Every story starts with a question. For Barow’s Tempus of Bellum, the question was: what if the person Thor chose was the last person anyone would have chosen?

We looked at a lot of hero archetypes. The warrior who was always destined for greatness. The exile who returns. The orphan with hidden powers. All of them carry a certain inevitability — a sense that the story could only have gone one way. We wanted the opposite.

Barow is chosen because of his craft. The hammer recognized something in the way he worked — the patience, the precision, the respect for the material. Thor’s power doesn’t go to the strongest or the most heroic. It goes to the person who understands what a hammer is actually for.

A lot of reluctant heroes are reluctant for about ten minutes before the adventure takes over. We committed to Barow’s reluctance as a character trait that persists through the entire first arc. He doesn’t want this. He is afraid. He makes mistakes because of it.

The feedback from early readers was that this made him more compelling, not less. Watching someone be genuinely afraid and do the thing anyway is more interesting than watching someone be briefly inconvenienced before discovering they were secretly great all along.

Barow doesn’t discover he was secretly great. He becomes great, slowly, through cost and choice. That’s the story we wanted to tell.

Creator Notes

Characters

Behind the Scenes