Spirit Rider - Acheron Dae-Cache Beachis

With me, as with most people, a series can live or die, based on its villain. Whenever gearing myself up and deciding if I wanted to read something or watch a film, I hope to see some glimpse of the villain in the blurb or the trailer. Even since I was a little boy, I’ve always liked the villains best. After watching Power Rangers each and every morning, I would run up to my bedroom and sketch out the monster from that episode.

And so we turn to Acheron Dae-Cache Beachis. Our leading Luceurge is everything I look for in a villain. He’s powerful, intelligent, cool, and suave. Always casual, he’ll more often than not engage Sam and Grim in some verbal sparring before the spells start to fly. Undoubtedly, were Sam not the luckiest boy on the planet, Acheron would have killed him a long time ago. So more often than not, it’s Grim who he faces off against. In many ways they are two sides of the same coin, both vastly intelligent and alarmingly powerful. Though if pressed, I might suggest that Acheron has a slight edge on her, when it comes to intelligence and planning.

Every time I write a scene with Acheron in it, my first thought is ‘make him cool’. He’s rarely flustered and often two steps ahead of everyone else, even if it seems he isn’t. Naturally, being the villain, he gets all the best lines.

He’s also one of my oldest characters, predating Spirit Rider as a series; he’s also gone through the most changes. Originally he was the villain of one of my aborted series about a futuristic wizard who cast spells with jewels and gloves. In his first incarnation, Acheron was more of a Lich, a zombie wizard. He had mottled skin and exposed bones in places. Most of his hair was missing and he generally looked like a mess.

But that series died before it was ever written, though I still liked Acheron’s character and moved him onto my ‘new’ series Spirit Rider. Back then his grand, master plan, the thing upon which the series turns, was pretty simple. He wanted to entirely corrupt his own soul, which was already mostly done, accounting for his zombie-like appearance. Only with an entirely dark soul could he kill pure and innocent creatures. Then I ditched that, made him normal and had him trying to resurrect his dead girlfriend. Again, not too original and it lowers his villain score significantly. Finally I settled on his current plan, which will remain a secret for quite some time. For a short while I fancied having him wear glasses and a leather trench-coat.  On a related note I suppose I should mention that Luceurgy, the brand of magic Acheron uses, was once Lucemancy, until I found out ‘-mancy’ was a common mistake and ‘-urgy’ is more appropriate.

I gave him a pet robin because it seems so innocent and innocuous. Having an adorable, fluttering robin really offsets his murderous personality. And of course Turdus isn’t there just as a pet, he holds more significance than anyone could ever imagine.