Hey everyone! Some people were interested in the lore aspect of things and the inspiration behind the characters in Bloodblade so I’ve decided to write a bit to explain the character, origins, and psychology of Aygün. Aygün was an interesting character to write; she sits at the intersection of several archetypes in both mythology and modern character work. Initially, I was thinking of introducing a Turkic lycanthrope character named Bozkürt (literally Gray Wolf) but decided that rather than create a male character that would essentially be a Eurasian werewolf version of Mortal Kombat’s Nightwolf, I should take time to fully flesh out the character and make it unique. It was then that I saw a few videos for the Siberian/Turkic folk-pop band Otyken and was inspired by their native Turkic garb; I learned about the wolf-birth story behind the national myth of the manifold Turkic peoples; and this came head-to-head to with my desire to make a tragic character that represents maturation through trauma and the overcoming of oppression.
Aygün Nurmammedova is an Azerbaijani college student on a study-abroad program in Istanbul, Turkiye when she meets an older student named Mehmet who comes onto her. Aygün, seeking to escape the wound of her father’s sudden suicide, decides to cope in school by entering the party scene. Raised in a Shiite Muslim household, her bond with her father was a deep one; her mother was largely absent, and the story alludes to her mother not even being present in her life. Aygün’s father struggles with his mental health but does his utmost to raise her and her sister until his illness takes a turn for the worse. Adept at masking his emotions in front of his family, he takes Aygün out for a night in Baku’s Old City to celebrate her passing a difficult exam. Later that night, Aygün, unaware of her father’s deteriorating condition and plans, she goes to bed unphased. Upon waking, Aygün discovers her father’s body in the kitchen, hanging with a note beside the toppled chair. The last thing her father gave her before he committed s*icide was a heart locket that belonged to his sister, and Aygün wears this locket with her wherever she goes, clutching it out of habit in an attempt to spiritually stay connected with her father. Aygün struggles with her grief over her father into university, where her grades fall and she copes by using drugs and drinking. Mehmet, the man who she met, slips a sedative into her drink and drugs her, and she is then kidnapped in a van by men associated with the Cabal and taken to the island.
She awakes in a stupor and is stripped, undergoing a degrading Satanic ritual that marks her as one of the island’s pleasure-slaves. She is instructed by the dreaded Confessors to serve the male and female patrons on the island- filthy rich, wealthy elites and power brokers who engage in acts of physical and spiritual debauchery and worse- often killing, eating or torturing the slaves- for pure amusement. Aygün refuses and attempts to break free, and she is captured and forced by the clergy instead to fight. Rather than be a slave to the lustful appetites of the patrons, she then becomes a piece of spectacle in their deathmatch. Hopelessly unaware of how to fight, Aygün first faces Sandra in Carnage, whose maternal instinct begs her to at least pretend to want to fight. When the girl freezes in fear, Sandra- who is on the island, ironically, seeking vengeance for the killing of her sister who was also a slave that blew the whistle on the Cabal- loses her composure and almost kills her. At the last moment, Aygün is saved by a hawk that calls himself Yagmur, the Turkic rain-spirit, who is supposedly in communion with her father. The island’s incantations- on part of the seers- enhance extant supernatural abilities in fighters who set foot in it; in daily life these abilities are seldom known to them, albeit in the case of Ming Hua, they appeared in moments of extreme danger. And so, it appeared that Yagmur, who accompanies her from then on, was a guiding spirit. She also gains, by way of this divine intervention, expertise in the Sayokan fighting style.
Aygün faces Gennadiy next, and in the throes of danger, her body begins transforming into a wolf. It becomes apparent to her that another feature of her communion with the Turkic spirit is the ability to not only transform into a werewolf, but to command the loyalty of wolves. This easily would make Aygün one of the most overpowered characters in the universe were it not for her inability to actually control this transformation. As events progress in Reckoning, Aygün joins the protagonists through her budding, protective relationship with Lt. Deringer- whose prior work in the Special Victims Unit gave her a sixth sense about Aygün being a human trafficking victim. Upon joining the protagonists, Aygün develops a sense of strength and maturity, and becomes instrumental in convincing Ming Hua to forgive Darian for betraying her, repairing their relationship and providing the groundwork for Rukhsana’s plan to overthrow the Cabal. Without Aygün nudging Ming Hua in this direction, Ming Hua’s emotionally intense nature would have prevented her from re-recruiting Darian, and Darian would not have impregnated Tamora in Ruin, getting himself corrupted and thus able to infiltrate the inner ranks of the Cabal in Ascension, offering the protagonists an important link in their plan to disrupt the tournament and destroy the island.
Yet Aygün’s fate is less than optimistic. As the corruption on the island increases and the Cabal decides to decimate the protagonists by splitting them, Aygün’s guardian spirit becomes tainted. It becomes apparent in Ruin that the spirit is indeed not in communion with her father, and it was Aygün’s desire for closure with her father that led her to believe so. The spirit, now in corrupted form after the Cabal summons the Etruscan hunger-demon Tuchulcha to infuse itself with it, begins to drive Aygün insane. She develops an insatiable hunger for h-man fl-sh that first starts with break-ins into the island’s meat-lockers- where it keeps human bodies for patron consumption- to lashing out and attempting to eat Bruiser. The Cabal reasoned that the perfect way to strike and collapse the unifying protagonists would be to exploit the protective relationship Deringer has with Aygün, deeming Deringer the bigger threat due to her incorruptible nature. In turning them against each other, the Cabal would fix the brackets, leading to a match between the two friends. In this tragic match- one of the most heart-wrenching moments in Ruin– Aygün loses control in lycanthrope form and nearly kills her friend. But the human part of her- and this is important because the theme of Ruin is that what makes a hero is the choice to remain human when the island is engineered to break their souls, much like Viktor Frankl’s description of the concentration camps in Man’s Search for Meaning– manages to wrestle out of her demon-possession for her to have a moment of clarity, where overcome with guilt, she decides to commit s*icide to save Deringer. Deringer doesn’t yet understand why she acted so decisively- she knows Aygün was possessed, because Bruiser told her, but she was hoping that they could take her to Rukhsana so the Yazatas could purge her of the demon. The reader is left with the conclusion that this tragic girl, haunted by her father’s s-icide, abandoned by her guardian spirit Yagmur, overwhelmed with grief for harming her friend, disgusted at the c-nnibal she has become, and in genuine fear for her friends’ lives because of her demonic possession, decided that the most human, heroic thing she could do was defiantly take from the Cabal the chance to take what was left of her humanity. In so doing, she reifies Rukhsana’s lesson about remaining human, in a more visceral way than Phaedra does with her face turn.
Aygün is a short-statured, Asiatic-looking woman with long, dark hair and olive skin. She speaks fluent Turkish, Azerbaijani, and broken English. She is in her second year of university in the events in the books, making her nineteen to twenty years old. Her fighting style is Sayokan, a Turkish military martial art. She is armed with a primitive hand-axe and wears furs and animal skins to battle after Carnage, and in the fight animations has this costume as well as a “schoolgirl” costume that matches her university uniform. She has attacks that call on her hawk to distract, pluck at, or blind her enemies, and in situations of danger, she can transform into a ferocious werewolf. Her finishers are lycanthrope, axe and student-themed, and she is considered one of the “supernatural” characters in the universe, alongside Phaedra, Atzi, Rukhsana, Ghoul, Nightmare and Ming Hua.