Character portrait: Sayah

My art skills are not good.  While my more artistically talented friends are drawing away for Inktober, I feel a little sad that I can't draw my characters the way they can.  Occasionally I'll pay someone for art (my profile picture, for example) but if I want to create a character portrait myself, I have to do it with words.

This is Sayah, my Coriolis character.

The room is richly decorated. Brightly coloured tapestries adorn the walls, and intricately woven rugs cover the floor, with only traces of the utilitarian grey beneath showing between them. The lighting is muted, with the harsh white filtered through coloured lanterns that throw patterns of light and shade across the low table and embroidered cushions. A faint haze of incense hangs in the air, filling the room with the scent of sandalwood.

A woman sits here. At first glance one might take her for middle-aged, but a closer look reveals a younger face, perhaps no more than twenty-five, with an unhealthy pallor to her light brown skin that seems to have stolen some of her youth. Her thick black hair has been dragged into a messy plait, the end fastened with a worn elastic and draped carelessly over her shoulder.

The galabeya she wears was once a deep, vivid red, luxuriously embroidered in golden yellow thread. Time and wear have muted the colours, and broken threads mar the pattern of the embroidery. She wears it carelessly; an old garment thrown on without thought for appearances. No bracelets, no ankle chains, no adornment save for a pair of rings set with agates and a tiny glittering nose stud.

Her posture is awkward; knees pulled up and head tilted back as she leans against the cushions. There is a deliberacy about the pose she has adopted, suggesting that relaxation does not come easily to her. Nevertheless, the tension is beginning to fall from her muscles. One bare foot has slid out a little further than the other, and the computer she carries has slipped from her hand.

The ornately carved pipe she holds dangles from languid fingers, while curls of sweet white smoke emerge from its mouthpiece and from her slightly parted lips. Her large brown eyes are unfocussed and the pupils still dilated in the dim light. The drug has not yet taken effect, but the ritual of preparing to indulge has served its own purpose. She is calm; her mind is still.