Julian Aldric (Book 1)

Full Name: Julian Sebastian Rémi Aldric 

Date of Birth: 14 March 1994 

Height: 6'2"

Title: His Highness the Crown Prince 

Voice: He speaks in complete sentences. He does not trail off. His sarcasm is precise and dry and deployed like a tool — sharpest in private, most controlled in public. He asks questions he already knows the answers to, in order to find out how people respond under observation. He is very rarely surprised. When he is, he goes still rather than reacting. 

Appearance: Dark hair, thick and unruly, longer than convention would strictly require for a man in his position — it falls where it wants to and he has evidently decided not to argue with it, which is the only part of him that appears unmanaged. Dark eyes, the colour of strong espresso, the kind that register everything without appearing to. A sharp jawline under stubble that is maintained rather than groomed. He dresses in black, plainly and expensively, with his sleeves pushed back and his collar open one button further than a photograph would ordinarily allow — the concession of a man who has been working since seven and has stopped noticing the camera.

He is tall, and built like someone who has kept up the discipline of an athlete without any of the vanity, and he carries both the way he carries everything else: with the stillness of someone who has been watched his entire life. All four Aldric brothers are fashion icons in the European press; Julian is the standard the others are measured against.

And he looks directly back. Not a challenge — simply the steady, unhurried attention of a man who is entirely used to being observed and has never once found it interesting. When he is tired, which he is, always, though only a few people in the world are permitted to say so, there is a line between his brows that does not fully relax. It is there in every photograph taken of him this year. Nobody has mentioned it.

Personality: He is not cold. He is careful. The distinction matters, and almost nobody makes it. There are people who get past the perimeter. His mother. His sister Céline, who calls him Jules when she wants something and is the only person alive who is allowed to. With them the control drops enough that he is occasionally almost himself — wry, warmer, willing to be teased.

Background: Thirty-two years old, and for eleven months now the regent of Sorvaine — running a country whose Sovereign Prince's name is still on the letterhead. He governs well. Not as performance; genuinely well. He understands leverage, reads rooms with uncomfortable accuracy, and has a memory for detail that his Council finds either reassuring or alarming depending on which side of his attention they happen to be on. He chairs the pharmaceutical regulatory committee personally because no one else understands it well enough to protect Sorvaine's interests. He speaks four languages without thinking about it and uses whichever one the room requires.

He reads, and not state documents: fiction, history, things with no relationship to governance whatsoever. He walks the beach alone when he needs to think. He has not told anyone this. He needs nothing. He asks for nothing. He has built a life that runs perfectly well without anyone in it, and he has never once had cause to examine whether that was a decision or a consequence.