Sylla

Hard, cold, and calculating. He built a fully militarized society inside the Ark and sold his own people's blood for gold without losing sleep over it. He was a giant of a man without being a giant, and he loved war for its own sake—he pushed opponents to fight better because he wanted the fight to be worth having.

His island was the Ark's door: the Brazzant runs and the convict ships sailed from it, and it was his face that formed in the water of the Great Barrier to let a hull through. He kept five warriors he called his best—Polymarch was one—and twelve inquisitors, including Talus and the Eye of Sylla, whose bandages covered a medusa's eye. A knight who knelt by a stream and asked for him got an answer.

The power that made him censor was regeneration: wounds closed as fast as they opened. Valerium was the exception. What a Valerium shot opened stayed open—the same weakness the dwarves had found in Vlad Varanov.

He erased whole dwarven clans from the Ark's plains, and when Markus Telus fell he cast Total Destruction, the epic spell the Ark had last used against the desert trolls, and burned the dwarves out of every region they had taken. It cost him everything he had left; with the aqueducts broken there was no Partage to refill him, and Merenin walked into his hiding place while he was empty.

He lost, handed Merenin his glaive, and was destroyed by his own last Judgment along with the island. Two things came out of that cave with the dwarves. He had been hunting for the next Polymarch, and thought enemies as hard as Askenon and Cerberus were what it would take to make one. And he told Merenin, with nothing left to gain by lying, that Archon did not kill Askenar—that he had been there, and that the truth is a secret only Archon holds.