The Disreputable Dog ✧ Kibeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dogwalksyou) wrote2013-07-07 01:10 pm
dogwalksyou) wrote2013-07-07 01:10 pm
TLV APPLICATION
User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: PM please
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr, the Risen Emperor, Marsh
Character Name: the Disreputable Dog, the Dog, Kibeth
Series: the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix
Age: She is older than the universe. Older than her universe, anyway. Her detailed memories only go back about a thousand years, though. She looks like an adult dog – black, mongrel, kind of scruffy.
From When?: Just after the conclusion of Abhorsen.
Inmate/Warden: Warden! Despite the Dog’s habit for minor mischief, she’s actually very well suited to it. In canon, she wanders out of the ether to be Lirael’s friend, guide, mentor, and confidant, simply because she thinks the girl needs someone (and she’s right). She’s friendly and fun, entirely willing to push people, and she believes in second chances. Mostly. In addition, a lot of inmates who have trust issues with other people might open up more readily to a dog, even a talking one, which could be really interesting to play out.
Item: Her collar. It appears to be plain, old brown leather unless touched, in which case it will suddenly feel like a connection to the Charter – the endless stream of living magic symbols describing and suffusing her universe.
Abilities/Powers: So, spoilers here, the Dog is actually a leftover hand-me-down bit of Kibeth, one of the seven primary gods of the Old Kingdom world, called the Bright Shiners, incredibly powerful Free Magic Spirits that existed before the world and shaped its current form. Kibeth is the Walker, and her domain is travel and motion. With a bark, she can force people to walk where she will, or hold them still, or grant freedom of motion to someone who lacks it. She herself can walk into the realm of Death, or send someone else there, although that won’t apply on the Barge since that realm is specific to the Old Kingdom universe. She is much diminished and definitely not all-powerful; she is unable to force one of the Greater Dead (equivalent to a high-level demon) into Death, and has to settle for forcing Chlorr out of her current combat-useful shape instead.
She is fundamentally composed of magic, and doesn’t actually need to breathe, eat, or sleep – although she enjoys all three. Also, as a remnant of one of the Shiners, she can occasionally simply break the rules of the universe. She sends Nicholas back to life, even though practically the only inviolable rule of the series is that you can’t cheat Death without paying a terrible price for it, which Nicholas seems to escape. However, this is something she does very, very rarely, and also probably only applies in her own universe, because of the way she is connected to/part of its fundamental structure and life force.
The Dog has pretty absolute control of her own shape. She can make herself larger or smaller, stretch into a sausage dog to wriggle through crevices, elongate her toes into fingers for turning pages or doorknobs, grow suckers on her footpads to cross a slippery bridge, and on a few occasions she grows wings. Mogget is the same kind of creature she is, and he has a humanoid shape in addition to his usual cat shape, and he is more restricted than she is. Presumably she could become something other than a dog entirely if she wished, but she simply chooses not to. When she manifests or is revealed in full power, she looks like a dog-shaped patch of pure darkness, outlined in silver fire, with red fire dripping from her jaws, and she comes up to a woman’s shoulder. This also happens only rarely.
Lastly, the Dog can do charter magic, which basically involves using charter marks to make things happen. ‘Marks’ can typically be drawn, spoken, cast with hand signs, and have additional auditory ways of being expressed. Marks can be whistled or sung, and the Dog can bark them. A few basic marks can do simple things – cast light, unlock a door, establish a diamond of protection, etc. More complicated spells like shape-changing, creating a sending (kind of a magic automaton), or binding a Free Magic creature involve hundreds, maybe thousands of marks strung together properly (almost like coding a computer program), and usually bound by difficult and powerful Master Marks. The Dog generally doesn’t perform complicated spells, but she is very strong and very knowledgeable about them.
Normal charter mages can only do magic in the Old Kingdom, or close to the border when the wind is blowing from the right direction, but this restriction does not apply to the Dog. Since she is a minor source of the Charter herself, she should be able to cast Charter Magic on the barge or in any world that doesn’t invalidate all powers, and if there were another Old Kingdom character on the barge at some point, the Dog’s presence would actually help their magic stay closer to normal levels.
Personality: The Dog’s fundamental nature is that of Kibeth, the Walker: she loves to explore. She’s always eager for new smells, new sounds, new places. She’s friendly, excitable, playful, and sometimes contrary. She lives very much in the present, and is consistently upbeat, self-indulgent, and a little bit mischievous. She focuses on simple pleasures when she can, and her simple pleasures are generally very much like those of a normal dog: she loves burying or eating juicy hambones, splashing around in the river, and chasing rabbits.
Of course, she is the Disreputable Dog, so her good nature also includes a lying, rule-breaking, minor theft, and generally encouraging Lirael to be rebellious and independent with shameless impishness. She also usually excuses this behavior on precisely the grounds that she is Disreputable, after all, leaving anyone attempting to censure her for it in unsatisfied exasperation.
She’s a rascal who simply doesn’t acknowledge most sources of authority in the slightest. She’s a free spirit! She’s going to do what she likes. She doesn’t break rules in ways that would harm people, only because they aren’t so terribly important, and it would be fun! She is capricious, but not cruel, or even really unreliable – just very keen on whatever catches her current fancy. She’s always happy to beg and whine in a typical canine fashion if it will get her a bit of meat or a scratch behind the ears.
The Dog isn’t all frolicking roguishly, though: she’s still a dog, which means loyalty is deeply important to her. Once she devotes herself to someone, she’ll stick with them, loving them and protecting them as well as she knows how. This still occasionally involves lying and often involves being maddeningly evasive, but she keeps secrets from Lirael at least in part because she believes Lirael isn’t yet ready to hear them, and she’s right (again).
She has very firm ideas about duty in general, and the importance of fulfilling one’s responsibilities, when they are serious. She’d urge ducking out on a night of assigned filing to investigate a mystery in the depths of the Clayr’s Library, but she won’t hear a word of running from danger once she and Lirael actually start on their quest. The Dog believes that action is the best cure for fear, even in the face of what seems like the end of all life: “It’s always better to be doing.” Even if hope seems foolish, she’ll advocate for trying something, for ignoring the mountain of impossible obstacles as tomorrow’s trouble, and focusing on overcoming today’s trouble today.
It’s difficult to really rile the dog, but she is capable of holding long grudges. She is still angry at and distrustful of Mogget for decisions made by a creature he once was literally at the beginning of the universe, though admittedly there is little love lost on his side either. The Dog is never mean in her lighthearted fun, because when she gets mean, she does so in brusque, somber earnest. The Dog also has little patience for self-pity. When Lirael contemplated suicide on her seventeen birthday, the Dog gave her a bite on the leg deep enough to scar.
She’s very invested in her identity and reputation as just “the Disreputable Dog,” and not as Kibeth, not because she’s running away from her history, but because in very important ways, she isn’t that creature anymore, and she doesn’t want anyone to approach her with awe or expectations: she just wants to be with her friends, have some fun, help as much as she can when the world needs a bit of helping, and see how it all turns out. At the same time, her nature very much is Kibeth, even if she’s only a small piece of what Kibeth was. Her memories of the Beginning may be hazy, but she still has strong emotions about the other Shiners, and she clearly loves the world she helped to weave and protect from the Destroyer’s sundering. When she finally does reveal herself, she is proud to stand under that name against him again.
Barge Reactions: The Dog is going to adore the barge. New smells, new people, new places to visit, even new sides of herself to be during floods and breaches. So much to explore, so many new friends to meet! All the different creatures from different worlds will fascinate her, although she will be very growly at the various undead characters. When she sees them not actively eating people, she will hopefully be persuaded to restrain herself to keeping a sharp eye on them.
Path to Redemption:
History: In the Beginning, everything was Free Magic. Nine spirits, know as the Nine Bright Shiners, exceeded all the others in light and power. The Ninth, and strongest, was Orannis. He crawled through the universe, finding young planets with flourishing life, and destroying them, one by one reducing six worlds to nothing but barren ash.
On the seventh world he chose, others chose as well. The Seven forged the Charter, an endless stream of Marks that channeled, organized, infused and and connected magic into a cohesive, living world. Together they bound Orannis, broke him in two, and buried each half under seven wards. (The Eighth refused to take sides; he was later captured and forced to serve the Charter.) However, the world they had bound themselves and their magic to was terribly damaged in the battle, so the Shiners grafted it onto another, nonmagical world, and poured their own essence into shoring up what would eventually become the Old Kingdom, giving themselves into bloodlines of people to serve and protect the kingdom in perpetuity, charter stones to keep the land and people tied to the magic and life force of the Charter, and the highly magical Wall, connecting but delineating the Kingdom with Ancelstierre, out of step but knitted together, side by side.
Most of the seven were entirely consumed by this endeavor, but two of them – Astarael and Kibeth – were not. A piece of Kibeth remained conscious of and as herself, “just to see what happens”, manifesting as a lesser magical spirit given freely to the Charter, but not wholly of it. It’s unknown what the Dog was up too in the many millennia between this work and the Dog’s first appearance in Lirael, but it’s probably safe to assume that she had many friends and many adventures.
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Lirael, a lonely young Charter Mage of two of the great bloodlines, finds a small statuette of a soapstone dog in the great Library of Clayr, full of mysterious and sometimes dangerous things. It inspires her to make a dog-shaped sending – kind of like a magic hologram – to be her companion. In the middle of creating it, however, something else takes over her spell, pouring thousands of Charter marks beyond her knowledge or ability out of her throat, somehow without hurting her. When she finally stops, the statuette is gone, and Dog – definitely not a sending – is there. She licks Lirael’s face and asks when they’re going for a walk.
Lirael is suspicious of her at first, because the Dog is unknown and obviously at least partly Free Magic, unbound by the charter, which is typically chaotic to the point of being dangerously corrosive, but the Dog is also clearly of the Charter, and she provides innocuous non-answers (“you called for a friend, and I came,” “I’m your Dog,”) to all Lirael’s questions until she stops worrying about it. The Dog urges Lirael to bind a Stilken, a dangerous Free Magic creature she almost released, helping her prepare but forcing her to take the responsibility of fixing her mistake on her own.
Afterwards, the Dog becomes Lirael’s confidant, bad influence, cheerleader, and fast friend. She exhorts Lirael to push herself in terms of her magical skill, encourages and accompanies various explorations through the long-unplumbed archives of the Library, laughs and plays with her, and doesn’t let her drown in her own longing for the Sight, the prognostic power which is usually the birthright of the Clayr, which Lirael never receives, as her powers lean more toward the other half of her lineage, the Abhorsen's duty of binding and defeating the Dead.
Meanwhile, a wicked Necromancer named Hedge orchestrates an elaborate and horrible plot to release Orannis from his prison. Lirael and the Dog set out on a vague but crucial mission prompted by Clayr visions. They meet up with Prince Sameth and Mogget, secretly the Eighth Bright Shiner in servitude to the Charter, and fight off or escape many Dead monsters on their way to try and upset Hedge’s plans. Although they gain critical information, they don’t succeed.
They follow Hedge and the recovered halves of Orannis into Ancelstierre, the neighboring land where the Charter is not present and the ancient acts of the Shiners fail. Orannis is freed and reunited, and Lirael and the Dog travel deep into Death so that Lirael can use the magic of remembrancy to look into the past and see how Orannis was bound the first time, because the Dog does not remember it in detail. They learn what they need, but Hedge pursues them in Death. He fights Lirael and the Dog, but ultimately passes beyond the Ninth Gate, from which there is no return; its call is difficult to resist for those who – like Hedge, using various terrible magics – avoid it past their time.
Lirael and the Dog rendezvous with other descendants of the Charter lines and prepare to undertake the binding in a moment when Orannis is receded into himself to prepare for greater devastation. Seven people take part in the ritual, each wielding one of the magic bells that each carry some fragment of the original seven shiners – except for one set of twins, spiritually intertwined, who share a bell between them. A first Lirael despairs, believing that they do not have the right number of weilders to represent all the shiners, but the Dog reveals herself as a remnant of Kibeth – though she had previously denied it – and ready to stand for herself.
Together, they are not quite enough to overpower Orannis, but Sam frees Mogget, who chooses, as he did not the first time, to aid them against the Destroyer. With his power added to the seven, Orannis is bound again. Lirael uses a specially-made magic sword to break his power in half once again, knowing the cost will be her life, as his destructive power lashes out at her through the connection created by her own weapon. Before she dies, however, the Dog bites her sword hand off at the wrist, sparing Lirael and apparently dying herself.
She survives long enough to tell Lirael that she loves her, but that it is time for her to go. Lirael has found new family and friends and a place to belong, and does not truly need the Dog as she did when she was younger. In the realm of Death, the Dog cheats flagrantly, sending the very recently-dead spirit of Nicholas Sayre, an Ancelstierran who was temporarily the avatar of a fragment of Orannis, but valiantly fought against its influence when he realized what he had done, right back to life. Incidentally, Nicholas and Lirael each had the beginnings of a crush on each other, despite the looming obstacle of potential doom. The book ends with the dog trotting happily through the river of Death, not onwards towards the last gate and final rest, but sideways, just at the border of Life and Death, off to new adventures.
Sample Journal Entry: A bunch of threads on the Voice Test Meme
Sample RP: This one is in prose
Special Notes: Regarding the Dog being a Dog, I honestly think she’d work just fine aboard the ship. She has no difficulty navigating the Clayr’s glacier fortress without Lirael’s aid, and it is similarly designed for human habitation/use. The ability to turn her toes opposable or use magic on doorknobs helps, and she’s generally quite nonchalant about doing things like that for her own convenience.
In terms of her interactions with other barge members, I don’t think she’s all that much stranger than any other fantasy or scifi characters (or events), at least not in terms of pure believability. Some characters might be weirded out when they first actually meet her, but talking animals are a staple in stories from all sorts of cultures, so the very idea of interacting with one shouldn’t be too difficult to swallow. Some people on the barge might even have an easier time opening up to a dog than to another (humanoid) person.
In most worlds the barge visits, a dog with a collar would be a perfectly ordinary sight. In some of them she might get in trouble if she slips up and talks to people – as she does in Ancelstierre at one point in canon, for that matter – but that could be a fun source of plot sometimes. For ports (or floods/breaches) where being a dog just completely wouldn’t work, I’m happy to give her a temporary human form. If you have any other concerns or questions about how I’d handle it, please just let me know!
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
E-mail: PM please
Other Characters: Anya Lehnsherr, the Risen Emperor, Marsh
Character Name: the Disreputable Dog, the Dog, Kibeth
Series: the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix
Age: She is older than the universe. Older than her universe, anyway. Her detailed memories only go back about a thousand years, though. She looks like an adult dog – black, mongrel, kind of scruffy.
From When?: Just after the conclusion of Abhorsen.
Inmate/Warden: Warden! Despite the Dog’s habit for minor mischief, she’s actually very well suited to it. In canon, she wanders out of the ether to be Lirael’s friend, guide, mentor, and confidant, simply because she thinks the girl needs someone (and she’s right). She’s friendly and fun, entirely willing to push people, and she believes in second chances. Mostly. In addition, a lot of inmates who have trust issues with other people might open up more readily to a dog, even a talking one, which could be really interesting to play out.
Item: Her collar. It appears to be plain, old brown leather unless touched, in which case it will suddenly feel like a connection to the Charter – the endless stream of living magic symbols describing and suffusing her universe.
Abilities/Powers: So, spoilers here, the Dog is actually a leftover hand-me-down bit of Kibeth, one of the seven primary gods of the Old Kingdom world, called the Bright Shiners, incredibly powerful Free Magic Spirits that existed before the world and shaped its current form. Kibeth is the Walker, and her domain is travel and motion. With a bark, she can force people to walk where she will, or hold them still, or grant freedom of motion to someone who lacks it. She herself can walk into the realm of Death, or send someone else there, although that won’t apply on the Barge since that realm is specific to the Old Kingdom universe. She is much diminished and definitely not all-powerful; she is unable to force one of the Greater Dead (equivalent to a high-level demon) into Death, and has to settle for forcing Chlorr out of her current combat-useful shape instead.
She is fundamentally composed of magic, and doesn’t actually need to breathe, eat, or sleep – although she enjoys all three. Also, as a remnant of one of the Shiners, she can occasionally simply break the rules of the universe. She sends Nicholas back to life, even though practically the only inviolable rule of the series is that you can’t cheat Death without paying a terrible price for it, which Nicholas seems to escape. However, this is something she does very, very rarely, and also probably only applies in her own universe, because of the way she is connected to/part of its fundamental structure and life force.
The Dog has pretty absolute control of her own shape. She can make herself larger or smaller, stretch into a sausage dog to wriggle through crevices, elongate her toes into fingers for turning pages or doorknobs, grow suckers on her footpads to cross a slippery bridge, and on a few occasions she grows wings. Mogget is the same kind of creature she is, and he has a humanoid shape in addition to his usual cat shape, and he is more restricted than she is. Presumably she could become something other than a dog entirely if she wished, but she simply chooses not to. When she manifests or is revealed in full power, she looks like a dog-shaped patch of pure darkness, outlined in silver fire, with red fire dripping from her jaws, and she comes up to a woman’s shoulder. This also happens only rarely.
Lastly, the Dog can do charter magic, which basically involves using charter marks to make things happen. ‘Marks’ can typically be drawn, spoken, cast with hand signs, and have additional auditory ways of being expressed. Marks can be whistled or sung, and the Dog can bark them. A few basic marks can do simple things – cast light, unlock a door, establish a diamond of protection, etc. More complicated spells like shape-changing, creating a sending (kind of a magic automaton), or binding a Free Magic creature involve hundreds, maybe thousands of marks strung together properly (almost like coding a computer program), and usually bound by difficult and powerful Master Marks. The Dog generally doesn’t perform complicated spells, but she is very strong and very knowledgeable about them.
Normal charter mages can only do magic in the Old Kingdom, or close to the border when the wind is blowing from the right direction, but this restriction does not apply to the Dog. Since she is a minor source of the Charter herself, she should be able to cast Charter Magic on the barge or in any world that doesn’t invalidate all powers, and if there were another Old Kingdom character on the barge at some point, the Dog’s presence would actually help their magic stay closer to normal levels.
Personality: The Dog’s fundamental nature is that of Kibeth, the Walker: she loves to explore. She’s always eager for new smells, new sounds, new places. She’s friendly, excitable, playful, and sometimes contrary. She lives very much in the present, and is consistently upbeat, self-indulgent, and a little bit mischievous. She focuses on simple pleasures when she can, and her simple pleasures are generally very much like those of a normal dog: she loves burying or eating juicy hambones, splashing around in the river, and chasing rabbits.
Of course, she is the Disreputable Dog, so her good nature also includes a lying, rule-breaking, minor theft, and generally encouraging Lirael to be rebellious and independent with shameless impishness. She also usually excuses this behavior on precisely the grounds that she is Disreputable, after all, leaving anyone attempting to censure her for it in unsatisfied exasperation.
She’s a rascal who simply doesn’t acknowledge most sources of authority in the slightest. She’s a free spirit! She’s going to do what she likes. She doesn’t break rules in ways that would harm people, only because they aren’t so terribly important, and it would be fun! She is capricious, but not cruel, or even really unreliable – just very keen on whatever catches her current fancy. She’s always happy to beg and whine in a typical canine fashion if it will get her a bit of meat or a scratch behind the ears.
The Dog isn’t all frolicking roguishly, though: she’s still a dog, which means loyalty is deeply important to her. Once she devotes herself to someone, she’ll stick with them, loving them and protecting them as well as she knows how. This still occasionally involves lying and often involves being maddeningly evasive, but she keeps secrets from Lirael at least in part because she believes Lirael isn’t yet ready to hear them, and she’s right (again).
She has very firm ideas about duty in general, and the importance of fulfilling one’s responsibilities, when they are serious. She’d urge ducking out on a night of assigned filing to investigate a mystery in the depths of the Clayr’s Library, but she won’t hear a word of running from danger once she and Lirael actually start on their quest. The Dog believes that action is the best cure for fear, even in the face of what seems like the end of all life: “It’s always better to be doing.” Even if hope seems foolish, she’ll advocate for trying something, for ignoring the mountain of impossible obstacles as tomorrow’s trouble, and focusing on overcoming today’s trouble today.
It’s difficult to really rile the dog, but she is capable of holding long grudges. She is still angry at and distrustful of Mogget for decisions made by a creature he once was literally at the beginning of the universe, though admittedly there is little love lost on his side either. The Dog is never mean in her lighthearted fun, because when she gets mean, she does so in brusque, somber earnest. The Dog also has little patience for self-pity. When Lirael contemplated suicide on her seventeen birthday, the Dog gave her a bite on the leg deep enough to scar.
She’s very invested in her identity and reputation as just “the Disreputable Dog,” and not as Kibeth, not because she’s running away from her history, but because in very important ways, she isn’t that creature anymore, and she doesn’t want anyone to approach her with awe or expectations: she just wants to be with her friends, have some fun, help as much as she can when the world needs a bit of helping, and see how it all turns out. At the same time, her nature very much is Kibeth, even if she’s only a small piece of what Kibeth was. Her memories of the Beginning may be hazy, but she still has strong emotions about the other Shiners, and she clearly loves the world she helped to weave and protect from the Destroyer’s sundering. When she finally does reveal herself, she is proud to stand under that name against him again.
Barge Reactions: The Dog is going to adore the barge. New smells, new people, new places to visit, even new sides of herself to be during floods and breaches. So much to explore, so many new friends to meet! All the different creatures from different worlds will fascinate her, although she will be very growly at the various undead characters. When she sees them not actively eating people, she will hopefully be persuaded to restrain herself to keeping a sharp eye on them.
History: In the Beginning, everything was Free Magic. Nine spirits, know as the Nine Bright Shiners, exceeded all the others in light and power. The Ninth, and strongest, was Orannis. He crawled through the universe, finding young planets with flourishing life, and destroying them, one by one reducing six worlds to nothing but barren ash.
On the seventh world he chose, others chose as well. The Seven forged the Charter, an endless stream of Marks that channeled, organized, infused and and connected magic into a cohesive, living world. Together they bound Orannis, broke him in two, and buried each half under seven wards. (The Eighth refused to take sides; he was later captured and forced to serve the Charter.) However, the world they had bound themselves and their magic to was terribly damaged in the battle, so the Shiners grafted it onto another, nonmagical world, and poured their own essence into shoring up what would eventually become the Old Kingdom, giving themselves into bloodlines of people to serve and protect the kingdom in perpetuity, charter stones to keep the land and people tied to the magic and life force of the Charter, and the highly magical Wall, connecting but delineating the Kingdom with Ancelstierre, out of step but knitted together, side by side.
Most of the seven were entirely consumed by this endeavor, but two of them – Astarael and Kibeth – were not. A piece of Kibeth remained conscious of and as herself, “just to see what happens”, manifesting as a lesser magical spirit given freely to the Charter, but not wholly of it. It’s unknown what the Dog was up too in the many millennia between this work and the Dog’s first appearance in Lirael, but it’s probably safe to assume that she had many friends and many adventures.
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Lirael, a lonely young Charter Mage of two of the great bloodlines, finds a small statuette of a soapstone dog in the great Library of Clayr, full of mysterious and sometimes dangerous things. It inspires her to make a dog-shaped sending – kind of like a magic hologram – to be her companion. In the middle of creating it, however, something else takes over her spell, pouring thousands of Charter marks beyond her knowledge or ability out of her throat, somehow without hurting her. When she finally stops, the statuette is gone, and Dog – definitely not a sending – is there. She licks Lirael’s face and asks when they’re going for a walk.
Lirael is suspicious of her at first, because the Dog is unknown and obviously at least partly Free Magic, unbound by the charter, which is typically chaotic to the point of being dangerously corrosive, but the Dog is also clearly of the Charter, and she provides innocuous non-answers (“you called for a friend, and I came,” “I’m your Dog,”) to all Lirael’s questions until she stops worrying about it. The Dog urges Lirael to bind a Stilken, a dangerous Free Magic creature she almost released, helping her prepare but forcing her to take the responsibility of fixing her mistake on her own.
Afterwards, the Dog becomes Lirael’s confidant, bad influence, cheerleader, and fast friend. She exhorts Lirael to push herself in terms of her magical skill, encourages and accompanies various explorations through the long-unplumbed archives of the Library, laughs and plays with her, and doesn’t let her drown in her own longing for the Sight, the prognostic power which is usually the birthright of the Clayr, which Lirael never receives, as her powers lean more toward the other half of her lineage, the Abhorsen's duty of binding and defeating the Dead.
Meanwhile, a wicked Necromancer named Hedge orchestrates an elaborate and horrible plot to release Orannis from his prison. Lirael and the Dog set out on a vague but crucial mission prompted by Clayr visions. They meet up with Prince Sameth and Mogget, secretly the Eighth Bright Shiner in servitude to the Charter, and fight off or escape many Dead monsters on their way to try and upset Hedge’s plans. Although they gain critical information, they don’t succeed.
They follow Hedge and the recovered halves of Orannis into Ancelstierre, the neighboring land where the Charter is not present and the ancient acts of the Shiners fail. Orannis is freed and reunited, and Lirael and the Dog travel deep into Death so that Lirael can use the magic of remembrancy to look into the past and see how Orannis was bound the first time, because the Dog does not remember it in detail. They learn what they need, but Hedge pursues them in Death. He fights Lirael and the Dog, but ultimately passes beyond the Ninth Gate, from which there is no return; its call is difficult to resist for those who – like Hedge, using various terrible magics – avoid it past their time.
Lirael and the Dog rendezvous with other descendants of the Charter lines and prepare to undertake the binding in a moment when Orannis is receded into himself to prepare for greater devastation. Seven people take part in the ritual, each wielding one of the magic bells that each carry some fragment of the original seven shiners – except for one set of twins, spiritually intertwined, who share a bell between them. A first Lirael despairs, believing that they do not have the right number of weilders to represent all the shiners, but the Dog reveals herself as a remnant of Kibeth – though she had previously denied it – and ready to stand for herself.
Together, they are not quite enough to overpower Orannis, but Sam frees Mogget, who chooses, as he did not the first time, to aid them against the Destroyer. With his power added to the seven, Orannis is bound again. Lirael uses a specially-made magic sword to break his power in half once again, knowing the cost will be her life, as his destructive power lashes out at her through the connection created by her own weapon. Before she dies, however, the Dog bites her sword hand off at the wrist, sparing Lirael and apparently dying herself.
She survives long enough to tell Lirael that she loves her, but that it is time for her to go. Lirael has found new family and friends and a place to belong, and does not truly need the Dog as she did when she was younger. In the realm of Death, the Dog cheats flagrantly, sending the very recently-dead spirit of Nicholas Sayre, an Ancelstierran who was temporarily the avatar of a fragment of Orannis, but valiantly fought against its influence when he realized what he had done, right back to life. Incidentally, Nicholas and Lirael each had the beginnings of a crush on each other, despite the looming obstacle of potential doom. The book ends with the dog trotting happily through the river of Death, not onwards towards the last gate and final rest, but sideways, just at the border of Life and Death, off to new adventures.
Sample Journal Entry: A bunch of threads on the Voice Test Meme
Sample RP: This one is in prose
Special Notes: Regarding the Dog being a Dog, I honestly think she’d work just fine aboard the ship. She has no difficulty navigating the Clayr’s glacier fortress without Lirael’s aid, and it is similarly designed for human habitation/use. The ability to turn her toes opposable or use magic on doorknobs helps, and she’s generally quite nonchalant about doing things like that for her own convenience.
In terms of her interactions with other barge members, I don’t think she’s all that much stranger than any other fantasy or scifi characters (or events), at least not in terms of pure believability. Some characters might be weirded out when they first actually meet her, but talking animals are a staple in stories from all sorts of cultures, so the very idea of interacting with one shouldn’t be too difficult to swallow. Some people on the barge might even have an easier time opening up to a dog than to another (humanoid) person.
In most worlds the barge visits, a dog with a collar would be a perfectly ordinary sight. In some of them she might get in trouble if she slips up and talks to people – as she does in Ancelstierre at one point in canon, for that matter – but that could be a fun source of plot sometimes. For ports (or floods/breaches) where being a dog just completely wouldn’t work, I’m happy to give her a temporary human form. If you have any other concerns or questions about how I’d handle it, please just let me know!