The Vorschkraag

The central character in The Crane Girl is called the Vorschkraag.

Note, I said the central character, not the main character. The main character, the hero, the reader surrogate, the Crane Girl herself, is a woman named Rana. But on the island where Rana lives, the Vorschkraag is the center of everything: geographically, politically, spiritually, even (gulp) ontologically.

The V won’t get much screen time. She’ll only appear in a couple chapters at the end of the book. But it’s her book.

I picture the V as a girl, about ten years old, although strictly speaking she’s genderless and immortal and definitely not human. She’s the quintessential demiurge, a spirit who creates for the sheer joy of creating, a lover of everything that’s alive and free. She’s an empress without laws, a sleeper whose dreams are the same as reality. If she’s a goddess, then she’s a goddess like no other: not a mother like Gaia, nor a wife like Hera, nor concerned with sexual chastity like Artemis; an accidental goddess, not interested in obedience or worship, only interested in making a world.

Her eyes are silver-in-silver and glow in the dark.

I keep searching for a picture that sums up the way I think about this character. I’m hunting Google Image Search and DeviantArt, cropping and altering and splicing images together, trying to figure her out. Sometimes she’s five years old and sometimes she’s thirty. Sometimes she’s a queen and sometimes she’s a little kid curled up in a ball. (I’d post the images, but most are copyrighted.)

I don’t know just who she is yet.

But I’m going to find out, and if you’re interested, you can too.