Night of the Blood Moon (Characters)

Hayden is a character with a savior complex, stemming from his survivor’s guilt. He believes that he owes the world and needs to prove that he was kept alive for a reason, but as he tries to live up to his idealised version of his foster mother, Tallulah, he ends up setting unrealistic expectations of himself. Although he often makes reckless decisions at his own expense, such as leaving the car to fight which leads to his capture at the end of part one, it is not so much because he overestimates himself but that he values the lives of those he cares about over his own. In his eyes, his life for one of theirs is a more than worthy trade.

He was written to initially seem scheming and selfish. That is based on the image he upholds to convince not only other people but also himself. However, in scenes where he is around his close friends like Arielle, it becomes evident that he is not as strong as he pretends to be. He has a more childish and excitable side in the face of his interests such as cardistry and gambling which only few characters witness. Arielle is one of them, as a close friend who has known him since their childhood. However, her status as a non-Resonant makes him feel the responsibility to protect her, so as the danger around him increases in part one, he inadvertently distances himself from her too.

While the fire that killed his family was the start of his survivor’s guilt, the incident that shaped his personality the most was Tallulah’s capture. While she was alive, she was the ‘caretaker’ of their group, but once she was gone, he assumed that role as he was the only Resonant left. I like to believe that hope is very powerful and this is reflected in many parts of the story. In all honesty, Hayden knew that Tallulah was as good as dead once captured, but he clung onto the hope that she had survived out of desperation to motivate himself to carry on. What he didn’t realise was that he had somewhat succeeded in deluding himself into believing there was a chance that she was alive, thus delaying his grief. When he no longer could deny her death, the grief overwhelmed him and he didn’t know how to cope with it. He turned to Nikolai — someone who was conveniently present and Hayden knew would not turn him down — to momentarily distract himself from the pain, but this would later become an unhealthy coping mechanism instead.

The loss of his family and later Tallulah also led to him becoming prone to addiction, easily latching onto dependencies that he views as stable amidst the uncertainty he’s constantly faced with. In the years between Tallulah’s death and the start of part one, he cycled through other bad habits that Yura fortunately made him quit. Now, his primary crutch is gambling, which is furthered by his immense success at poker due to his keen perception and his impressive ability to lie like he’s telling the truth. The feeling of control that it gives him is one of the reasons he enjoys it so much.

As a character who’s also featured in my first novel, his personality has not changed drastically. He’s still a control freak who wishes to save the world, though his circumstances are quite different in the two stories. When it comes to Night of the Blood Moon, he was one of the characters that played a pivotal role in every draft, but never became a protagonist until the final version. He was originally meant to be the leader of a secret rebellion in the city, which I decided against because it didn’t feel quite right for him. After all, he’s never been a ‘hero’ character to me, rather somebody who comes across as untrustworthy but has an unexpected warmth beneath that.

When I was deciding who to include as one of the four main protagonists, Chaeli almost didn’t make the cut. It was between Arielle and her and I was leaning towards the former as I found that Hayden and Chaeli shared a common key trait — the desire to save people. However, to avoid having three protagonists be of a similar age, I decided to go with Chaeli instead. That was when I had to think deeper about her personality. I began to write her perspective in the second episode and it was when I reached the scene with the raid on Silo’s hideout that it clicked for me.

The two of them were raised in similar ways, with Tallulah trying to protect a rebellious Hayden and him doing the same for Chaeli. But unlike Tallulah who’d been in her 30s when she took Hayden under her wing, Hayden was only 20 when he saved Chaeli, thus treating her more like a little sibling to shelter than a child to teach about the world. Because of that, Tallulah was a mentor to Hayden and trained him to be as independent as her, while Hayden focused on keeping Chaeli away from danger instead as he, too, was still growing up as well. Compared to him, she ended up more skittish and indecisive, but at other times also takes things into her own hands in an attempt to prove she’s as strong as him.

At the same time, she hasn’t experienced the same amount of tragedy he has, so she’s far less cynical and more ambitious about change. With someone keeping the scarier parts of the world out of her reach, her curiosity was allowed to foster and this is evidenced by her constant thirst for knowledge. I tried to write her as a more relatable character, someone who wants to know more but is also afraid of crossing the line, which I feel like most people would be if faced with situations like hers. Her indecisiveness and occasional impulsiveness make her human, reminding the reader that in the end, she is still quite young and has a lot of room to grow.

Shortly after the story begins, she finds herself entangled in the affairs of Cressida’s work. This step out of her comfort zone makes her both uneasy and excited. Adding her newly discovered lunar corrosion onto that, there is a sense of urgency for her to find a solution even if it means making risky decisions and going to places that she would never have thought of going to before. Contrary to Hayden, Cressida fills the role of a mentor who doesn’t hesitate to show Chaeli the reality of the world. This arguably does more harm than good, though it succeeds in spurring Chaeli into action.

Chaeli becomes braver as the story progresses. She doesn’t stop being afraid, but she fights through her fears more often. Then towards the end of part one, she starts to realise that Cypheria’s secrets are darker than she’d expected and chooses to reign herself in, just a little too late. Hayden’s capture in Marchia makes her rethink the secrets she’s been keeping from her friends and she begins to understand that independence doesn’t necessarily mean she has to handle everything on her own.

In Chaeli’s story, Kwyn is a very significant character. He’s her first friend of the same age and someone who remembers nothing, thus has no prejudice towards her and the views she holds. That makes it easy for her to open up to him and bring him into her world, where he becomes her only true confidant. My intention is to write their relationship as an innocent, comforting one where they bring light into each other’s lives. With him, she can be an ordinary eighteen-year-old who gets to play games and have fun…at least until they’re finally forced to navigate the less glamorous parts of their pasts.

Unlike the other protagonists, some of the most significant events in his life have already happened to Nikolai before the story even begins. He is a much more pessimistic person who does not seem to care much about the world as he’s suffered enough at its hands. Although he escaped captivity in Bioscena and managed to return to Cypheria from the city of Skylis, the time that he has spent away has caused him to feel like a stranger in a city that was once his home. He adopts a dangerous lifestyle and trusts no one but his manager, Junko, until Hayden enters his life.

If you’ve read my first novel, you will know where this is headed. However, while their relationship remains complex, Nikolai’s personality has changed greatly. I would thus read him in this book as a separate character, without any preconceived notions. Anyway, he and Hayden are two sides of the same coin — two broken people with different experiences trying to find their places again in the same messed up world. Like Hayden, he’s slow to trust (much slower, in fact). But when he starts to care for someone, he can’t stop. That is why despite Junko’s threats and often aggressive behaviour, he still looks out for her and treats her as his family. After all, for the entire year after he returned to Cypheria, he and Junko only had each other.

Junko, of course, can’t understand what he’s been through. On the other hand, Hayden seems like he could, thus Nikolai finds himself latching involuntarily onto him so quickly. Knowing how similar they are, he is desperate to prevent Hayden from going through the same things as him. He is initially reluctant to participate in Yura’s research but finding a cure for Hayden became his motivation to help, even if it means revisiting his trauma. This change is pointed out by Junko who notices that he’s no longer as detached from the city’s affairs. He takes her warnings into consideration until he and Hayden enter a friend-with-benefits situation after the asylum break-in and he realises he’s too far gone, much to Junko’s chagrin.

His shared past with Hayden was not in the original plan, but I liked the idea of them being the ones who ‘saved’ each other — with Nikolai rescuing Hayden from a moon crawler in the lunar realm and Hayden returning after seven years to bring Nikolai out of despair. Although Nikolai claims to blame Hayden for his capture, I believe that he never truly did, only using it as a way to excuse the way he couldn’t stop thinking about him. Not necessarily in a romantic way, rather Hayden was a mystery that he wanted to understand. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get to until much later.

I wrote Nikolai as a character who’s inherently selfish yet not a conventionally ‘bad’ person. He is plagued by guilt from his actions in Bioscena but he’s also able to suppress or even deny it. It is when he kills the Executioner in the Crucible that he is forced to confront himself as a murderer. This worsens his tendency to push people away as he fears once again that he will hurt the people he cares about, or that they will leave him if they knew the things he’s done.

In a way, he sees himself as irredeemable. He knows how brutal his work in the Crucible can be. He’s also aware that there aren’t many better options for him. He plays into that image instead, deterring people from stirring up trouble with him. He eventually becomes one of the top dogs and leaders of the Crucible with the goal of eliminating Soulburn to protect the fighters, though he avoids admitting that as it would make him seem too ‘heroic’. Up until the end, he doesn’t really let go of this ‘tough’ persona, but he does mellow out around certain characters.

[Has not appeared in the story]

For the first three versions of Night of the Blood Moon (which never made it past the first chapter), Kwyn was the only protagonist. The story was told from his point of view where he, while amnesiac, would try to figure out how he’d ended up in Cypheria. However, I didn’t like this idea as it felt too cliché, especially when he would turn out to be the most powerful Resonant. I didn’t want to follow the common trope of the protagonist being the ‘chosen’ one, and it didn’t help that his personality felt too bland. That was why I decided to make him a character whose perspective is not explored, at least within part one. With this, I turned him into a more enigmatic character who is not guaranteed to be trustworthy.

Kwyn deals with plenty of dilemmas in the story, being just as uncertain whether to trust the protagonists as they are about him. However, the only thing I wanted to make obvious was his genuine concern for Chaeli, the only person he truly considers a friend in part one of the story. His initial goal in Cypheria was solely to track down the person who ratted out his family and led to their capture and he was completely prepared to take down anyone that Blaine wanted him to. But when Chaeli was kind to him and he started to care deeply for her, he broke his end of the deal multiple times to protect her.

Despite his allegiance to Blaine, his dorky and earnest personality are not an act. Chaeli made him feel at home in Cypheria. Nevertheless, he sees how eager she is to uncover secrets that he knows will put her in danger so he tries to stop her from the sidelines, including by ratting them out in the IrisNet mission as an exchange for the group’s guaranteed safety. Having seen nearly the full picture for himself, he does have much hope for Cypheria to change, at least until Chaeli convinces him otherwise. He will eventually be forced to confront his past decisions and the denial he’s been living in.

Cressida is driven by one goal: to save her brother, Dorian. Initial versions of her were actually very different. She was supposed to be a bubbly and determined character rescued by rebel group leader Hayden, who remains fiercely loyal throughout the story. When the rebel group idea was scrapped, I had to figure out where to put her. That was where I wondered if she could be someone who was more sinister — after all, Cypheria isn’t a kind place to its inhabitants. Her brother, originally meant to be a friend to Chaeli and Kwyn, was turned into a tragic family member whom she would fight to save.

At first, I wanted her to be part of Hayden’s plotline. She would’ve clashed with him as she wanted to experiment on Kwyn and they would later have become trusted allies. However, she was never supposed to be a villain, only a ruthless character driven by the strong motivation of familial love. Pairing her with Chaeli allowed me to strike a balance between her caring for someone and her ‘using’ them. Of course, she and Hayden still don’t get along. I don’t think they are very different people. In fact, I think it’s how similar they are in many ways that makes them wary of each other, for they see the parts of themselves that they dislike in the other person.

Cressida is a character who can’t really be classified as “good” or “bad” (not that I believe characters in general can be). She tends to believe that the ends justifies the means and has no qualms against using the people who’ve crossed her for her own benefit, or simply getting rid of them. She’s quite cynical in a way, and justifies her immoral actions with a lack of choice, viewing her perilous circumstances in Cypheria as what forces her hand. I purposely introduced her in a way that hopefully made her seem a little questionable. My intention was for the reader to wonder whether Arielle and Hayden were overthinking their suspicions of her, and eventually get to know a bit more from Chaeli’s point-of -view instead, when she actually gets to know Cressida personally.

In the first draft of the story, in which the rebellion group would travel through a vast wasteland from Cypheria to Skylis, Junko was supposed to be one of the bandits they would encounter in between. She and her own group of wanderers between the two cities would help the rebellion in its fight for freedom, and she wasn’t any closer to Nikolai than she was to the rest of the party. But when the two cities became separated by a cliff instead, there was no more middle area for the bandits, nor was there a need for them to exist. However, Junko is a character who’s existed even before Night of the Blood Moon, and I didn’t want to just erase her from the story completely. As I segmented the characters based on which protagonist’s story they would be most involved in, I found that Nikolai, being isolated after returning from Skylis, didn’t really know anyone. I decided to have the two of them meet, while also keeping Junko as a shady individual with her own personal agenda.

As mentioned in the story, Junko is a Watcher. She patrols her designated areas to keep order for the authorities and as a Cypherian Watcher (as opposed to those sent by Skylis), she isn’t let in on all of the city’s secrets. However, after meeting Nikolai, she learnt about Skylis and is aware of the situation with the two cities, although she does not care enough to think about changing anything for the better. Her main goal is just to earn money to support her parents. Because Watchers do not have a good reputation and tend to be outcasted by civilians due to fear, Junko cut off contact with her parents so she wouldn’t bring trouble to them. They do know that she is alive and thus requested Chaeli’s services to locate her, but Junko has stayed under their radar and continues to thanks to Chaeli. To her, this is a regretful yet inevitable decision. It ended up driving her to alcoholism to cope with the guilt and loneliness.

Her need for money has turned her to bounty hunting as well, in which she constantly keeps a look out for wanted individuals in the city. When Nikolai returned to Cypheria, Skylis put a bounty on his head and Junko sought him out. Her plan was to turn him in for a handsome sum of money, but he easily put up a fight and he, needing a manager to start fighting at the Crucible, struck a deal with her, possibly because he figured that it was better to silence her this way than to draw more attention to himself. The two of them spent a lot of time together afterwards, even moving into the same apartment building. Junko was the one who came up with his fighter name “Ryuu”. She doesn’t like to admit it but she appreciates his presence greatly as he is the closest to family she has now. While she is more than a decade older than Nikolai, he tends to be the more mature one between them. Nevertheless, Junko looks out for him in her own way which may not always seem right. Because of their forbidden knowledge and undesirable circumstances, she believes that it is best for them to stick in their own lane, so she dislikes Hayden for dragging Nikolai into his affairs. She also sometimes worries that Nikolai will leave her behind if he finds better company.

Admittedly, Arielle was supposed to play a bigger role in the story. Those who’ve read my first novel would remember that she was pretty much the third most significant character in the story behind the two protagonists. However, in Night of the Blood Moon, she takes a bit of a backseat. When I was planning the first draft of the story, I had Arielle as the team engineer, who was supposed to provide weapons for the rebellion group. However, when the rebellion group idea was scrapped, I decided to keep her “engineer” role but have her less involved in the action in part one. In this universe, her brother, Elijah, is living with her and I believe that he wouldn’t be fine with letting her get into all sorts of dangerous situations, especially when she has a choice to stay out of them. But of course, that’s just temporary — in part one, the situation in Cypheria hasn’t changed much outside of the protagonists’ experiences. As the story progresses and the stakes rise, and Cypheria as a whole starts to face the external threat of Skylis she will start to take part in the action as well to fight for her survival and her freedom.