Biblically Accurate Eye of Judgment: Korrisel Varodahn
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.
Two children without one parent between them sat across from one another on the narrow bunks of a narrow cabin. Varodahn had her arms around her knees, looking straight down to the lilting floor; her gaze occasionally darted across it as though seeing straight through to something in the water below. She had said nothing all day, not one single thing, but Kapriel had been burning with a question he could no longer contain. “Um, hey–”
Varodahn lifted her eyes like deadly daggers poisoned with resent. When Kapriel met her stare, he saw not just two angry eyes but uncountably many, whole wheels of eyes spinning around her, blinking in and out of perception, cast from gleaming gold. The fell vision faded like a faltering glint of sun.
It was a bit mean of me to draw Kapriel when he's 14 but Varodahn as an adult, because he's actually a little older than her, but hey, being mean to Kapriel is Varodahn's way of relaxing. ("Korrisel" is her family name, "Varodahn" is her personal name.) She's rather dismissive of others' emotions and has a low opinion of almost everyone else's intelligence. I mean, if you could foresee exactly how everyone's decisions are gonna blow up in their faces, you'd probably think less of them too.
Varodahn grew up the beloved and pampered daughter of a fantastically rich (and evil) artificer and the brilliant architect he never quite got around to marrying. When she very abruptly became the Goddess of Sight when she was nine years old, she vividly foresaw that her father was going to wholly unintentionally poison her mother while foolishly trying to poison Tsovinar. So Varodahn, who is Special and knows it, simply tried harder to foresee a different future. She could! She could see what would happen if she prevented her mother's death, and... it was worse. So she let it happen. She's never been willing to say what was worse, but one thing's clear: she blames Tsovinar for everything. She blames Tsovinar for things that have happened, for things that will happen, for things that never happened. At first Varodahn's mission is "stop Tsovinar from Tsovinaring so much," but soon it becomes: stop the gods. All of them. Including Kapriel. Including herself. Make it stop.
Varodahn really, truly loves Kapriel, even if she has a strange way of showing it sometimes. They both have stars of the "what if knowledge but too much" rather than "what if violence but too much" variety, and are both artifice children created with someone else's dead soul. They both feel they have inescapable responsibilities of grave importance. They both know Varodahn is absolutely, positively planning ahead for when she has to kill Kapriel.
Emerlian stood up, alarmed. “Mama? Mama…” He reached through the crib to pelt Varodahn with an ineffective little fist. “Mama is crying! You hurt Mama!”
Varodahn stepped back from him, her arrogant air shattered; her eyes softened and she looked down with regret. “I’m… sorry. I would be upset if someone came to me and said harsh things about Kapriel.”
Ismyrn was plainly suspicious of this sudden change in manner. “You and Kapriel do seem strangely close.”
Varodahn glared at her not hatefully but bitterly. “I only have so much time before he’s gone forever. And I know down to the minute. Every moment I’m not with him hurts.”
She's in the plural club, but she's perhaps the most subtle from the outside; there's not much in the way of clear, marked swings in personality or world view. On the inside, she is wheels within wheels of eyes. It seems pretty clear that the reason she can see so much more of the future than previous Gods of Sight is the parallel processing. And gods damn, every single one of those eyes is a judgy bitch.
Fun fact: Varodahn is the singly oldest OC in all of Glory in the Thunder. The very first iteration of her dates to my 7th grade composition notebooks. (I'm turning 36 on the last day of OC Jubilee.)
Vibe music:
In A Persian Market by Alebert Ketelby
Megalovania
Yes, "In A Persian Market" is fake "eastern" music written by a western person, but surprise, the girl who is writing an absurdly long story about the contested border between "the east" and "the west" considers this genre a problematic fave. The song was intended to convey the movement of a princess through a public market, and I think it reflects how Varodahn thinks and moves, including the rare breakthrough of something gentler. Megalovania is... Megalovania.