I wrote Torven as the hero.
The opening needed someone willing to defy orders, take burns, carry an impossible child through the snow while his captain walked away. Someone who would look at an infant glowing in a circle of dragon blood and see a life worth saving.
That was Torven. The good one. The one who stood when others walked away.
For a long time, that's all he was.
Here's what I've learned about people—something the rewrites taught me, something I didn't understand when I first wrote him: the ones who act heroically in crisis aren't always the ones who show up for the quiet work.
The grand gesture comes with witnesses and adrenaline. The clarity of emergency. Someone is burning—you pull them out. A baby is dying—you carry it home. These choices feel obvious in the moment, even when they cost you.
But then the moment ends. The burns scar over. The baby becomes a child. And the real work begins: the daily presence, the hard conversations, the truth-telling that has no audience.
That's where Torven fails. I just didn't know it yet.
I didn't plan it this way. Not exactly.
In the earliest drafts—the ones I mentioned in my journal entry about revising the opening—Torven was exactly what he appeared to be. The Council gave their verdict. By chapter two, Fionn was exiled, and Torven remained what he'd always been: the good father. The one who did the right thing.
End of story.
But then we needed to see Fionn grow up. To understand what he lost, we had to watch him have it first. And to watch him have it, I had to write the years between—the childhood that would make the exile matter.
That's when Torven became complicated.
Each chapter of childhood demanded more of him. Year Two needed a father learning to hope. Year Six needed a father learning to fail. The more I wrote, the more he revealed himself—not as I'd planned him, but as he actually was. The hero I'd created started showing cracks I hadn't put there.
In some drafts, I tried to keep him steady. Present. Struggling alongside Moira. Facing it together.
It felt false.
Because I've watched this pattern—in myself, in people I love. The person who rises magnificently to the crisis, then retreats into silence when the crisis becomes ordinary life. Who carries you through the fire but can't sit with you in the aftermath. Who saves the burning boy but can't tell his wife the truth for fifteen years.
The secret Torven keeps isn't dramatic. It's administrative. Exile at sixteen. The Council decided it on the first day, and he agreed to the terms. He just... didn't tell her. Kept saying "later." Let her hope while he counted winters.
That's the betrayal. Not the secret itself, but the choice to let her build a life on ground he knew was temporary.
Year Six broke something in me to write.
Torven watches his son kneel in the dirt. Watches the other boys turn away. Watches Fionn's hands shake around the dragon bone that rejects him.
And Torven does nothing.
Not because he doesn't love Fionn. He does—desperately, protectively, in the way parents love children they can't quite reach. But love isn't the same as presence. And Torven has spent six years watching Fionn like an experiment. Counting signs. Measuring wrongness.
While Moira has been doing something else entirely.
And when Torven finally sees it—finally understands what she's been doing all these years—he's standing in the shadows. Behind. Apart.
The hero, watching from twenty paces back.
Torven is the father who loves his son and fails him anyway. The husband who carried a secret for fifteen years because he couldn't bear to see hope leave his wife's eyes. He rose to the crisis, then retreated from everything that came after.
He's the hardest character I've written. Not because he's evil—he isn't. Because he's recognizable.
And then there's Moira.
She's the counterweight. The one who shows up. Who takes her trembling hands and stained fingers and does the quiet work of making space for a child the world wasn't built for.
She doesn't test Fionn. Doesn't watch him for signs of wrongness. She hands him a pot to warm and lets him be useful. Gives him a blade and teaches him a trade. Hums while they work together in the fading light.
Moira is the parent we all need. The one who sees you clearly—all of you, the parts that don't fit, the ways you're different—and makes room anyway. Not by ignoring what you are, but by refusing to let it be the whole story.
I needed someone like her, growing up. I think a lot of us did.
That's why I wrote her this way. Not as a saint—her hands shake, her work is hard. But as someone who chooses presence over paralysis. Who acts while others watch. Who builds a life with her son instead of counting down the winters until it ends.
The story needed a Torven to show how love can fail. But it needed a Moira to show how love can work.
I don't know how Torven's story ends yet. I haven't written it.
But I know this: I love him for who he was in that clearing. And I'll understand him for what he becomes.