Behind the Character: Kohen and Ahryn

I’d like to talk about Kohen and Ahryn today.

I went back and forth on whether Alyx should have one or two brothers. I had initially penciled in two more because the ‘female lead’ with two bratty brothers is a little bit of a trope in the noble fantasy romance stories I read. To be clear, Alyx is not a ‘female lead’ in that way, but if you are familiar with that kind of ‘oh no, my father/family hates me, how will I escape this house with my life?’ settings in trashy romance manhwa, you might see some surface parallels in initial setting.

I initially had little stake in there being two of them, but it promised to make the dynamics of their family a little more interesting, so I left it.

As I progressed with book 2, I went back and forth on whether to cut Ahryn. There is a general principle in writing not to have extraneous named characters. It’s better to not make your readers need to remember more names than you need to. Also, combining similar characters into one usually means that you can have fewer more fleshed out characters. I’m not very good at following this principle. But, as it stood, I didn’t have a strong reason to keep Ahryn.

And then I accidentally wrote book 3.

Let me explain. The end of book 2 did not come to me easily. I wanted to wrap up the Dragon Festival and all that, but no matter how I tried, the ceremony around binding with the dragons felt anticlimactic. So, in a deadline fueled fit of mania, I wrote this extended mini arc about Cass getting kidnapped and Alyx coming to rescue her at the expense of her chances to get a dragon. It was rushed and messy and full of plot holes, but I liked the direction and that (after a lot of rewriting) became book 3.

But book 3 made Ahryn necessary. For one, he became critical not to Alyx, but to Kohen. Kohen as a character only makes sense with the existence of Ahryn. Sure, without Ahryn, he would still be a classic ‘Arrogant Young Master’ (this was the start and end of his character when we first meet him in the family guest room). But to see the way he’s struggling for affection or even attention from his family when his mother’s entire focus is on taking care of the sickly Ahryn and his father is so indifferent and demanding paints a picture as to how he ended up the way he did.

Ahryn also became critical to exploring the world and themes of Stormborn Sorceress. A lot of progression fantasy uncritically watches characters amass power for the sake of power. There isn’t anything wrong with that in escapist fiction. I don’t point that out as a critique of the genre. It can be a lot of fun.

But exploring why people might chase power, what they might lose as they do, what a society that values that above all else looks like, that could be fun too. Ahryn is an example of someone who has little self-worth because the society he lives in has told him he will never have the ability to accumulate the thing that matters: power. And, in bonding with Emenes, something he is only able to do because he was weak but tried anyway, he gets that power anyway.

My plans for Kohen didn’t survive the end of book 3 the way I had intended. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he survived book 3, despite my intentions.

In my initial plans, Kohen was going to die. Cass was going to kill him. It was going to go over about as well as you imagine.

But then I started writing Kohen POV chapters, and I said, wait, hold on, writing this brat is kind of fun. He was so arrogant, but also so soft yet prickly to his brother. And then I got to the part where Cass needed to kill him. And I’m as soft as Cass. I couldn’t do it.

I am only mostly joking about that. There were a lot of reasons I decided killing him there wasn’t what I wanted to do. For one, I legitimately had a hard time arranging the situation such that killing him would be in character for Cass. If I was going to have her kill him, I wanted her to decide consciously and intentionally to do it. Doing it accidentally or even in the heat of the moment wasn’t going to work with the angst I wanted the fallout of killing him to be.

This is something I would have eventually figured out if I was committed to this plan. And, even if I ended up having her kill him with less intentionality, that was something I could have worked with.

But, as I was working on this, I realized that Cass handling the emotional fallout of killing Kohen was not the most interesting thing I could do with his character. This man, whose soul has been compromised in this way, was more interesting to me alive than dead. The parallels I could use him to draw with at least one other character were too tempting to let him fall here.

So I inflicted a fate possibly worse than death on him. And I don’t regret it.

Look forward to book 4 and the fallout of Kohen’s condition.