Niamh, the heroine of my first novel, comforting Jessamine, who is the heroine of my second novel. Poor Jess. A lot of my characters tend to have difficult lives, because that's what makes for interesting stories. Jess probably got it worse than any of the others, though. I created her as a challenge to myself to take a character and throw her in the nastiest situation I could think of, and see if I couldn't still come up with a decent story. So Jess ended up as a life-long slave in a brothel, and that was just the start of her problems.
When I commissioned this, Niamh was still my personal character, so the idea was to have the creator herself comforting her creation. But I think it still works pretty well this way.
