Silvahni Cadence

One goal I had in mind was to revive the stoic male character and not degrade them for politics. Since I am a female writer, this was not an easy task. I have many male friends and five brothers, but still, I am not a man. Serving in the Marine Corps I believed helped me the most as when I served, women were only 2.5% of the Corps; I was around men constantly.

We have seen an absolute saturation in books watering down male characters, dismissing them as useless, misogynistic and in the way of female progress. I do not care what politics inform a story, but there should be a reason for it, and most books that do this offer none.

What are my reasons? I enjoy characters that match men and women and I have no issue crafting female warriors or leaders but I do so within the confines of my world, with no outside politics being injected shallowly into it.

An example would be Chialon, the Golden Warrior of Starwatch.

To give some background, the Aldren who are the hybrid children of elf and human pairings, they built great cities across the mainland of Valdris. Five in total, they did not have a kingdom and were a people for all the world and Chialon was an Aldren before her death two millennia ago. Her legendary status allowed her name to be known until the present day in Kin’dal, book one of the Aurean Legacy series.

What was she known for? Not her combat skills in the normal sense, she was an average warrior, the Aldren in general possessing greater strength, speed, and endurance than elves or humans; it was her ability to evade attacks until the opponent tired, often to the point of surrender.

A small excerpt from Kin’dal, the prologue titled Kael’morna which is a flashback of one of my characters Theraxis:

“Starwatch, burning against the night sky.

He had been young then, barely five hundred years old, when the war against the Malakor had reached the great Aldren fortress. The corrupted ones, their skin bearing the red taint of their demonic bargain, had come with demons in numbers that seemed beyond counting. But Starwatch’s defenders had been legendary, and none more so than their champion.

Chialon.

He had seen her from a distance that first day, standing atop the city’s outer wall. Her armor had been gold—not gilt, but true gold plate that caught the sun and threw it back in blinding radiance. Her hair, the color of wheat fields in summer, had flowed loose beneath her helm. Even from afar, she had seemed something more than mortal, more than Aldren. A warrior goddess made flesh, terrible and beautiful in equal measure.

The battle had raged for three days. Theraxis had been pulled away, dragged into the chaos of the eastern flank. When he finally returned to Starwatch’s outskirts a week later, the city had fallen. Corpses lay in drifts, Aldren, Malakor and demon alike, the stench of death so thick it was nearly visible.

And atop the highest pile of dead, her gold armor shattered and rent, her body pierced by a dozen mortal wounds, lay Chialon.

Even in death, she had been magnificent. One hand still gripped her sword, the blade buried in the chest of the Malakor beneath her. She had fought until the very end, until her body could give no more, and she had taken a score of the corrupted ones with her into darkness.”

Chialon wore this type of armor because gold was absurd to wear in combat but her armor had never been marred… until that fateful day when the Malakor came with their demon armies. Not once in all her long years had she been struck.

A normal human or elven woman would not have this strength or ability, not in my world. Only the Aldren held such power within their very flesh and blood, so Chialon and other female Aldren warriors were as exceptional as their male counterparts.

I mention Chialon because the same principle applies to every character in Valdris regardless of gender: strength, restraint, and ability must be earned within the logic of the world itself, not handed out to make a political point. That standard cuts both ways. It is why Chialon is exceptional, and it is why the men in this story are allowed to be what they are without apology.

But stoic male characters needed a revival in my opinion and that is precisely what I tried to craft.

This is not a world of humor. The author lacks it generally, and the world itself is dark by design, full of brutality and bloodshed. These male characters have grown up in a world that tests them at every turn. They protect their families and carry the weight of decisions affecting those they love. But it is the stoicism I really wanted to hone in on.

These are not easy men (or elves) to write, they process the world differently, often inwardly, in ways that took me time to understand. No two are identical; each carries his own nuances, weaknesses, and strengths. Here is what two of my beta readers (one male, one female) had to say about a few of my male characters: 

On Ryel in Act 1, he immediately appreciated that “he isn’t sentimental, but he isn’t cruel either. His logic is cold, but not malicious”—and that his decisions cost him.

On Draevon across Acts 3 through 8, he consistently praised the vulnerability beneath the control. He called the admission of fear—“a king admitting fear is great”—a turning point. 

On Rivan, she wrote that the scene where he cries over his son’s question was devastating precisely because of its restraint—“no dramatic speech, no giant emotional explosion. Just a father remembering a question his child once asked.” 

On Draevon, she tracked his arc across the entire book and her response to that single tear from him—after chapters of establishing him as emotionally repressed—“doesn’t come across as melodrama. It comes across as a crack in a dam that’s been holding for two thousand years.” She specifically said she normally dislikes scenes where stoic characters suddenly cry because it can feel manipulative, but here it worked because of the groundwork laid.

You do not know these characters yet, but you will when Kin’dal releases. Each holds a special place in my heart and I crafted them with care, making sure they held up to my ideals of what I wanted to revive and I do believe I largely succeeded. As you can see, I had beta readers of both genders letting me know how well I crafted them.

They gave me plenty of critical feedback, even on those exact characters, but what made my heart sing was how closely they followed them, scrutinized their every move. At first I was annoyed until I realized how much they liked these characters and wanted to help me fix them.

I had many difficulties trying to envision how they would react in various situations, so I would close my eyes and remember all the men I had met, served with and worked with as a civilian. The odd things they would do that would baffle us women, the lack of verboseness and the quiet stoicism many of them had. I tried to mold my main male characters with this in mind.

My youngest brother is my number one source, a man I have to pull everything out of. He will call me, say hello, and then offer nothing else but a word or two. Yet I remember like it was yesterday the day his first child was born. This quiet stoic man, cried. Not from weakness but from joy and fear, at least I assume there was fear but I certainly know there was joy.

In reviving the stoic male characters, I may anger quite a few people… potentially more than a few, but I am quite all right with that. I enjoy breaking norms and going against the grain, and quite frankly, I want to read these types of characters. So I write what I would read myself.

Lastly, I will leave you with this quote:

“There is a moment in every warrior’s life when skill proves insufficient, when strength becomes irrelevant, when all accumulated knowledge reveals itself as shallow understanding of a world far stranger than arrogance allowed them to perceive. This moment is both death and birth—the death of pride, the birth of wisdom. Most men spend their lives avoiding it. The wise seek it out.”

—Path of the Blade, attributed to various sources