#ashka is a complicated man okay. i am working on ironing out his backstory completely (it's there just not personally organized)

[you-are-my-neverland]

love love love godhood... do you mind talking about ashka and naying? whatever you want, these kinds of dynamic just fascinate me endlessly <3

oh, i would be happy to discuss ashka and naying. maybe too happy, even.

where to start? naying doesn't remember the first seven years of her life, only waking up to find ashka watching over her. he tells her that her parents died in a car accident, the same one that injured her severely enough that she has to relearn just about everything. to her, he's the only parental figure she's ever known, and she's always felt a complicated sense of debt, awe, worship, and love towards him. sometimes, she felt as if she didn't know him, or understand him, that he was a distant point she could never reach, but she never doubted that, whatever happened between them, he loved her.

and then, when she's eighteen, he disappears. vanishes from her life. he had said he was going to meet someone, and then had never come home. she made missing posters, even talked to the police, but, eventually, it feels as if everyone but her stopped caring, stopped looking. the police found his bloodstained clothes, ruled it as a death, or murder, without a body, let it grow cold. naying dabbled in alcoholism, anger, and ruining her life one piece at a time. she never gives up hoping that he's alive, insisting that he's alive, because sometimes he leaves her things, groceries or gifts, things she knows are from him but can never prove.

so he didn't die. he didn't abandon her, he's not gone like everyone says. he just, for some reason, can't come home, and even though naying has rationalized it a hundred times in her mind, there's still a part of her that whispers he left you behind. it doesn't help that when she enters the outsider world, she's told some rendition of that line; her knee jerk denial is a defense mechanism, response, a way to protect herself, to not let it become the truth.

the ashka naying knows, though, the man that is her father, is a monster to the outsider world. he's the perpetrator of the greatest tragedies in the past century, a man honored as a god and then reviled as a devil. for his own greed, for his own selfish desires, he committed genocide (intentionally?), slaughtered a generation (intentionally), and, apparently, kidnapped a child just when they thought he might have gone to ground for good.

ashka is a man who looks to be in his thirties, but has actually been alive for almost a century. his believed power is unmatched, and, in the fifty plus years since the Battle of Black Cliff, he has become the bogeyman of the Outsider World. he's the last member of the last, revived godhead, a vengeful ghost who will not let the world move on. as long as he's out there, he's a threat to everything the Families and the World stand for. he's Wanted Number One basically. no one knows why, but everyone knows that, when she was seven years old, naying yue, heiress to the yue family, the next in line to be saintess, vanished. was taken. kidnapped. by a man described to be no other than ashka mihari.

most of the world has accepted that she was killed, but some outsiders never stopped looking, including the yue family. no body, no crime. when our naying appears again at twenty one, she is and isn't the naying yue they are looking for - to naying, they have the same name, but they aren't the same person. to everyone else, she's either a fake or a copy. no one knows the game ashka is playing, least of all naying herself.

now, in terms of writing, ashka and naying's dynamic/relationship haunts the narrative. particulary for naying, who has the main pov of godhood, ashka is a ghost in her past, always cropping up in her thoughts, memories flooding in at the most inopportune moments. the littles things bring him to mind; in her memories, we are shown a man who loved his daughter, a man who sometimes hurt her in ways only father's can (not in a dv/sa way though. let me make that clear; there are enough other evil people in godhood), a daughter who tried her best to understand him and be the best she could be. she's bitter and angry at him, but also longing for him. she just wants him to return, to prove he didn't abandon her.

to prove everyone else wrong.

but for the majority of godhood, we have naying's pov and memories contrasting with what other people tell her about ashka. we slowly learn the extent of the things he has done, the reasons he is hated and reviled. naying might not judge him, but the readers will have to form their own opinions on what sort of man he is. ashka himself doesn't make a (re)appearance until close to the end of the first novel at least; he himself haunts the narrative alongside the girl naying was.