Every hero needs someone to defy.
Torven was supposed to be the good one—the man who breaks ranks, takes burns, carries an impossible child home while his captain walks away. For that to work, I needed the captain to be worth defying. Someone whose orders deserved breaking.
Enter Varn.
In the earliest drafts, Varn was exactly what the story seemed to need. Here's how I first introduced him:
Varn emerged from the watch house, crossbow in hand, face hard in the torchlight. Hunting captain. Ten winters Torven's senior, half his skill, twice his cruelty.
Twice his cruelty. I wrote that line and felt satisfied. Clear. Efficient. The reader knows exactly who this man is.
Except I'd written myself into a corner.
The problems started immediately. The scene where Varn stays at the rear during the dragon fire? Originally, that was cowardice. Pure and simple. The hunting captain hiding while his men burned.
The scene where he tells Brenan to stay back? Cruelty. Dismissing a young hunter because Varn didn't care if he lived or died.
Every choice Varn made, I wrote as evidence of his villainy. And every scene became harder to write than the last.
Because one-dimensional characters don't give you anywhere to go. They do bad things because they're bad. They make cruel choices because they're cruel. There's no tension, no internal logic, nothing to discover. You're not writing a person. You're writing a cardboard cutout that exists only to be defeated.
I spent weeks trying to make Varn work. Rewrote his scenes half a dozen times. Tried giving him tragic backstory—in one draft, he'd watched his brother burn to dragon fire, close enough to smell it, too far to help. That was going to be his excuse. The trauma that made him a coward.
"Dragon fire." Varn's hand tightened on his crossbow. "White-gold. Hotter than forge flame."
That tightening hand was supposed to be a tell. But tragic backstory doesn't fix a flat character. It just makes readers feel manipulated when you reach for it.
I couldn't figure out why everything felt so flat.
The breakthrough came when I stopped asking "how can I make him worse?" and started asking "why does he think he's right?"
Because everyone thinks they're right. Even the people we disagree with. Especially them.
Varn doesn't stay at the rear because he's afraid. He stays there because that's where captains belong. Command position. Maintaining overview. Directing rather than charging. That's protocol—and protocol kept his people alive for generations.
Varn doesn't dismiss Brenan out of cruelty. He's protecting a young hunter from a situation beyond his experience. Rear guard is where you put someone you want to survive.
Varn doesn't refuse to bring the baby back because he's heartless. He refuses because they hunt dragons. They don't collect strays. That's not who they are, not what they do, not how the settlement survives.
He's not wrong.
That was the uncomfortable realization. Strip away the early drafts, look at the actual situation, and Varn's position is defensible. Even correct, by the logic of his world.
The new Varn became something more interesting: rigidity as philosophy.
Follow the rules. They exist for a reason. Individual feelings cannot override collective survival. The protocol worked before. It will work again. The dragons will return. They always have.
He's the settlement made flesh. The same inflexibility that built their civilization—we are dragon hunters, we've always been dragon hunters—lives in Varn's spine. He can't bend because bending would mean admitting the rules might be wrong. And if the rules are wrong, then everything he's built his life on is wrong too.
That's not cowardice. That's faith. Dangerous, destructive faith—but faith nonetheless.
Here's what makes Varn work now: he and Torven are both right, and both wrong, and both paths lead to destruction.
Varn's way—rigid adherence to protocol—means slow death. The settlement can't adapt. They train children for dragons that no longer exist. They perform rituals that have lost all meaning. They starve by inches while insisting the old ways will save them.
Torven's way—breaking rules for humanity—means personal destruction. He defied orders, saved the child, and lost everything. Status. Standing. His wife's trust. His son, eventually. Sixteen years of slow poison for one moment of conscience.
Neither of them wins. In a system broken enough, there's no winning move.
The old Varn was easy to hate. The new Varn is harder to dismiss.
When he says "protocol kept us alive for generations," he's stating fact. When he says "the dragons will return," he's voicing the hope that keeps his entire society from despair. When he refuses to bend the rules for one glowing infant, he's protecting the collective from the chaos of exceptions.
He's still wrong. The dragons aren't coming back. The protocol is killing them. The rigidity will be their end.
But he believes it. Truly, completely, down to his bones. And that makes him human.
I still needed someone for Torven to defy. I just stopped needing that someone to be a villain.
What I needed was a man who embodied everything the settlement believes about itself. A man whose faith in the system is absolute. A man who follows the rules because the rules are all he has.
That's more frightening than cruelty, in the end. Cruelty can be fought. Faith just waits for you to break against it.