V is for Truth.

Vrai is the French word for truth. French is actually my second language. It’s my mother’s second language and she wanted me to learn it when I was little, so when I was small I would find myself often speaking it. I loved to watch Muzzy which was a animated cartoon in French about a green metal eating alien, a kid and a princess (that’s about all I remember). Yet like all things, if you don’t use them, they atrophy.

I don’t speak French anymore. Not passably. I can read it, kinda, but I certainly don’t speak it. Yet, even then, I find myself sneaking bits of French into my writing. 

One of my more interesting characters in my current WIP (at least to me) are the Vraeden. The Vraeden aren’t really one character, they are more a race that the people in the world know very little about. Because of that they become a bit like the boogy men of the night. That being said, the more you find out about them the more they go from boogy men to outright living breathing monsters.

The Vraeden are humanoid. Meaning, unless you get close to one you’d think they were human, and even if you got close, you’d probably keep thinking they were human until they wanted you to know the truth. They have two legs, two arms, two eyes, a nose, hair, two ears, faces that are like ours. They typically wear human clothing.

Yet if you were to get close you would notice their skin was made of scales, not like scales of a snake, think scales of a lizard, so its hard to notice. Their scales also have a blueish ting to them, and they turn darker blue when they are shedding, which can leave them with the look of blue tattoos all over their skin.
They have sharp teeth, but the sharp teeth are hidden behind a layer of white gum that makes their mouths look human, they have forked tongues but they can be fused together temporarily to resemble a sharp human tongue. And perhaps the creepiest thing of all, they pray on humans. They can eat our food, but it can make them sick. They eat people for nourishment. 

 
Yet even odder, is that they come in threes. Always three’s, and this is essential to their survival, because the way they get nourishment is that each of the three has to eat a specific part of a human, the heart and eyes, the liver and thigh, the brain and lung…and only if that is done, will the human nourish them. More importantly however, if that is done then they will know all that the human they ate knew.

They are known as contract workers, accumulating knowledge and skill, doing whatever job they can, requesting only people as payment.

So what do you think? Can I make the Vraden more creepy? Should I?