Kerberos and Aristide are two of my favorite characters in the series, so I decided to start my character profile talks with them! (Aristide will be in the next post.) Important: character profile posts do contain spoilers! If you haven’t read King’s Captive or King’s Shadow, I suggest you wait to read all Gate of Myth and Power character profiles until you finish!
Kerberos
Let’s start with it. Yes, I thought I was absolutely hilarious when I decided that my version of Kerberos would be a werewolf.
Kerberos is known as the three headed dog of the underworld and serves as a guard. When I was designing Ker’s character, I first considered having three siblings serve and calling them “Ker,” “Ber” and “Os,” but I decided it was more important to flesh Kerberos out as a deep character than to make her reflect mythology, so I centralized her into one character.
Ker is the oldest living werewolf—by centuries. Given that she was around before the war with the elves and lived through it, she’s been around the block. And yet, her cheerful temperament has kept her kind and gentle when time could have easily made her jaded. Her age does create a bit of a conundrum, though, as it means she can’t exactly go strutting around in her human form, creating records of her presence, or supernaturals are going to start wondering why there’s an immortal werewolf running around, which is why she typically acts as Aristide’s guide wolf when they’re in public.
As we learned in King’s Shadow, Kerberos lost her *entire* Pack in the war against the elves. We know from Pip’s series—Pack of Dawn and Destiny—that to a werewolf, nothing is more important than Pack and family. Normally that means it’s shocking Ker survived, but the truth is she made it because Aristide is a stubborn mule who was going to keep her alive even if it killed him, and because Ker herself was determined to live and love again.
Still, despite all the years, you can see that pain has left an impact on Kerberos, she just chooses to keep on living with her friends—and with the help of her beloved affirmations! Additionally, because her friends are her new Pack, you can also see that due to her love, she is going to help them whether they want it or not–whether that means trying to cajole Noctus into taking a break from work, or to tease Aristide about being a Nostalgia vampire to keep him from becoming one. (In particular, fans of Pack of Dawn and Destiny might be able to spy additional insights on the way Ker treats her friends and how it relates to pack dynamics/hierarchies.)
And that’s our closer look at Ker! What do you think now that you know more about her? Has she inspired you to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie?