the snowflake project

Full Character Chart (Step 7 of TSM)

Short Character Summary (Step 3 of TSM)

Name: Kos

1-Sentence Summary: Through a series of life-threatening events, Kos learns the truth about himself and about the purpose behind a conquering empire’s war.

Motivation (abstract desire): Kos is motivated by a desire to understand. He is bewildered by concepts such as greed and lust for power, and cannot comprehend why the empire is enslaving innocents, but more than that, he wants to understand why Achi betrayed him and their vows.

Goal (concrete desire): Kos wants to restore balance to his life, to achieve peace once again.

Conflict (barrier to goal): Kos’s experiences have launched him into a journey filled with external turmoil (his feud with Achi, the empire’s war) and internal struggle. He is in denial about his mounting power, and therefore rejects the responsibility of wielding it, so he is unbalanced.

Epiphany (lesson/change): Kos learns that things are not always as they seem; that power is not always evil, and he begins to accept his destined path of leadership.

1-Paragraph Summary: Conscripted by a conquering empire’s army with his friend, Achi, Kos refuses to kill for the empire. He responds to corporal punishment with an involuntary burst of powerful magic he didn’t know he possessed, resulting in a court-martial and a banishment to the blood pits. As a gladiator, Kos refuses to fight, terrified of his hidden power – he earns the respect and reverence of the gladiators by defending without striking, and cultivating his ability to see through the present to the coming attack. Since no gladiator will kill Kos, Achi, now an officer, sentences him to death by execution, a fate Kos escapes with the help of several gladiators who organize a prison-break. The escapees look to Kos for leadership, but his fear of power prevents him from providing it – without Kos’s guidance, they turn to banditry, and Kos flees the group. In the wilderness, on the point of starving, Kos meets an elf who makes Kos see his inner self. Kos and the elf are attacked by a pack of monstrous creatures, and Kos must finally control his power to defeat them – he realizes that this is the threat the empire is unifying the nations to face. Kos travels to the empire’s capital to warn the Emperor – he confronts Achi, who flees after being shamed, and alerts the empire that the enemy is approaching. Kos participates as a leader in the first battle of a new war.

Plot POV (Step 5 of TSM)

Kos, a young, novice monk of the Order of the Dragon, was spending the day in the city with his childhood friend and fellow novice, Achi. Sent to run errands for the other monks in the Dragon Temple up the mountain, the pair were enjoying the sea air of a day in the beachside city when they heard the shouts. Ships were spotted off the coast – a lot of ships. Kos and Achi followed the crowds to the beach – there had never been a ship that wasn’t one of their country’s own fishing boats anywhere near their shores, and this was a whole fleet of ships.

On the beach, Kos and Achi watched, fascinated with the crowd, then horrified as the enormous fleet swept past the bobbing fishing rigs and burned each and every one of them where they floated. The people of Kos’s island nation were peaceful and stood transfixed at the violence they witnessed. It wasn’t until the first fireball landed among them, consuming a dozen people, that the crowd broke and ran. Kos ran with them, losing Achi in the trampling press of bodies rushing inland. Kos saw horrible things as he avoided the invaders – things he would have thought impossible. He knew he should have run back up the mountain to the temple, but he couldn’t leave Achi behind. Dodging soldiers and huge unexplainable hulks of moving metal, Kos found Achi wounded in an alleyway. The two struggled back up the mountain together, behind the failing line of defending monks.

The few monks who still lived by the time the governing council offered surrender decided that it was their duty to resist the invaders peacefully. Kos did his best to remain detached from his feelings about the invaders and the empire from which they hailed, but when in the city again, he couldn’t contain his rage when he saw two soldiers beating a shopkeeper for refusing to part with his goods for nothing. Kos attacked the soldiers with Achi’s help, giving the shopkeeper time to escape. But they were caught and captured by one of the metal hulks, and forcibly conscripted into the imperial army.

The two friends were put on a ship bound for the fabled mainland to the west. On the ship they suffered the ills of military training. Kos took the lesson of his failure to control himself to heart, and unbendingly refused to break his vows of non-violence. Kos’s approach to his training, with his background in rigidly controlling his body through what he now recognized as a defensive martial art, earned the respect of the crew and his fellow soldiers.

On the mainland, Kos marveled at the difference in society. The people here lived in hovels and were constantly at war and fighting amongst themselves. Kos and Achi were both assigned to the same regiment, fresh imperial troops to assist in quelling a particularly rebellious barony. Their first battle was a slaughter, hundreds of armed soldiers against a few protesting farmers and guildsmen, armed with nothing more than the tools of their trades. Kos survived the battle without doing anyone any serious harm, as his monk’s vows demanded. When ordered to execute a farmer taken prisoner, Kos refused but Achi stepped in and swung his sword in Kos’s stead. Kos was beaten for his insubordination and he reacted to the beating with an uncontrollable outburst of power, as if the sun were in his belly and he was vomiting to get it out. His abusers were killed instantly, a fact that would haunt Kos later, and Kos was court-martialed on the spot and sent to the Blood Pits to fight as a gladiator.

In the Blood Pits, Kos’s abuse continued. Tricked out of his weapons by a man named Torik, Kos was forced to fight unarmed. But somehow he managed to keep to his vows and disarm and subdue his opponents, no matter what the Blood Lord sent against him. Soon all the gladiators respected Kos, and few were willing to fight him. The story of the boy gladiator who never kills and never dies began to spread. Kos was visited in the night by a woman named Aryenne sa’Tabine, and the two quickly became friends. Kos learned from Aryenne that the empire seemed to come out of nowhere, and even the lords of the land don’t know who leads it. Together, Kos and Aryenne devised a plot to discover the truth behind the empire, and stop the oppression of the free tribes. New gladiators were brought to the Blood Pits, and Kos was pitted against them. When Kos defeated them, an officer of the imperial army, who Kos was shocked to recognize as Achi, ordered Kos to kill them in cold blood. Feeling completely betrayed by his friend, Kos refused to do the gladiators harm. In front of the entire Blood Pit audience, Achi sentenced Kos to death by public execution.

The night before Kos’s execution, the gladiators, every one of them a prisoner, escaped. Torik, the man who hated Kos, had come to respect Kos, and had plotted the escape with Aryenne. Torik broke Kos out of his defeated frame of mind and out of the prison itself. Kos followed the escaped gladiators into the wilderness. The next day, all the gladiators, including Torik, looked to Kos for direction. But Kos refused to give them instructions, choosing instead to reject power in any form rather than admit he was capable of wielding any power at all (still haunted by killing the soldiers who beat him). As time wore on, the men started putting together raids and bandit parties, robbing and killing for supplies. This sickened Kos, and he left the group, and Torik, behind.

Alone again and depressed, Kos ventured deep into the forests of the west, where he found he lacked the necessary skills to survive. Kos began to starve. In the midst of a fever brought on by hunger, Kos was found by Sky-Kicker, who nursed him back to health. Sky-Kicker took Kos on as a pupil, a fellow exile. Sky-Kicker taught Kos how survive in the forest, and he quickly saw the potential for magical power in Kos. At first Sky-Kicker responded to Kos’s magical potential with fear (the wild dragon-men were returning!), but he realized that Kos was as frightened by his power as Sky-Kicker was himself. Hiding lessons of magic into more mundane tasks, Sky-Kicker began the slow process of unlocking Kos’s denial of his nature, at the same time teaching him to control the power.

One day, a hunting party came across their camp, taking Sky-Kicker prisoner. Kos followed the party back to their village to find Sky-Kicker locked in a cage, suspended from a post in the village square. Kos approached Sky-Kicker at night, intending to free him and sneak away, but Sky-Kicker refused and told Kos to convince the villagers to free him openly. Kos approached the village council and argued for his friend’s freedom, but the villagers would not relent. The next night, the village was attacked by a pack of Griind breeders, Kos helped fend off the attack. Over half the village was killed, and in the aftermath, in front of the whole village, Kos simply walked up to Sky-Kicker’s cage and smashed it with magic, releasing him. Not one villager moved to stop him.

Just before the battle with the Griind, another stranger had come to the village, a messenger from Aryenne. The man was barely able to deliver a message to Kos: The empire is uniting humankind against the monstrous evil foretold to rise from the west. Before Kos’s eyes, the man slipped into a fever induced madness – the blood of the Griind breeders mixed with his own, Aryenne’s messenger began to change. Seeing that the man was becoming like the Griind themselves, Kos decided that the deepest mercy he could show the man was to kill him. It was at that point that Kos, recognizing the threat posed by the Griind, and the inability of the common people to do what was necessary to protect themselves, finally came to terms with his responsibility to use his magical power to lead in the defense against the Griind.

Kos made preparations to travel back to the empire’s lands and add his power to that of the empire – even if it meant he would have to fight for his life in the face of his still pending execution. Sky-Kicker’s plans took him a different way. Seeing that Kos had learned all that he could teach him, Sky-Kicker decided to end his exile and go back to his own people. News of Kos’s part in the battle with the Griind traveled across the country-side faster than Kos himself, and more and more people left their homes to follow him. Chance put many of the escaped gladiators in his path, and they all followed him as well, happy to leave the hard life of banditry to follow the leader they had craved from the beginning.

Kos and his small army of followers traveled to the core of the empire, the imperial capital. Achi was there to meet them with a force of his own. Kos, rather than see the blood of his followers shed needlessly, appealed to Achi’s pride and asked that if he must kill Kos, that he do it in single combat. Achi agreed, and they fought. The battle was long and full of powerful magic. It seemed that Achi had found power that nearly rivaled Kos’s own – and by the haunted, cold and hungry look in Achi eyes, Kos feared the source of his power was dangerous. In the end Kos defeated Achi, but did not kill him. Achi fled, humiliated, to the east, unpursued.

After Achi flees, a contingent of high lords of the empire rode out to meet Kos. They told him that for months, Achi had been like a snake in the ear of the emperor, breathing poisonous ideas into his mind. When Kos told them of his experiences with the Griind, they took him immediately into the city to see the emperor. Kos, in confronting the emperor, found him to be utterly ineffectual in his role – concluding that he must be a puppet, Kos demanded to speak to the people who truly ran the empire. The emperor’s outrage saw Kos in chains instantly, and locked in a cell. But that night he was visited by Aryenne, who brought with her a Dwarf, a being whose race Kos had been taught were long dead and gone from the world. The Dwarf admitted that the entire empire was a puppet institution, controlled by the Dwarves, whose purpose was to unite mankind against the Griind.

Kos, with the help of Aryenne’s influence, earned his freedom and an audience with the Council of Kings, the Dwarves who control the emperor. Kos recounted his experience with the Griind in a village to the west to the Council, which caused quite a stir – the empire was not yet ready to face that threat. The Council argued back and forth about what to do, while every day, new reports of Griind attacks on the western frontier of human civilization came in. Kos, in an impassioned speech, pleaded that the Council of Kings bring the dwarven people out of hiding, but the Council refused.

Finding he must shoulder the responsibility of leading humankind against the Griind himself, Kos abandoned Aryenne, unable to hold such great responsibility and such great love in his heart together. He sent out messages, in the name of the Dragon, asking for soldiers to join him. Kos amassed a small army and set out to meet the advancing wave of Griind at a pass in the mountains. The day before battle, Kos’s army was joined by a band of Eldest warriors led by Sky-Kicker. The battle raged on for days – the seemingly endless sea of Griind breeders and warriors hurling themselves against the smaller force of humans and Eldest. Then, at the end of the third day, just as it seemed as though all hope was lost, the hulking shape of an imperial golem appeared on the horizon, followed by many more like it, and thousands of smaller shapes, Dwarves and men, marching together. Imperial soldiers and dwarven warriors. The Griind army was broken and routed by the alliance between humanity, Dwarves and the Eldest.