The version of Revenge Runs Red that did not survive the second draft had a mentor in it. He was old. He had a beard and a regret and a fortress, and roughly three chapters’ worth of dialogue prepared on the subject of why the Baronlands are the way they are. I cut him out in the third draft. The fortress went, the regret went, the beard went, the monologue went. That was the point.
Why I wrote a fantasy without a mentor
A fantasy without a mentor is a harder book to write, and that is not a coincidence. The wise-old-guide character is one of the most efficient exposition machines in the genre. Gandalf. Hagrid. Belgarath. Ogion. Brom. Every robed figure who pulls a farmboy out of a barn and tells him what the world is. The pattern persists because it works. The mentor is a license. He lets the writer dump a thousand years of history into a torchlit chamber and have the reader thank him for it. He gives the protagonist somewhere to look while the rules of the world get explained. He sets up the prophecy. He dies on schedule.
If you are an unknown writer launching a debut grimdark novel, you should probably keep him.
I did not.
It started as a creeping suspicion in the second draft that every time my old man walked on-page, the book got 20% less interesting. He was doing the work too well. Every question I had not figured out how to answer through the protagonist, I was handing to him. Every reveal I was too lazy to seed earlier, I was making him say.
So I cut him. The book got harder. The book got better.
The Gandalf/Hagrid pattern and what it actually does
The wise-old-mentor is older than fantasy. It is the archetype Jung called the Wise Old Man, the one Campbell wove into the monomyth, the one every fantasy writer since Tolkien has reached for at one moment or another. The job description has not changed in a century. An older, knowledgeable figure crosses the protagonist’s path, recognises what they cannot recognise about themselves, supplies the framework the story needs the reader to know, and exits before the third act can complicate his moral clarity.
Gandalf walks into Bag End and tells Frodo what the Ring is. Hagrid breaks down a door and tells Harry what he is. Brom corners Eragon on a hillside and tells him what dragons are. Ogion takes Ged in and tells him what magic costs.
The pattern is the easiest way to write fantasy.
Easy is not an insult. Easy is what gets the world on the page in 90,000 words instead of 200,000. Easy is what lets a debut land its premise inside chapter two so the rest of the book has somewhere to go. Brandon Sanderson uses the pattern, and he sells more books than I am ever going to.
The reason I cut mine is not that the pattern is broken. It is that the pattern was doing my work for me.
Why the mentor is a crutch for a writer like me
I came to Revenge Runs Red with a world I had been building in my head for years and a protagonist I was not yet good enough to put inside it. Darius was the hardest thing on the page for me. The man on the cover. The general turned exile. The one carrying a name on a traitor’s warrant. His interiority was the part of the book I was least confident I could pull off. The temptation of the mentor was to write around that confidence problem. To bring on an older, calmer voice who could tell the reader what Darius was thinking by reflecting it back at him in dialogue.
Every time I leaned on that solution, I was choosing not to solve the actual problem: write a man whose interiority does the work without an interpreter. The mentor is the interpreter. When you have one, you do not have to make the protagonist legible from the inside. You can make him legible from the outside, through someone else’s eyes. That is faster. It is also a different book.
I wanted the harder book. So the mentor had to go.
What replaces the mentor in Revenge Runs Red
Cutting the wise-old-guide does not mean cutting exposition. The world still has to land. The reader still needs to know what the Baronlands are, who the Shadow Council is, what a Berserker is, why a man like Darius matters in a war he is not currently fighting. The exposition has to go somewhere. In Revenge Runs Red it ends up in three places, none of which is a mentor’s mouth.
Inside the protagonist. Darius has lived in this world his entire life. He does not need anything explained to him. He knows what a Baronial levy looks like at dawn because he has called for one. He knows what a Council-trained operative moves like because he has buried friends who underestimated one. The reader rides his POV, and the world arrives the way it would arrive for a man who already understands it: in fragments, in assumptions, in things the prose does not bother to define because Darius would never bother to define them. The reader has to work. The reward is that the reader gets to feel like a competent native of the world rather than a tourist on a guided walk.
Inside the environment. The world tells you what it is. A burned village tells you who runs the next valley. The way a guardsman wears his armour tells you which faction paid for it. A coin in a man’s purse tells you which border he last crossed. None of this is described to anyone. It just is, on the page, and the prose trusts the reader to read it the way the reader reads a Cormac McCarthy paragraph. By the things named and the things unnamed.
Inside the cost of finding out. When Darius does not know something, he has to pay to find out. He pays in coin, in violence, in time, in the residue that asking the wrong question leaves on a man. There are things he does not know, because he has been in exile two years and the world has moved on without him. Information has weight in this book because it has a price. A mentor gives the protagonist information for free.
What the reader gets back
The readers I am writing for, the ones who read the post on earned darkness and nodded, would rather be respected than oriented. They have read the genre. They do not need a torchlit chamber. They want to walk into a world that already exists without them and be trusted to find their footing.
A mentor character is, structurally, a referee. He stands between the reader and the unreliable narrator and tells you when to trust him and when not to. Take the referee away, and the reader sits inside Darius’s head undefended. When he does something terrible, no mentor figure is going to step in and contextualise it. When he is wrong about the world, no mentor figure is going to correct him. The reader has to do that work themselves, and the reader knows it.
That work is what grimdark readers come to grimdark for. The complicity. The argument with the protagonist. The slow knowledge that the man you are riding inside of is not telling you the whole story even by accident.
The cost, said honestly
A fantasy without a mentor pays for itself in three places.
The opening is slower. The first quarter of the book asks more of the reader than a mentor-led first quarter would. I have heard from beta readers who put the book down at chapter four because they did not yet know what kind of book it was. That is a real cost. I have lost sleep over it.
The worldbuilding is more diffuse. There is no one chapter you can point at and say that is where the rules of the world get explained, because the rules are baked through the prose like salt into bread. A reader who likes their fantasy to deliver its framework cleanly in one early scene will not get that scene. They will get the framework, but they will get it the way you get a city. By walking in it.
The publisher pitch is harder. Anyone who has tried to sell a debut grimdark novel knows that “no Gandalf” is not on the list of features acquisitions teams scan for. I am self-publishing into Kindle Unlimited, which gives me the freedom to make this trade. Trad would have asked me hard questions about it. Some of those questions would have been fair.
The mentor is the easy way, and the easy way is often the right way. For this book, in this voice, with this protagonist, it was not the way I could live with.
So the beard came off. The fortress came down. The robe went into the fire. Whatever else Revenge Runs Red turns out to be when readers actually have it in their hands, it will not be a book that explained itself.