Loved all of the submissions and congrats to the contest winners. This subreddit has inspired me to join this year's NaNo and to finally begin grinding away at a story that has been hanging around in my head for the better part of the last five years.

Jackson Elliott: Jack is a war vet, fresh from the fighting overseas. He returns home to find his life in disarray; lacking direction, purpose, or motivation. That is until he meets Lilith, a strange girl who claims to be from a place farther away than his imagination can carry him. She introduces him to the thing that's chasing her, a thing of shadows with eyes like mercury but he's seen it before in his dreams and it drives him to pursue Lilith to try and understand their connection.

Lilith: She is a woman as mysterious as she is beautiful, but with a dark side Jack only gets glimpses of. She's mischievous, as dangerous as a viper, and cunning with a very dark sense of humor. She treats men with a mix of suspicion and seduction, women with scorn, and children with either a surprising gentleness or complete dismissal. Despite all of this, she's running from a thing she won't explain in order to obtain something she refuses to discuss and she always gets what she wants.

Dominic: He is the half-mad, self-proclaimed pirate king of the ocean, who hoards everything he finds and has a terrifying evil streak. He is power hungry and surprisingly good at keeping it. Dom has taken Miriam as his wife (though I suspect that they are or were once siblings).

Miriam: Dominic’s wife who loves him still, watched as he became a man she feared and yet could not kill. She is considered mad by proxy, but is harshly loyal to Dom.

tl;dr http://nanowrimo.org/participants/catovadreams/novels/firethorne