Chess is a soldier, and has been since he became a man.
He is an Eëcil – and the way the Eëcil live is very oriented towards duty and family, and the intersection between those two. Having family is a good thing, and staying with your family is imperative. However, many Eëcil are unable to be highly gregarious for social and economic reasons (particularly in the colonies, where Chess lives), and single men and women or small groups either split off from a family group that is verging on too large, or are sent off, to make their way in the world and form their own groups.
Chess was one of those single men, and after a year or so on his own he came across his younger brother, who had also split off, and they joined each other. For many years after that they were soldiers together, always together.
Then when he was thirty-eight, his younger brother, who was thirty-four, turned subversive to the political faction their soldiery was serving. He was sentenced to a punishment that was practically death. The faction was experimenting with turning a human into a half-automaton – no long-term memory, limited short-term, mentally compelled to behave in certain ways and to serve the people around them, no personality, no attachments to people, limited range of emotion – it's a cobha thing, I won't bother to explain now. Anyway, that's what they did to Chess's brother – 'neutralized' him, they call it.
There was nothing Chess could have done to stop it, and he did not try.
Chess counted his brother dead. He was dead, so far as it made any difference to anything. However, out of Chess's Eëcil sense of loyalty to family (and possibly his love for his brother), he never left him. He remained at the soldiery, even as the faction he was under grew more and more openly corrupt, to the point that Chess, if he had been on his own, might have left. But he never considered it, because of his brother.
He has very few strong attachments, but shows sympathy, compassion, and loyalty to his companions.
As a person, he is very quiet. He is always aware of his emotions, although not in much detail, and he rarely expresses them. He shows his beliefs and his feelings through actions, not words. He is accepting. He is principled, internally, but does not apply this to the people and groups around him very much, which is not always a good thing.
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If it was proved beyond doubt? 