I’ll start really with my antagonist. Darius, later on most commonly known as ‘a daemon’, following on the greek/roman denomination of ‘a spirit’.
Though he isn’t a spirit but he thinks propaganda that makes people believe he’s omniscient can’t hurt. Right? Especially if everybody fears spirits in this world.
This character has two phases: Darius, eight son of a noble family in a world males are fodder, he has seven other brothers (in their branch of the family) with the same name so it hardly matters.
And daemon, vague threat to the way things are run. Don’t like spirits possessing you and the dark making you fear living? Good; because he hates it, he hates that being able to see spirits makes everyone shun him while if he had been a girl, it’d been okay. So… ultimately, let’s destroy the four pillars of a society established in worshipping your ancestry and kill the High Spirits. How hard can it be?
Darius is the definition of an anti-hero, being truly good is too much work but he’s unhappy with the way things are. He has good intentions, no patience however and an inclination for chaos. Darius is smart in the charming, easy going way that captivates people radical measures notwithstanding. He’s a social animal.
This in the change into daemon translates as he’s more straightforward, openly plays people against each other and basically builds a power trio with two other people: Jack and Bianca.
Darius still played by the rules, daemon… is kinda tired. So daemon really isn’t up for partying anymore, the irony and the hypocrisy make him sick now. In turn he micro manages Jack and Bianca, right and left hand respectively, to do whatever to strike and make most damage. This ultimately leads to the destruction of a State-city.
This may not sound like a huge deal but it is. A State-city manages the whole region and the surrounding villages, it’s run by the matriarchs of ‘noble’ blood line with each matriarch given a portion of the territory. Nobility in this case is just a name for a vocation by blood to manage land, like literal noblesse oblige.
He decides destroying his ‘hometown’ and his mother’s bloodline is a good start. The State-city whose district he belongs to – Nubya – has a symbiotic relationship with other territories/State-cities. They basically feed the other states, it’s their major exports to be honest.
This explains why Wildfire II – Sonata Arctica suits him perfectly. Nubya is a State-city mountain, its many districts scattered throughout the mountain. Everyone who lives there has great respect for the mountain itself, it’s like they worship it. Their matriarchs, their bloodlines, the mountain’s will is important so they all survive and the rest of the land does too.
Thing is, since this society worships ancestry, anything like ruins and such are left undisturbed for the spirits, exactly how he knows they won’t rebuild there.
Anyway, he becomes the main antagonist for the heroine of my current novel. I thought I should write about him as the hero but then changed my mind. We’d have very boring times up until he’s daemon. He’s way older than my heroine, by the time she starts getting into worldplot, he either already destroyed Nubya or they her news of that.
What more can I say about Darius/daemon? For now this will do.