One day – it had been perhaps months since I’d been travelling with the Orcs – I saw Jebediah about to speak up, with the now familiar glint in his eyes as he looked at me, the glint I learned to recognize all too well in my time alongside him, that let me know he was going to make fun of me once more.
I cut him off. “And you - You’re too proud, too conceited to accept that Elves may be good people too! You think you’re better than me, but where has your revolution gotten you? You make grand speeches, sure, and you rally people, but what have you achieved? You speak of a time past, of your people lost, but worry about the present for once! You think I can’t help you, you say you don’t need me in the revolution, but you’ve achieved more with me at your side here in months than you’ve done in years by yourself!” I yelled out, right in front of him and the council.
Jebediah looked at me for a moment, but he showed no emotion. He endured my words. Then he breathed in, and for a moment I thought he might lunge at me for my transgressions. Instead, he calmly turned to one of his friends and motioned for him to bring forward his musket.
“Are you going to pick it up?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you want to prove you have our interests at heart, that this is your fight too, then pick up the musket and join us fully.”
I looked at the weapon. It’s not that I’d never handled a weapon – I’d used a bow plenty of times before to hunt back in my homeland, but… a musket was a whole different thing.
Jebediah challenged my gaze.
“I thought not,” he said. “You claim you want to help us, you say you are on our side, but when it comes down to what matters, you would never die for us. You will go back to your cozy life in the glades, while we sacrifice our own down in the ditches. And that is why I believe you, but I don’t listen to you.”
Do you vibe with the adventures of Jebediah the Orc?
(he was originally named Jebediah because settled populations would use their settlers’ names, and these were originally humans and Jebediah is the quintessential medieval guy name, but I changed it to elves).
I like the writing and the dialogue, don’t love the name though. I understand the reasoning but it just doesn’t feel very “fantasy-ish”, even for a fantasy human. Is Christianity a thing in this universe? Because if it’s not i don’t think that name would exist either. Just my opinion.
No I agree, I originally wrote one of the excerpts super quick and had to pick a name for him and I thought what’s the most medievally name I can think of? But it kinda grew on me since then lol
When writing things inspired by the medieval period i always like to ask myself “whose medieval era?”, because there are big cultural differences depending on whether you’re looking at western Europe, eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, etc., they each had their own distinct medieval period. And if you’re going with Europe then you need to remember that it was a period where Christianity and the church were the biggest cultural, ideological and political force by far. In a fantasy world with an entirely different religion though, all of that would be different, so you would not expect to see biblical names. No, Davids or Johns, or Lukes or Marys, etc. etc. Instead i would maybe look to draw names from pre-Christian cultures, or world build in such a way that you think about what kinds of names each race and culture would have based on their characteristics and history, and invent your own.