The script for the last panel reads, “His face has grizzled into a mischievous rage and his eyes have tinted ever-so-slightly red with blood.” If that seems out of place to you, well, it is: in all other instances, Byron would be cool as a cucumber in combat, except of course for the times when he really, really wasn’t.

But we had not actually figured out the Berserker Curse at this point, so our thought was that Byron would have this off-putting, five-percent-berserk aspect to him in combat, just a little crazy in his eyes beneath the self-control.

Not sure we could’ve maintained that even if we’d tried harder. To build on what I said earlier, in the Morbundi scene, he seems to be more or less a meathead, both because of how he behaves (“Hitting fire is stupid and I hate it”) and how others see him. We had a set of notes for each “class” our characters might belong to, and a lot of the notes for “field medic,” “musical warrior” and “mystic” got imported directly into our main cast. The notes for “fighter” read, in their entirety, “He’s a fighter.”

Frigg was pretty much all the “fighter’s fighter” we needed, though, and the more time we spent on Byron’s musings about the freelance life, the less inclined we were to make him just a simple-minded blade-swinger. He would see himself that way for a long time, though, so our early ideas about who he was weren’t entirely wasted.