Stardeep's Kiril Duskmourn

I'm home this week outlining a new book. As I was going through old notes, I found a character profile for Kiril Duskmourn, one of the main characters in my novel Stardeep. This was slated to show up on Wizards' publishing page in December to promote the book, but I don't remember seeing it.

Late's better than never, right?

A Profile of Kiril Duskmourn

Kiril Duskmourn is on the run. She flees the honors she once attained, and the memory of noble deeds she accomplished. She seeks to outrace the price she paid for her triumph: the loss of her love, and then, the loss of her innocence.

Kiril has blood on her hands, and redemption lies beyond her grasp.

So she wanders, a hard-bitten, drunken sellsword perpetually a few drinks from oblivion, courtesy of the bottomless whisky flask strapped to her belt. She curses and swears her way from one day to the next, unable to put behind her the tragedy that changed her life.

How could she forget? After all, strapped to her other hip is the sword Angul. Angul's unforgiving steel contains the soul of her dead lover, a soul stripped of all darkness, doubt, and mortal failing. In Angul burns a righteousness that surpasses worldly virtue. His light burns away all doubt and shades of gray, bathing his wielder in warm, certain, and lethal clarity. When one wields Angul, no wrong is too small to punish.

It was Angul that drove Kiril to the crime she flees to this day. She hates the blade and what it made her. Yet, she yearns for it, too, for it is her last and only tie with her lost love. To give up Angul would be to give up the only thing she still cares for.

Now, a message summons her back to the hidden dungeon of Stardeep, a message that finds her a full decade after she fled her duties there. Kiril has no choice but to respond. How can she do anything else?

The message is, impossibly, from the long dead man who's soul is trapped in her sword Angul.