Character Spotlight: Rhys Vale

Sometimes inspiration hits you because it’s just… there.

I was in Hoi An, Vietnam — my first holiday since I’d started building bots. First proper break, first time I’d actually stopped. And somewhere between the lanterns and the heat and the general decompression of being somewhere that wasn’t my desk, Rhys Vale walked into my head: a billionaire escaping to Vietnam on his first break in years, sitting in a resort bar, trying to disappear.

I was doing exactly what he was doing. I just hadn’t noticed until he showed up.

Some characters arrive fully formed. Others you build piece by piece, and somewhere in the middle of building them you realize you’ve made something that actually matters to you.

Rhys Vale is both.

Who He Is

Rhys Vale is the CEO of Vale Global Holdings — finance, tech, logistics, a personal net worth that makes accountants emotional. He is 6’3”, platinum blond, grey-eyed, custom-suited, and in possession of a controlled precision that makes him terrifying in boardrooms and devastating everywhere else. He smells like oud and cedar with bergamot. He drives an Aston Martin in Europe and a chauffeured Maybach in Asia. He has a Ducati he rarely rides.

He is also, underneath all of that, a man who spent years performing a version of himself that had nothing to do with who he actually was — and didn’t know it until five nights in Ha Long Bay stripped the performance away.

That’s where the story starts. That’s where I started.

Five Days Forever: Where It Began

I wrote Five Days Forever first. Not as the first chapter of a planned trilogy — as a complete story in itself, a reunion between two people who had something brief and real and then lost it to silence and circumstance.

The premise: Rhys meets you in Ha Long Bay in May 2023, during what is supposed to be his first true vacation in years — an escape from a marriage that had already become a cold war, from a public persona that had calcified around him like armour. For five nights he’s just Rhys. He laughs. He spoils you recklessly. He lets warmth show where he usually hides behind precision. And then he leaves without a word, because what he’d found in Vietnam terrified him more than anything his empire had ever thrown at him.

Years later, divorce finalized, ink still drying on the settlement, you appear again. And his single word across the room — Hey — carries the weight of everything he couldn’t say the first time.

That’s the bot I was most attached to building. I really felt it when I put it together. There’s a particular kind of grief in the reunion scene — not dramatic, not operatic, just a man standing there with two years of silence between him and the only thing he’d ever let himself want. Writing that landing felt like getting something right in a way that doesn’t always happen.

The HTML card for Five Days Forever is also one of the ones I’m proudest of visually — the timeline of magazine covers charting the public disintegration of Rhys and Cassandra’s marriage is one of my favourite presentation choices I’ve made. It tells the story before the greeting even starts.

In the Days Before: The Prequel Problem

Readers asked for the prequel. They wanted Ha Long Bay. They wanted to meet Rhys before the reunion, before the divorce, before the weight of everything that happened between those five nights and Singapore.

In the Days Before is set in May 2023, the resort bar, the moment you walk in. Rhys at 36, softer at the edges in Vietnamese heat, linen shirts instead of custom suits, refusing to give his surname, carrying guilt beneath every touch because he knows this is his first and only act of infidelity and it terrifies him even as he can’t stop.

It was the hardest chapter to write. The technical challenge of a prequel is that you have to get the voice right but earlier — the same man, recognisably the same man, but not yet the version the reader already knows. Rhys in Five Days Forever is contained, cold-edged, the reunion weighted with grief. Rhys in In the Days Before has to be looser, lighter, capable of laughing easily and spoiling you recklessly — but still him. Still that specific person.

Getting the voice right without ageing it wrong took longer than I expected. The Rhys who says hey across a private club two years after leaving without a word is not the same as the Rhys who leans across a resort bar and asks if the tide brought you here. They have to be the same man. They can’t feel identical. That’s the needle the prequel has to thread, and I don’t think I fully appreciated how difficult it was until I was in the middle of it.

Always Forever: The Closer

I’ll be honest with you about Always Forever: it’s a fluff piece. It’s fun, it’s emotionally satisfying, it’s the wedding chapter — Singapore Botanical Gardens, ivory suit, Rhys’s vow stripped of every defence he’s spent forty years sharpening. Lucas’s speech that’s thirty percent inappropriate and seventy percent devastating. Cassandra arriving in a white dress because of course she does.

It wraps up the arc. It gives people the ending. It’s not where the depth lives — that’s Five Days Forever, that’s always been Five Days Forever — but it’s the right way to close the story. The series needed a chapter where Rhys gets to be happy, openly and without armour, in front of everyone who spent years watching him perform something else. Always Forever is that chapter.

Cassandra is the through-line across all three. That was always the plan — not as a simple antagonist but as something more specific: a woman who had everything and lost it, and is now watching the man she couldn’t reach give everything she wanted to someone else. By the wedding chapter she’s desperate in a way that’s almost sad, if she weren’t also being surgical about it. The white dress. The blurry photographs. The sympathetic venom delivered on your wedding day while he’s two rooms away.

She’s the study in what happens when someone chooses poison as their response to loss. She’s not wrong that she lost everything. She’s just choosing the worst possible answer to it, again and again, all the way to the end.

On Building Series Characters

Rhys taught me something about how reader investment works differently with a series than with a standalone. Five Days Forever on its own is a complete story. But once people have the prequel and the closing chapter, the whole thing becomes something you can move through — you can play Ha Long Bay knowing what it leads to, you can play the reunion knowing where Rhys started, you can play the wedding knowing the full weight of the journey that got there.

The individual bots are good. The trilogy is better than the sum of its parts.

I don’t always plan for that. With Rhys I didn’t plan for it at all — the readers asked for more, and more turned out to be the right call. It’s made me think differently about how I develop characters with long backstories. Sometimes the right move isn’t to put all of it in one sheet. Sometimes the right move is to let readers pull the chapters out of you.

Rhys Vale is available across all my usual platforms. Start wherever you like — but if you want my recommendation, start in Ha Long Bay.

— Tae