Writing the Cold Protagonist

AUTHOR'S NOTES // J. LEGÊNE BEHIND THE SCENES

I didn't set out to write a likeable protagonist. I set out to write a functional one.

Most fantasy heroes are defined by what they feel — a burning sense of justice, a rage against tyranny, a deep love that anchors them. Lucien Glacisse is defined by what he suppresses. He is not cold because he lacks emotion. He is cold because he has decided, very early, that his emotions are a liability he cannot afford. Every interaction is filtered through a lens of administrative logic. He doesn't read a room; he audits it.

This was a deliberate design choice, and honestly, a risky one. A protagonist who runs cold risks alienating the reader. You can't root for someone who won't let you in. So the challenge was never "Can I make him interesting?" — it was "Can I make his restraint feel like a wound instead of a wall?"

The answer, for me, was in the physicality. Lucien doesn't emote through dialogue. He emotes through temperature. When he's stressed, the air around him drops. When he's suppressing something dangerous, sounds go quiet. His body betrays what his words won't. The reader doesn't need him to confess his feelings; they feel the frost in the room and understand that something is being held back at enormous cost.

This is why the magic system matters. In Ardynia Nova, every use of power extracts a physical toll — caloric, thermal, structural. Lucien's entropic abilities aren't a superpower; they're a symptom. The colder he gets, the more he's spending. And what he's spending is himself. His restraint isn't stoicism. It's conservation. He's a man trying to survive on a budget that gets smaller every time he acts.

If I had to name one character from the genre who influenced Lucien by contrast, it would be Jorg Ancrath from Mark Lawrence's The Broken Empire. Jorg is brilliant, dangerous, and magnetic — but he burns. He takes the world's cruelty and throws it back with interest, daring the reader to look away. He is defiance made flesh.

Lucien is the opposite impulse. He takes the world's cruelty and files it. Where Jorg would kick down the door, Lucien would audit the hinges, note the structural violation, and have the building condemned by morning. They are both products of systems that failed them, but Jorg rages against the machine while Lucien becomes its most efficient operator — and quietly breaks apart inside the mechanism.

But if Jorg is the contrast, the deeper root is probably Raistlin Majere. Weis and Hickman built a character who was brilliant, physically compromised, and perpetually overshadowed by a twin brother who had everything that came naturally — warmth, strength, connection. Raistlin's tragedy was that he could never stop resenting the ease with which Caramon moved through the world.

Lucien is what happens if you take that archetype and remove the brother entirely. No Caramon. No warm counterpart to bounce off. No one to resent, and no one to anchor him. Just the brilliance and the frailty and the cold, with nothing to soften it. Where Raistlin's bitterness was always directed outward — at the world, at his brother, at the gods — Lucien's turns inward. He doesn't rage at what he lacks. He simply operates as though warmth was never an option, and builds his entire identity around the absence.

That tension is the engine of the character. Not the ice. Not the magic. The fact that somewhere underneath the wool coat and the silver cane and the perfectly balanced ledgers, there is a man who is afraid that if he ever stops working, he'll have to sit with what he actually feels.

The readers who connect with Lucien tend to recognise something in that restraint. Not because they're cold people, but because they understand what it costs to hold yourself together when the system you serve doesn't care whether you survive the process.

That's the character I wanted to write. Not a hero. An employee. One who happens to be very, very good at his job — and is slowly being consumed by the machinery he maintains.