Behind the Character: Selanor Caladrys

Selanor is the High Chair of Caelthys, imprisoned for a century at the beginning of Caelthys' Awakening, and the main protagonist of the book.

He embodies stillness, a characteristic that was hammered into him from the grief and imprisonment. His eyes have not opened. His body has learned not to move at all, mistaken for defeat rather than the burden of a grief so deep and complete it has rendered him incapable of doing anything more than living with that grief. His own people have long since stopped believing in him. He had given up in front of them and never changed his stance for long enough that his silence, every single day, could only read as a betrayal of everything he owed them.

It would have been easy to make him unredeemable. A tragic, broken figure that things just happen to, and in most stories, that's exactly what would have happened. But grief is the entire drive behind their magic, their realm, and their existence, and he is the epitome of it. Even if he used it as an excuse to shy away from his responsibilities.

What breaks the stillness isn't hope but a purpose that he cannot ignore. The moment his perception brushes against something that shouldn't exist, something moving at alarming speed, a live portal that has been blocked by a wall of suppression, something that could not be done by the humans who had imprisoned them, Selanor opens his eyes for the first time in a hundred years. He did not want to. But he could not afford not to look anymore.

This is the core of who he is, beyond the myths and tales of the Chair who rejected the throne. Selanor's grief was not weakness. It was a strength that if allowed an edge would be fatal to any who came across it, including himself. What I wanted to write was a character who chooses, deliberately and at great cost, to choose sacrifice over revenge, rather than a character who just sets aside their trauma for the greater good and then forgets about it entirely.

He is not soft. A century of grief and rage has sharpened him into something far more dangerous than the silent broken figure his captors assume he is. But he is also still someone who is capable of offering empathy to a guard who never asked for it, and of finding an odd comfort in irritating the one person hellbent on breaking him. Even at his lowest, darkest points, some part of him kept reaching for the people around him, whether or not he let himself admit it.

Selanor spent a century believing that there was nothing left worth seeing. This book is about what it costs him to be wrong