a country where parentage and marriage is everything, Hayr sincerely expected he would never be happy. When his older brother confronted him about how he was gonna turn up dead at the bottom of the gorge if he didn’t start acting interested in girls, Hayr ran away from his remote mountain village — and realized that the wider world doesn’t have much need for illiterate country bumpkins with hopeless dreams. That’s why he readily accepted the offer of the first mysterious old man he met on the road to work in exchange for being taught to read. But maybe… maybe Hayr should have asked a few more questions before agreeing to go home with Rashk, the God of Sight, a notorious serial killer.
But simply luring Hayr away from anyone who might help him and killing him to repurpose his shiny soul is too easy for a bored old man like Rashk. Wouldn’t it be much funnier to indulge in his hobby of setting people up to fail with meticulously ambiguous prophecies?
The poor boy has been tumbling through increasingly unusual twists of fate ever since.
Hayr is a kind and gentle soul, as sweet as honey, but he can endure hardship as well as any mountain man. He resembles his mother, a seamstress who worked herself to the bone to support her two fatherless sons, in both body and soul — though he’s also more like his father than he’ll ever know. Hayr is generally what people from Tokhar would call a good and faithful boy, but every now and then a hidden mischievous streak compels him to take his chance to knock a god off a dock into the sea or spin a queen upside-down in front of her own subjects:
They danced in a circle on the flying floor high above the heads of all, Katarosi twirling so that her skirt flared with grace and majesty. Hayr’s uncertainty in dancing was balanced by her uncertainty in being aloft, but he thought they were both doing all right – and in fact he had a better idea. “Hold on tight,” he warned.
Katarosi lifted her head in concern. “Huh? – AAAAIIIK!” She shrieked as the platform flipped upside down, taking her and Hayr with it. They still stood with their feet to the wooden planks, their heads adrift above the astonished crowd; the flags reached up to the sky. Hayr continued the dance with a sinful grin.
Rosi drew a sharp and indignant breath. “From a political standpoint this is brilliant,” she conceded, compulsively checking that her glasses and holly crown had not fallen away. “But if you ever do this to me again, there will be REVOLUTION.”
“Yes, my queen,” said Hayr like a good husband.
Hayr is grade-A life partner material, and very good with children. After meeting his younger and more legitimate half-brother Aramaz, Hayr becomes deeply protective of him almost to the point of fatherhood. He is, however, a bit prone to holding grudges. His primal grudge is against his father for getting into a forbidden relationship with a town woman, and then against his father’s tribe, the Tokharika, for making it so forbidden in the first place. He has a grudge against his older brother Vanador over the fight that drove Hayr to run away from home. He’s building up quite the grudge against gods in general but uh, yeah, that one’s pretty understandable.
He was smitten by Barsamin of Chald from the moment they met — Barsamin was the most beautiful, refined and strangely sad young man that the mountain boy had ever seen. Rashk then immediately assured Hayr that Barsamin was 100% going to murder him, which ought have nipped that in the bud — and yet. And yet Hayr kept reaching out, for years, choosing time and again to ignore some truly spectacular red flags until Barsamin reached back out for him. Whether this is history’s best or worst ignoring-a-god-of-prophecy is yet to be determined, but Hayr really, truly loves Barsamin despite all the good reasons he probably shouldn’t.
What Hayr wanted when he ran away was a peaceful, honest life with someone he could love and who could love him, and maybe learning to read. Very low on the list: getting married to a woman, having children of his own, or being forced to play the role of god-king for someone else’s country. And yet. And yet.
There are a lot of stories from the last few generations of writers about a girl bravely accomplishing something that's been traditionally only for boys. Hayr is a bit of an inversion: there is a certain power, a certain glory, that is seen as so intrinsically feminine that the very idea of a man partaking of it has never even occurred to anyone. And yet.
Vibe Music:
Ozoliņi
Wind Waker/Dragonroost Isle medley
Ozoliņi is a Latvian folk song about oak trees and this rendition is currently my singly most favorite song on earth. I strongly associate this with the scene of Hayr and Barsamin at the waterfall at the end of book 2. If Glory in the Thunder were to somehow get made as an animated show (the ultimate unrealistic fantasy), I'd want this to be the opening theme.
Dragonroost (aka Rito Village in BOTW/TOTK) captures the vibe of Hayr in his native mountains well.