The God and Goddess of Darkness

I'm at the bit in Deep Embrace when Perse finally meets the baddies Nyx and Erebus the God and Goddess of Darkness/Nightime. I've been building up to it for a long time. The battle scene will take place in almost total darkness which should be interesting, difficult, but hopefully fun to write. I write so many battle scenes in my stories its always an effort to think of new and exciting ways to write them. A battle scene in the dark should not be as hard as the one I did earlier on in Deep Embrace between Perse and several large, hard to describe, violent sea monters! Ah that was fun! No, really, it was. A bit difficult, yeah, but mostly a fun challenge.

I have this awesome idea about how to describe Nyx and Erebus. Since they are the God and Goddess of Darkness (I do not mean evil I literally mean darkness. They are the God and Goddess of night) I am going to make them an attractive black couple with beautiful long silver hair and glowing silver eyes. If they are exposed to any light stronger than a candle flame or moonlight they turn to stone so they will be appearing to Perse in the dark. I'm going to make them glow though. Now that is going to be cool. They will have a silver aura surrouding them which will look alot like moonlight. They are going to be beautiful, mystical, and creepy.

A part of me has been worrying that some people might take offence that I will be writing two characters from Greek mythology that are traditionally protrayed as white as two black people. The reason I am doing it is because I like for the phsyical appearance of my characters to be symbolitic. I want people to be able to look at them and know straight away what sort of God or Goddess they are. For example: Perse is a mermaid so she has blue hair and a blue tail to represent the sea and gold eyes to represent the rising sun, which is Helios, her soul mate. Helios has red hair (fire) and blue eyes (the ocean) which is supposed to represent Perse.

Another reason I am making Nyx and Erebus black is because I love writing about black characters in fantasy novels with brightly coloured hair and eyes. The main character in my last book, Echo, had black skin and green eyes and green hair. I thought she was beautiful and exotic and I'm crossing my fingers like mad that she will be chosen to go on the front cover of Echoes in the Wind.

When I think of what Nyx and Erebus will look like in my book I think to myself 'Wow, they are going to be so pretty, so eerily beautiful' they are black because their skin represents the colour of the night sky and their silver hair and silver eyes represents the moonlight and the stars. I know I will probably offend some people, maybe, but that's not going to stop me from writing them the way that I want. I know that I will never please every single person who reads my book. That's okay. I accept that. I just hope people do not jump to the wrong conclusions about me and think that I made Nyx and Erebus black because I think that black skin = darkness/evil. Not at all! :-)