Why My Hero Is a Homeless Man in His Seventies

Fantasy has a habit of beginning with people who are about to become important.

Young people leaving home for the first time. Soldiers discovering what they are capable of. Heirs learning who they really are. Apprentices finding power. Chosen people being told that the world has been waiting for them.

There is nothing wrong with those stories. I have loved plenty of them.

But when I began The Box of Dead Heroes, I wanted to start somewhere else.

I wanted to begin with someone the world had already stopped asking anything of.

That became Elias Whitlock.

He is in his seventies. He is homeless. He is hungry. He has spent years moving between alleys, abandoned rooms and whatever shelter he can find. The one thing he has protected through all of it is an old box he has carried for most of his life.

His opening belief is brutally simple:

I wasted my life.

But being old and homeless is only part of what matters about Elias.

More importantly, he is forgotten.

A man outside the city

Elias lives in Titan, but he is barely part of it.

That distinction became increasingly important while I was writing him.

Titan is an occupied city built around systems. People have jobs, classifications, ration allowances, responsibilities, records and places they are expected to be. The system may be cruel, but most people are still caught inside it.

Jack Mercer, another of the central characters, is a good example. Jack works. He has quotas. Supervisors know his name. The city records his usefulness. It tells him when to arrive, what to carry and what will happen if he fails.

Jack is trapped inside the machine.

Elias is almost outside it entirely.

Nobody expects him at work. Nobody notices when he does not arrive somewhere. Nobody is waiting for him to come home.

There is no home.

The city has not dramatically banished him. There was no ceremony where Titan declared that Elias Whitlock no longer mattered.

It simply learned to continue without him.

And eventually Elias learned to continue without expecting anything from it.

He watches life happening around him, but he does not really participate in it. People work, queue, eat, complain, go home, raise children and worry about tomorrow.

Elias looks in from the edges.

That was the starting point I wanted.

Not a hero who has lost his throne.

A person who has lost his place.

I understand more of that than I would like

I am not in my seventies.

I turned forty-five this week.

That is not old, despite what certain parts of my body occasionally try to tell me.

But I understand something now about the pull of age that I could not have understood properly at twenty-five.

There is a point where time begins to feel less theoretical.

When you are young, there seems to be an enormous amount of it ahead of you. Whatever you have not achieved yet can happen later. Careers can change. Plans can be restarted. The version of yourself you imagined becoming still feels as though it is somewhere up ahead waiting to be reached.

Then birthdays start carrying arithmetic.

I thought I would have done this by now.

I thought I would be there by now.

I thought my life would look different.

And alongside your own expectations are the ones other people once had for you.

When I was young, I think there was an assumption that I would do something significant with my abilities. There were expectations around what I might become, what kind of career I would have, what I would accomplish.

Some of those expectations came from other people.

A lot of them came from me.

Forty-five is old enough to look backward and realise that not every imagined version of your future became real.

That does something to you.

And over the last year especially, I have felt much closer to Elias than I probably intended when I first created him.

Outside the workplace

I have been out of work for more than a year.

One of the things I underestimated before it happened was how much employment provides beyond money.

Work gives structure to time.

There is somewhere you are expected to be.

There are people who notice whether you arrive.

There are conversations you have because another human being happens to be sitting nearby.

There are problems that belong to today rather than to the whole of your life.

There is a Monday and a Friday.

There is a reason to get dressed at a particular time.

There are co-workers. Meetings. Irritations. Deadlines. Tasks. Lunch breaks. Someone asking whether you have finished the thing you said you would finish.

A lot of those things can be exhausting when you are inside them.

Their absence can be surprisingly heavy.

When you are outside the workplace for long enough, the rest of the world does not stop.

People still go to work.

They complain about Monday mornings.

They get promotions.

They change jobs.

They talk about colleagues.

They make plans around annual leave.

The machinery keeps moving.

You are simply no longer moving with it.

I do not mean that my circumstances are the same as Elias's. They obviously are not. I have a home. I have people who love me. I am not starving in an occupied fantasy city.

But emotionally, I recognise the shape of standing outside something that used to structure your life and watching everybody else continue inside it.

There is a particular kind of invisibility in that.

Not that nobody cares about you.

That the system does not need you today.

There is no desk waiting empty.

No shift uncovered.

No meeting starting without you.

You can very quickly begin confusing not currently having a role with not having value.

I think some part of Elias came from there.

So I started writing

Writing did not begin as a grand replacement career plan.

I was outside the traditional workplace. I had time that no longer had its old structure, and I needed somewhere for that time to go.

So I wrote.

Then I finished something.

Then I published it.

Then I wrote another.

Eventually writing began creating some of the structure that work had taken with it.

There was a chapter to finish.

A manuscript to edit.

A cover to approve.

Formatting.

Proof copies.

Publication dates.

Emails.

Websites.

Marketing.

Readers.

It did not replace everything that had disappeared.

It did something else.

It gave me a way to participate.

That word keeps turning up in these books, and I do not think that is accidental.

I was writing about a man who had spent decades outside his society while I was trying to work out what my own place looked like after falling outside a structure I had taken for granted.

Elias carried a box.

I started making books.

Different circumstances.

Perhaps a similar question.

If the role you thought you were supposed to have disappears, what do you do next?

Being ignored can be worse than being hated

There are many forms of oppression in Titan.

Some are obvious.

Some are frightening precisely because they are not.

Elias occupies a strange position within that world because nobody needs to actively persecute him for his life to be terrible.

He is already easy to overlook.

If someone important disappears, questions might be asked.

If a worker disappears, a shift may go uncovered.

If a parent disappears, somebody waits for them.

If Elias disappears?

For much of his life, very little changes.

That was important to me.

I did not want his homelessness to function as shorthand for gritty fantasy. I did not want it to exist simply to tell the reader that the world was unpleasant.

His homelessness is about social invisibility.

He owns almost nothing. He is expected almost nowhere. His absence creates almost no administrative inconvenience.

And perhaps the worst part is that, by the time the book begins, Elias has internalised much of that judgement.

He no longer needs Titan to tell him he is irrelevant.

He has already decided it for himself.

That thought hits uncomfortably close to home.

Because once you have spent enough time measuring yourself by usefulness, unemployment does more than remove a job.

It can begin to ask what is left of you when nobody is paying for your time.

And if you are already struggling with depression, that question can become vicious very quickly.

Once, everyone could see him

What makes Elias's beginning hurt more is that he remembers a very different life.

As a child, he stood close to the centre of Titan's attention.

His father, Aldric Whitlock, was one of the heroes Titan celebrated. Elias remembers the Parade as colour, food, noise, music, crowds and a boy watching his father being loved by an entire city.

Once, his family was visible enough that people moved for them.

Decades later, Elias can pass through the same city almost unseen.

I found that contrast far more interesting than making Elias a forgotten hero himself.

He was never the legend.

He was the child standing next to one.

He grew up close enough to history to feel its heat, then survived long enough to watch history harden into story and himself into somebody nobody particularly remembered.

That connects to another feeling I recognise: the weight of expectation.

Elias grew up with a heroic father.

That is an extreme version of something much more ordinary.

What happens when the future people once imagined for you becomes another thing you carry?

What happens when you remember being young enough that everyone spoke about what you could become, and eventually you reach an age where you have to compare that possibility with what actually happened?

It is very easy to make that comparison cruelly.

To treat every road not taken as evidence.

To turn your younger self into another person you have disappointed.

Elias begins the novel having done exactly that to himself.

I wasted my life.

Not: terrible things happened to me.

Not: the world changed.

Not even: I made mistakes.

I wasted it.

He has turned an entire lifetime into a verdict.

I understand the temptation.

The box is the last thing he still belongs to

For sixty years, Elias carries one connection to his old life.

The box.

He has lost homes. Lost people. Lost any meaningful place within Titan.

But he has not lost that box.

He protects it. Carries it. Sleeps beside it. Keeps it closed.

Somewhere inside himself, he has built an entire mythology around what it represents: legacy, burden, perhaps some final purpose he failed to understand.

When he finally opens it, he expects something worthy of legends.

Instead, it changes the shape of those legends.

The box does not give Elias a prophecy. It does not reveal that he is secretly important. It does not contain instructions telling him how to save the world.

It gives him people.

Letters.

Relationships.

Private jokes.

Objects kept because somebody loved the person who once held them.

Evidence that the legendary heroes were ordinary to one another long before they became legends.

The canon of the trilogy is deliberately built around that distinction: Elias recognises people before greatness, and his memory becomes useful without making him young, powerful or wise.

That is what begins breaking something open in him.

I did not want him to become secretly extraordinary

This was important enough that I kept checking it while writing.

There is a very tempting version of Elias's story where the old homeless man eventually reveals that he used to be an incredible swordsman.

Or discovers dormant magic.

Or learns that his bloodline matters.

Or turns out to be the missing key to an ancient prophecy.

I did not want any of those things.

Elias is old.

His body hurts.

He gets tired.

There are things younger people can do that he cannot.

He is not especially wise.

He remembers.

That is different.

I did not want to write about an ordinary man discovering that he had secretly been extraordinary all along.

I wanted to write about an ordinary man discovering that ordinary did not mean worthless.

And perhaps there is some selfishness in that.

Because I need that argument too.

I need there to be a version of value that is not simply a list of career achievements.

I need forty-five not to be a deadline after which the things I have not achieved become more important than the things I still might.

I need losing one structure not to mean losing the right to build another.

Writing and publishing books has become part of that argument.

I do not know where it goes.

I do not know whether I will ever make meaningful money from them.

I do not know whether The Box of Dead Heroes will find hundreds of readers, thousands, or a handful.

I cannot know the end result yet.

But I know what happens if I do not write the book, publish it, send the email, ask the reviewer, make the post or take the next step.

Nothing.

The road cannot go anywhere if I refuse to walk because I cannot already see the destination.

From looking backward to looking around

Elias is Memory within the architecture of the trilogy.

But memory alone is not enough.

At the beginning of The Box of Dead Heroes, he has effectively turned memory into somewhere he lives.

The dead are safer than the living.

The past is painful, but it is finished.

The present requires participation.

Opening the box begins breaking that arrangement.

Once Elias starts seeing the people beneath the legends, something changes in the way he looks at the living.

That is where Jack becomes important.

Elias does not notice Jack because Jack looks heroic.

He notices him because Jack stops.

In the middle of an ugly, ordinary civic process, Elias sees this huge, exhausted worker kneel down to comfort a frightened child.

It is a very small thing.

That is why it matters.

Elias has spent most of his life staring backward at legends.

Now he begins noticing people standing in front of him.

That is the real beginning of his story.

Nobody asks him to participate

This may be the part of Elias that matters most to me.

Nobody comes looking for him.

Nobody says, Elias Whitlock, the city needs you.

Nobody tells him this is his destiny.

There is no invitation.

For years Elias has existed as a man nobody asks to participate.

Then he begins participating anyway.

He interferes.

He asks questions.

He notices people.

He puts himself somewhere he does not belong.

He acts before anyone has certified that his actions matter.

I think that is one of the things I have been trying to learn over the last year.

There are parts of life where permission is useful.

There are other parts where waiting for someone to give it to you can become another form of disappearing.

Nobody was going to appoint me an author.

Nobody was going to arrive and tell me that, because one part of my life had stalled, this was officially the correct next thing.

I wrote.

I finished the manuscript.

I published.

Then I did it again.

There are still plenty of days when I do not feel successful.

There are days when being out of work weighs far more heavily than having written several books seems able to counterbalance.

There are still applications, disappointments, worries about money and questions about what happens next.

Writing has not magically resolved those things.

But neither are they the only evidence I am allowed to consider.

That matters.

Getting older without becoming finished

Perhaps that is why Elias being old matters after all.

Not because seventy-four is inherently interesting.

Because we have a habit of treating lives as though their significant parts should happen on schedule.

Education.

Career.

Marriage.

Home.

Achievement.

Retirement.

And underneath that is often another assumption: that the older you become, the more your life belongs to what has already happened rather than what might still happen.

Elias begins the book believing that.

His meaningful years are behind him.

His father's story is behind him.

Whatever he might once have become is behind him.

The box is behind him, literally carried on his back.

Then he opens it.

His life does not reset.

He does not get his youth back.

The years do not become fair.

He simply discovers that not being at the beginning does not mean you are already at the end.

That idea means rather more to me at forty-five than it would have at twenty-five.

I can feel time now.

I can feel the weight of things I expected to have accomplished.

I can feel the comparison between where I thought I would be and where I am.

But there is still an enormous difference between not having become everything I expected and being finished.

Those are not the same sentence.

I think Elias exists partly because I needed to write that distinction down.

Why him?

So why is the protagonist of my dark fantasy novel a homeless man in his seventies?

Because age alone was never the point.

Homelessness alone was never the point.

I wanted someone forgotten.

Someone ignored.

Someone the machinery of his world barely bothered to account for anymore.

A man with no job waiting for him, no heroic reputation of his own, no prophecy demanding his presence, and no institution interested in whether he turned up tomorrow.

Someone who had begun believing that his absence would make no difference.

I am not Elias.

But I recognise pieces of the view from outside.

I recognise the loss of structure.

I recognise watching systems continue without you.

I recognise measuring yourself against the expectations attached to a younger version of yourself.

I recognise wondering whether you have done enough, become enough, mattered enough.

And I recognise the need to find some answer other than simply accepting the verdict.

The Box of Dead Heroes is ultimately interested in a question much smaller than whether one old man can save a city.

It asks whether someone who has spent years outside life can decide to participate in it again.

Elias begins with almost nothing left except memory.

His story begins when memory stops being somewhere he hides and becomes a reason to look at the world again.

First at the people he lost.

Then at the people still standing in front of him.

He does not become younger.

He does not become powerful.

He does not discover that Titan secretly needed him all along.

He begins to understand that participation does not require permission.

Maybe that is part of why I needed him.

Because at forty-five, outside the workplace I expected to still belong to, still trying to work out what the next part of my own life looks like, I do not particularly need a story telling me that I was secretly destined for greatness.

I need one that says the next step still counts.

Even now.

Especially now.