“The heart of The Burden series.”
Every story needs an anchor, someone who carries us into the world before we even realize it’s becoming our world too. For The Burden of Honor, that anchor is Richard Matheson.
Richard begins as many of us do: young, hopeful, convinced that with enough effort and integrity he can shape the world into something better. But the world he inherits is war-torn, politically fractured, and haunted by the decisions of the generation before him. In many ways, Richard’s journey becomes a collision between who he wants to be and what the world demands he become.
Who is Richard?
Richard is a soldier in the 10th Engineers within the Royal Army, part of Eidelind’s military forces. He’s a young man who enlisted early and found himself quickly pushed into a role that required far more of him than he ever expected. He has an engineer’s mind, a soldier’s tenacity, and a heart that hasn’t yet learned how to give up on people — even when giving up would make things easier.
He’s not the loudest in the room. Not the strongest.
But he’s the one who steps forward when it matters.
Richard struggles with things many of us recognize:
- living in the shadow of expectations
- trying to make sense of right and wrong in a broken system
- carrying more responsibility than someone his age should ever have
- loving people he can’t always protect
- trying to stay human in the face of trauma
He is a character who feels deeply, even when he tries not to. His defining trait is empathy — sometimes his greatest strength, sometimes the thing that puts him in the most danger.
Key Traits
- Loyal — to his family, his friends, and to his conscience
- Perceptive — better at reading situations than he realizes
- Stubborn — once he believes he must do something, he does it
- Haunted — not broken, but never untouched by what he’s seen
- Courageous — the quiet kind, the kind that shows up even when he’s afraid
His Role in the Larger Story
Richard’s arc is the emotional spine of the entire Burden trilogy.
While political forces move in the background and nations shift on the board, Richard represents the grounded, human cost of it all. Through him, we see war not as a grand strategy but as something that reshapes people from the inside out.
The Burden series is filled with secrets, deception, old wounds, and people caught between loyalty and survival — but it’s also a story about identity. Richard’s search for truth, justice, and belonging drives much of Book One and beyond.
Why he matters
Because he is caught between worlds:
- the military and civilian life
- duty and personal freedom
- the expectations of his family and the expectations he has for himself
- the light he tries to stand in and the shadows that keep trying to claim him
Richard does not simply react to the world around him — he changes it, often without meaning to, simply by refusing to let it harden him.
A glimpse into his heart
Richard is, at his core, someone who wants to do the right thing even when the right thing is impossibly complicated. He carries the weight of loss heavily, and he loves fiercely — to the point where protecting the people he cares about becomes the driving force behind many of his decisions.
He is the kind of protagonist who does not ask to be the center of a story, but the story keeps circling back to him because he’s one of the few people trying to hold onto hope while everything else is unraveling. A man of principles, he continually refuses to stand in the shadows and instead maintains his composure within the light.
Closing Thoughts
If The Burden of Honor is a story of war, secrets, and the dangerous gravity of power, then Richard Matheson is the human pulse running through it. His journey is not about glory. It’s about survival, identity, and finding a way to remain whole when the world keeps taking pieces.