2 tragic protagonists who lost everything in completely different ways

Quinn Cozens lost his old world. Sabre Kjaergaard learned hers was always a lie. That makes these tragic protagonists so similar, yet different.

Quinn Cozens and Sabre Kjaergaard would understand one another better than either would probably admit.

Both are stubborn, they question authority before most people around them realize authority deserves questioning, are fiercely protective of the few people they trust, and spend their respective trilogies wondering whether one bad decision will get someone they love killed.

But their losses aren’t the same, despite eerie similarities: Quinn loses a real life, and Sabre loses the illusion that she ever had one.

That difference makes Quinn’s story one of regret and reconstruction. Sabre’s becomes a tragedy about theft, betrayal, and surviving truths that keep getting worse every time she uncovers another one.

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Quinn had a family before he pushed it away

Before the world collapsed in Beyond the Lost Horizon, Quinn’s greatest wounds were mostly ordinary ones. He wanted to build a career writing about sports, independence, and to prove he could turn the thing he was good at into a freedom-based lifestyle.

And like too many ambitious people, he convinced himself those waiting at home would always be there. Quinn missed family time while chasing his career. He hid professional failures from his parents, spent hours in libraries trying to build something while pretending he still had a stable job, and watched other people his age succeed and grew angry that he remained stuck behind them.

Then he finally made it.

By the time Quinn became the writer and influencer he wanted to be — in both sports and libertarianism — his grandmother was dying. His grandfather followed not long after, unable to live without the woman he had spent more than six decades beside.

Quinn could not recover that lost time

His falling-out with his sister Jackie made the guilt worse. His younger sister had once been close enough to use him as a pillow. By adulthood, she could barely spare him a glance at their grandparents’ funeral.

He still loved her. But pride, jealousy, politics, ambition, and years of resentment built a wall neither knew how to tear down.

Then society collapsed before they could fix their relationship, and that’s Quinn’s next great tragedy. He lost the people he remembers laughing and arguing with, visiting, avoiding, disappointing, and loving.

His parents died believing their children remained estranged, and his grandparents died before he fully understood what his ambition cost him. Quinn’s grandparents’ old home’s another memory in a world where nearly every familiar place was burned, abandoned, occupied, or turned into a graveyard.

His pain comes from knowing he once possessed what he now wants more than anything.

Meet Quinn Cozens in the Beyond the Lost trilogy

Sabre never received the life Quinn wasted

Sabre’s story begins from the opposite direction. She never neglects a happy family and regrets it later. Instead, she discovers that nearly every important fact about her family was hidden from her before she was old enough to speak.

Sabre grows up believing she’s an ordinary girl in the People’s Republic of Vranom. The society’s controlling, but it’s predictable. She has a home, food. and she knows the rules, even if she increasingly wonders what happens when someone breaks them.

Then her Sentry heritage begins to surface. From that moment forward, almost everything Sabre believes about herself collapses.

The man she considered her father isn’t her biological father. Her mother never disappeared in the confusion of war. She has an older brother she never knew existed, and her biological father was once a celebrated Sentry Master before fear drove him into the Venn Order and turned him into the very monster hunting her.

Even the adults who protected Sabre lied to her

Some had understandable reasons. Others believed secrecy offered the only chance of keeping her alive. But intentions didn’t change what Sabre experiences.

Hindsight contaminated her childhood. Every comforting memory now contained an unanswered question, and every revelation forced her to reconsider the previous one.

Quinn knew he had a family and failed to appreciate enough of it, while Sabre discovered she had a family but was denied the chance to know it.

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Quinn’s haunted by what he did

Quinn carries personal guilt. He remembered choosing work over family gatherings, hiding his struggles because he never wanted his parents or Jackie to see him fail, and envying his sister because she appeared to have the stable, successful adulthood he wanted.

When terrorist cells overran America, Quinn immediately thought of his family. His mother knew where he planned to be. If she survived, she’d assume her son was dead. Jackie was in State College, another city struck during the coordinated onslaught. Quinn had no idea whether she survived.

That uncertainty followed him through the first book. He hoped to find familiar vehicles at the lake house, and imagined his parents and sister waiting inside some hidden colony. He knew those ideas were irrational, but catastrophe makes even the most rational people bargain with reality.

Quinn then carried another kind of guilt once survival became his daily life. Every person he protects was someone else he might lose. He’s terrified of becoming the man who survives while everyone around him disappears.

Sabre’s haunted by what other people made her

Sabre also blames herself, but her guilt’s more poisonous because other people cultivated it. Venn Rhine shares a psychic connection with his daughter. He exploits it, and sends false warnings and manufactured visions suggesting her friends are in danger.

Sabre acts because she loves them, but she also acts recklessly because Rhine knows which fear will break through her judgment. When something went wrong, Sabre never blamed the man manipulating her. She blamed herself for moving too quickly, trusting the wrong signal, or failing to become powerful enough before someone paid the price.

Sabre loses trust in her own mind because she can’t always tell whether a warning came from instinct, fate, prophecy, another world, or her father setting a trap.

As Sabre grew stronger, she discovered she can drain life forces and use their energy. Each use gave her the ability to save someone, destroy an enemy, or survive another impossible confrontation.

It also took her closer to becoming the heir Rhine wanted. So while Quinn feared failing the people he loved, Sabre’s afraid that loving them gave her father the exact weapon he needed to turn her into him.

Quinn’s story gives him another chance

For all the devastation in the Beyond the Lost trilogy, Quinn’s arc still bent toward reconstruction when he found Yui.

What started as two strangers fleeing a concert attack turned into the closest relationship either had ever experienced. Yui gave Quinn someone with whom he can imagine a life after the ruins — if both survive the gauntlet.

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Sabre’s second chances kept dying

Sabre got glimpses of the life she wanted, but the trilogy repeatedly tore them away. She hoped to redeem her father, to find her mother, and that the war might end with her family restored, the lies exposed, and everyone finally allowed to live as they choose.

Sabre grew close to people, only to watch them die, sacrifice themselves, or suffer because they stood beside her. Just as she learned enough to understand one relationship, fate demanded its price.

Her brother represented the childhood stolen from both of them, her mother symbolized the life that should’ve existed, and her mentors were the truth she should’ve received before the world forced her to learn it through blood.

Sabre’s tragedy’s the hope that kept returning just long enough for her to believe it until it died again.

Quinn Cozens loses his world. Sabre inherits the burden of hers

Quinn and Sabre emerge as protectors, but they arrive there through opposite roads. Quinn once chose ambition over presence. After losing almost everything, he decides that people matter more than the career, recognition, or old dream that once consumed him.

Sabre never had that choice. Her heritage, her father, the Venn Order, and prophecy put demands on her before she had time to decide what she wanted from adulthood.

Quinn got a chance to rebuild a family after the world collapsed. Sabre had to keep her world from falling while mourning the family she never had intact.

Quinn’s pain feels more familiar, because of the fear that we will look up from our work, our grudges, and our private ambitions after the people we love are gone.

Sabre’s pain’s more mythic. Hers is the fear that our identity, family, and memories were shaped by forces that viewed us as nothing more than a future weapon.

The difference between regret and theft

Quinn would tell Sabre not to waste whatever time she still has with the people beside her, and Sabre would probably tell Quinn he was lucky to have memories that were real.

Quinn’s tragedy is that he had love and never honored it until the world forced him to understand. Sabre’s tragedy is that love, truth, and family were separated before she ever had the chance.

One man spent his trilogy learning that a ruined world can’t keep him from building a home, and one girl spent hers learning that saving the world may cost her every version of home she ever desired.

Quinn Cozens lost his old life, and Sabre Kjaergaard discovered hers had been stolen before it began.

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