Murder Your Darlings, or: Move it or Lose It

I hate cutting out cool characters who it turns out you just don't need for the book. One of my walk on characters from GW got a fairly lengthy scene in BD in a chapter that, well, doesn't really need her so much anymore (she doesn't show up later in the book, so doing a lengthy intro only to have her disappear seems silly). It's such as shame, really, because then all this has to go:

"Sometimes Nyx invited Husayn to drive up with them. Nyx had met Husayn at the magicians’ gym in Mushtallah back when Nyx was training as a boxer and bel dame, sometime after Nyx had been recalled from the front and reconstituted. Husayn was a stocky old fighter with a mashed-in pulp of a nose. Her left eye drooped a little, and was going a tad misty. She’d lost her peripheral vision in that eye at thirty, and now, at fifty, she didn’t see much out of it at all....

Nyx and Husayn sat out on the hilltop the morning after Nyx sent Mercia home with a bellyful of buni-flavored rum. The blazing orange disk of the primary star had just swallowed the blue sun, and Eshe was lying prostrate on a prayer rug on the other side of the bakkie, his fingertips stretched toward the base of an old thorn tree that clawed at the sky with barren, charred branches."

Eh, it wasn't doing much anyway.