User blog comment:Jedi Master 76/Retrospective 2 -- Origins/@comment-31421-20160208225754/@comment-35495-20160213081505

To be honest, most of the secondary and tertiary protagonists were created during later drafts of CD for the archetypes they were meant to fulfill. Ralina (then R'alna) was just the smuggler à la Han Solo with a comedic element. Jhosua is a rookie soldier who becomes stronger and stronger until he becomes something of an elite fighter. Nafyan is the man-behind-the-man. And so on. There were a few characters, Syme, Delvin, and Verita if I recall, who were amalgamations of old role-playing characters who were repurposed for the series.

Dynatha would have been the first new character of the final draft of CD. I organized the entire plot of the series just prior to writing that draft, so certain plot elements, like Raen's death, were already written in stone. At first, she was just going to be Raen's admirer/lover. When he died, she would have struck out on her own, found Tserne, and the two would pursue the big bad together. She wasn't always meant to become so formidable though, so she would have played second-fiddle to Tserne in the end. I changed that after Absolution. Since Tserne cannot really be the main protagonist given that the reader hardly knows about him, he's very one-dimensional in his goals, etc, Dynatha had to take his place. So in a way, Dynatha was in fact "key to all this" all along.