Character Spotlight: Aricen
Hello everyone, today I have a special blog for you all — I'm unveiling one of the main characters from my book. He's one of the two protagonists, and today, I'm introducing Aricen!
Aricen is a tragic character with more baggage than he lets on. He's the prince of Pleiada, though almost no one knows it. In the main setting of the book, he's eighteen cycles old, and when war broke out on his homeworld, he never even got the chance to graduate.
He's spent years in and out of therapy — when he was six, his parents took him on a trip to Vaegha, and Vaegha was invaded. He lost them both that day, and it's a wound he's carried with him ever since.
Before that invasion, though, he was just a sweet, happy kid — the kind who loved being carried around by his busy parents wherever they went, lighting up every room he was in at Pleiada's central hub. After Vaegha, he was adopted by one of the hub's caretakers, Aria, and it took him a long while to find his voice again.
Eventually, he did — he made a close friend his age, a neighbor, and held onto that friendship for dear life as they grew up together. That friendship is a big part of his story... but I'll save that for another post. 👀
Fast forward to the present: Aricen had been studying to be a healer, hoping to help people if a tragedy like Vaegha ever happened again. But when war finally reached Pleiada, something in him broke — and instead of healing, he chose to fight for the home he loves.
He left Pleiada for another world, Alpharatz, to learn combat — and picked it up at a pace that startled everyone around him, though he just chalked it up to hard work. Somewhere along the way, desperate for something to change, he ended up somewhere he never expected... somewhere that would change him completely.
Just what happened to him there? How does it shape the war ahead of him? Stay tuned — there's a lot more to Aricen than meets the eye. 🖤
Art note: the image is AI-generated — a temporary reference/placeholder, not final art. Real character art is the eventual plan, just not a priority right now.