World of Aona

This is really the first proper introduction to the man known as Ilumor, who readers of Oblivion’s Forge had a the dubious pleasure of meeting briefly.

Ilumor, who dimly remembered being a mere human man once, rode near the head of the vast army. His horse, uneasy of his presence, often shivered and tossed her head, but Ilumor did not notice such things. His thoughts, oddly disturbed fragments for the most part, formed two distinct threads along which he idly wandered. The lesser of these concerned Serina; he was confident that the fresh diafagh would find her and tear her apart, but he would have preferred to see some part of her brought back; a bone for him to look at, a dead-eyed head for him to toss aside, anything tangible. I should have commanded that too, he thought, but it was difficult to give more than one instruction at a time to diafagh. The smearing of her blood across their dead lips was almost a command to find and ruin in itself, but anything more than that was asking too much. Theirs is a simple spark, he reminded himself, dim in radiance and dimmer still in intellect. Not all tools need to be sharp.

The other strand of thought, which occupied him more and more as they drew nearer to Nisstar, was of the Great Enemy, the marandaal to those who remembered the name at all. They would, he knew, emerge in Nisstar as the Earth-Lords had foretold, and they would burst forth like white light. Ilumor’s lips tightened in a grim smile. The test, he thought. This is the greatest test any of us can face.

As before, so again. The smile that adorned his lips now, wider and blissful, had the appearance of a dark crack. His eyes, like hard black jewels, gleamed in Ildar’s light. For a moment he recalled an occasion that mirrored this one, another long march over open ground under the same moon, over three thousand years ago. It seemed to him more recent than that, but Ilumor had spent much of the time since then dead to the world, in curious limbo, wandering the places that witches and their like sought to explore. His name had been Charn, a word that roughly meant That which seeps from the depths. And so he had, eventually, coaxed forth from the bitter darkness of the earth and from the sterile eternity of the Silver Road, by Serina of all people.

I knelt by her that night, he recalled, and I kissed her even as she recoiled at what she had done. The sense of sudden freedom addled my very being. How else could I have felt something almost akin to love?

Ilumor shook his head. She should have known that he answered only to his own lords, to the world itself, and not her shallow attempts to capture and contain powers for herself. Like all your kind, you think yourself a shaper, he had told her. But you are simply a shape. By now Serina had surely been snapped apart and was missing even the marrow from her bones, so that was another chapter to close away.

Ilumor had lived for a very long time, one way or another, but he was not in the habit of reminiscing.