Some characters appear out of nowhere, created by a whim of unpredictable imagination. Elindra is one of those. In this post, I’ll share how she became a part of the story.

Background: Magic-Breakers

While the Magic-Breakers are a crucial element of the story with their role as specialized anti-magic units (I often compare them to real-life units such as SWAT and described how I came up with them here), they lacked any direct presence for a long time, being merely nameless elite warriors in heavy gear.

During the drafting of the first book, the Magic-Breakers gained the first named representative – Marshal Aegan, their leader. Aegan, however, is someone who leads them from an office and thus won’t come into contact with the actual bad guys.

This only changed when my drafting reached the last 15-20 chapters of book two. The Magic-Breakers are deployed in force and I realized I needed someone to lead them to battle. And thus, Elindra was created.

Editing book one

When that was done, I realized that it’d be a pity if Elindra’s first appearance was only by the end of the second book. There were some smaller appearances of Magic-Breakers in the first book, of which some could be repurposed to set her up sooner.

Thus, Elindra replaced the nameless and featureless Captain that came to arrest the cultist incapacitated in a fight with Tyr’eshal, which became her first appearance. The number of scenes in book one getting this treatment was small (two or three, I believe) but it did what I wanted to do: set her up so when the trouble gets real and she’s brought out in force, the reader will know who she is.

Continuing her story

Following the events of the second book, I was not willing to part with her despite the main reason of her presence was dealth with. Hence, Elindra will get to show her skills much more in the third book, to the point she becomes one of the main front-line characters.

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This is all I’ll share today. Feel free to share your thoughts or experiences. Was it something you encountered in your writing – a character that became a part of the story in such a retrospective way?