Dear Friends:
It’s fitting that Alexander follows Duke Verlan in this series, because in many ways, he started as Verlan’s levee against the storm that is Agni Kazirian. A veteran captain trusted not just for his strength, but his judgment.
Alexander was never meant to be this deep.
At first, I conceived him as a classic fantasy bruiser—over seven feet tall, three hundred fifty pounds of unthinking muscle, an enforcer with maces for fists. The kind of man who could calm a rowdy bar by standing in a doorway and cracking his knuckles. But that had no place next to a warlord. Bandits need brutes. Warlords need wisdom.
He had to evolve with Agni.
Wisdom requires experience. And so, he became a man of the world. The son of a Tarkan trader and a Solantian wife, born in a port, given an Avician name, and raised on the sea with salt air in his lungs. He learned how to haggle in four languages, fought pirates throughout the Great Sea, and drank in the taverns Agni would plot to raze.
He would follow in his father’s footsteps but settle in the land of his birth and raise two sons. His wife would pass, and his sons leave to seek their own fortunes. When war rose, he had little left but his homeland…and soon, Agni, and through him, Kali.
In many ways, he is what Agni is not. Older. Grounded. Patient. Cautious. Cosmopolitan. He has little ambition and no desire for glory.
And that is why he matters.
Because he sees Agni not just as a commander, but as a boy burdened with too much fire and no safe place to put it. He believes in Agni’s vision of the land, but fears what it might become. He shields Agni’s soldiers from their general’s worst moods and keeps secrets locked behind respectful silence. He does not understand Agni’s “fits”—nor the darkness that emerges thereafter—but he stands firm through them.
And yet he is afraid.
Not of Agni the man, but of the unsettling shadow behind him. He knows Agni withholds something otherworldly. And in his own calm way, he tries to hold the line—not against an enemy army but something deeper that wars for Agni’s soul.
He does not know Anton Kazirian, but he feels the chill.
He has seen the world, the light in the darkness, weighed it, and decided that for all his fear, Agni is worth it. That he would give his life for the only family he knows.
And his bond with Kali. They share the task of grounding the Lord Guardian. She is not the demure daughter he never had, but the undaunted spirit of his sons in the body of an Aloi woman. He is her anchor to a life she could not live—a steady life, a loyal marriage—and the wise father she never knew.
He has no theme music that screams his name and his task. But if he did, it would be a low, steady drumbeat, a bulwark against the storm. The sound of a man who stands his ground.
For the Borderlands,
Joe