Something I’ve been meaning to work on for some time, alongside the online stories I’m writing, is a history of Ayla. When we first meet Ayla in Over Witch’s Knee, she is already many hundreds of years old and has lived a full life. She is self-possessed and of a calm and at times, commanding temperament. She takes the thief Atrocious both under her wing and into her bed, regarding her initially as something like a cross between a student, a plaything, and a lover.

Much like Kira, Ayla is not necessarily a ‘good’ character. But she is well loved in spite of her flaws. So I think my next Lesbia book will tell some of the tale of her early years. There is some cannon backstory to her emergence into Lesbia, which you can read here: A History of Ayla , but I want to write a true narrative of the trying time which she faces after emerging from the prison of her youth into the mortal world of Lesbia.

Here’s a little of that tale in progress:

Ayla took her first steps into the world of the mortals, finding herself in a forest which was exactly the same as the one she had left, and yet nothing like it at all. Her gossamer robes were too light against the cold winds of the world of the mortals. She had never felt weather like this before. Her years in the prison were calm ones. Obsidian walls did not move, nor did the air inside them, lest it be fanned by some deliberate act. Out here the leaves and grass never seemed to stop waving in constant gusts and breezes, and above them the sky went on forever. It was foreign, this world, and the young witch desperately wanted to be back in the dark shadows in which she had been born.

It could not be. The prison which she had known as home had collapsed under an avalanche of hatred. Her mother was gone, taken by the walls. There was no going back to the elven realm in which she had been born a prisoner. There was only the way forward…. a way she did not yet know and could not begin to imagine.

Ayla’s stomach growled. She was hungry. There were no plates of food delivered here. There was nothing but the rushing of mortal nature, living, dying, decaying. None of it seemed edible in that moment. It was a buzzing confusion of existence which overwhelmed her so much she was forced to close her crystal green gaze against the world.

She was fifty years old, middle aged in the world of the mortals, but barely in her adulthood for the elven race. If she had been born in good grace, and if she had been of pure blood she would have been regarded as young for another fifty years at least. But she was old enough to be cast out according to the council. Her blood was not pure, and the elven blood she did have was tainted thanks to her mother’s many evil acts.

Ayla did not look tainted. Her long skeins of golden blonde hair framed a face of sweet beauty and determination, a narrow pointed chin and great green eyes which sparkled like jewels under pale brows. Her cheekbones were high, her face rather long and angular in a way which heightened the appeal of her features. She was very elf-like, but there was more to her than that. She did not have quite the gravitas of the elven peoples, nor their coldness. There was a hotter blood running through her veins, a more generous nature than might otherwise be expected. These traits showed in the innocent set of her full lips, the lower of which was intermittently trembling as she held her eyes closed against the wind of the world and took stock of her situation with as much calm as she could muster. Her figure was ample in bust and rump, her height telling of her blood. She was a very striking figure and if one were not privy to the anguish and turmoil of the recent past, one might be forgiven for mistaking her for a meditative figure totally at one with all around her.