Behind the Character: Maira Blackstone

Maira Blackstone is the human official tasked with interrogating Selanor in Caelthys' Awakening, and the first half of a story I have been working on for a long time.

At first glance, she is just another prison official, wearing the same uniform, a more composed expression, and eyes sharper than most others. She cycles through interrogation tactics on him with practiced ease, authority, softness, and the quiet threat of what she could take from him, testing each approach the way she has been trained to. She asks for his name as though it would cost him nothing to give it. And every time he gives nothing but silence as an answer, she gets sharper.

It would have been easy to write her as someone who simply served a system. Just another body in a sea of uniforms. But Maira was never meant to be the villain of this book, and the story spends a long time making sure you understand why.

What she does not say is what she is actually carrying into the cell with her. A mother she can't afford to think about losing. A family history with the fae that has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with grief. She has been taught her whole life that the strange beings in those cells are a threat to humankind above all else, and she has never once had enough reason to question it. Until now.

That is what made her so compelling (and difficult) to write. Maira isn't cruel because she enjoys it. She's cruel because she genuinely believes that kindness is what would get the people she loves killed. That's a far more arduous thing to write than simple villainy, because she had to be capable of being entirely right about the stakes of the game, and woefully wrong about everything else simultaneously.

I wanted a character who could stand across from Selanor, mean every threat she made, while still being someone that the reader couldn't just hate. Her armor had to be real. The reasons for her coldness had to be valid, even if she aimed all of it at someone totally undeserving of them.

Maira spends the entire book finding out how much of what she was so crtain of, was actually just what she was taught. I won't tell you how far that goes. But I will tell you to watch her hands. They give her away more than her voice ever does.