This is not an exhaustive list; I didn’t create wiki pages for every character. What’s listed here is simply the ones I did write up. Note that if you see words with “?” after them, those were originally links to other articles. I tried to remove them, but may have missed a few.
Yeine Darr/Arameri
Yeine dau she Kinneth tai wer Somem kanna Darre — daughter of Kinneth, member of the Somem clan, of the Darre people — is the protagonist of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. (Her name has an acceptable short form: Yeine Darr.) Nineteen years old at the time of the story, she is the product of a “legendary” romance between the then-Baron of Darr and the Lady Kinneth Arameri, heir of the Arameri clan. Having risen to become ennu (Baron, in Amn parlance) herself after inheriting the title from her father, Yeine has ruled Darr for three years, since the age of 16. She loses this title when she is formally adopted into the Arameri family, becoming Yeine Arameri.
Though half Amn and half Darre, Yeine looks mostly Darre. She has deep brown skin, black hair, and rounded features, and she is very short — about five foot two. She does have some Amn characteristics: her hair is loosely curly, and she has little in the way of breasts or hips or visible physical strength. Her eyes are green, but of a different (paler, “faded”) shade than those of most Arameri; this is the result of the gods’ tampering as much as genetics.
Yeine has a serious nature, the partial result of having inherited so many responsibilities so early in life, though she retains a certain wry wit. She is a warrior of necessity, not out of any great desire for battle, and although she is quick to go for her knife, she’s also pragmatic enough to understand that fighting can be only one part of her political toolkit, and not the most important part. This reflects both her parents’ natures. She is also quick to love both Sieh and Nahadoth, though this may reflect Enefa’s influence.
Before her birth, as part of a bargain between Kinneth and the Enefadeh, Yeine was implanted with the soul of the long-dead goddess Enefa. As a result, Yeine strongly resembles Enefa in physical form and somewhat in personality. Moreover, Yeine has the unique ability to awaken the Stone of Earth’s full power, which no other mortal can do. Should she use the Stone while alive, it will kill her, but in the moment before she dies she will wield a god’s ability to completely rewrite reality — and among other things, she’ll be able to free the Enefadeh. Because she in fact uses the Stone while dead, she absorbs the Stone’s power.
As the new Goddess of Twilight and Dawn, Yeine has all Enefa’s power, but her personality and memories are her own. She continues to resemble her mortal form, though she takes on other forms and answers to other names (e.g., “the Gray Lady”).
Dekarta Arameri
Head of the Arameri family at the time of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. He is in his eighties at the start of the novel.
Forty years prior to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Dekarta made the choice that would set the novel’s events in motion. As part of the Arameri ritual of the succession, he sacrificed his wife Ygreth Arameri in order to become heir. He attempted to conceal this from their young daughter Kinneth Arameri, but she later learned the truth. As part of her plan for vengeance, she eventually abdicated her position and left the family to marry Baron Darr and bear Yeine. Her abdication broke Dekarta’s heart.
Afterward, Dekarta chose Relad Arameri and Scimina Arameri as his new heirs, forcing them into competition with each other. Some years later, when Kinneth died under mysterious circumstances, he suspected her daughter, and therefore summoned Yeine to Sky and forced her into the competition too. When he finally realizes his suspicions were mistaken, he confesses some regret at setting Yeine’s death in motion. When Yeine becomes a goddess instead, Dekarta is grudgingly pleased.
He dies of natural causes shortly after The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, leaving T’vril Arameri as his heir.
Relad Arameri
One of the Arameri heirs at the time of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Yeine’s first cousin, once removed.
Relad and Scimina are twins; Relad is the younger of the two by several minutes. He is blond and tall, though not well-built. He has been a high-functioning alcoholic for several years by the time Yeine meets him.
Though Relad is fully as intelligent and capable as his sister, he lacks the ruthless nature expected of an Arameri highblood — a fact that Scimina has exploited over the years. All of Relad’s friends, lovers, and children (he has many, mostly by servant women) have been turned against him or effectively destroyed by Scimina; by the time Yeine meets him, he has voluntarily given up meaningful relationships with any other human being, realizing that Scimina — ironically — is the only person he can safely love. He therefore sends her addled poetry written during his drunken binges, has sex with women he’s openly chosen because they resemble his sister, and makes gifts to her of pretty young men who resemble himself in his younger days, all of which are calculated to annoy her.
Though he has no particular liking for Yeine — being as bigoted as any other highblood — in a last-second gambit, Relad convinces Yeine to name him heir instead of Scimina. Though he succeeds and is named heir by Yeine, things go awry at the ritual of the succession, when Nahadoth and Itempas battle over Yeine’s murder. In the confusion, Scimina stabs Relad to death with Viraine’s knife.
Scimina Arameri
Yeine Darr’s first cousin once removed. She, like Relad, is the daughter of Dekarta’s older brother. Also the twin brother of Relad Arameri; Scimina is the elder of the two by several minutes.
Scimina and Relad were two of four children. The eldest (unnamed) was somehow assassinated despite her blood sigil; it is implied that Scimina or another of their siblings managed to do this. The second-oldest child was T’vril Arameri’s father; he was executed for the scandal that led to T’vril’s birth. Since then Scimina and Relad have been Dekarta’s prospective heirs; Dekarta shows no particular favor to one or the other, and indeed doesn’t seem to like them much. As a result, Scimina and Relad have been engaged in a private war for influence and money for several years, each hoping to defeat the other and impress their uncle enough to become sole heir.
At the time of HunThou, Scimina is in her thirties. She is unmarried, has no permanent lovers, and has one child, whom she gave away to be raised by servants as the child is a halfblood (a fact she uses to torment T’vril, though T’vril has made it clear he doesn’t care). She is considering marriages with several Arameri offshoot clans in order to produce fullblood children, but she intends to wait on this ’til after the succession. She is described as tall and slender, with sable hair and pale skin and a penchant for wearing jewel-toned dresses (the one exception being her dress for Yeine’s ball, which is white because all guests aside from Yeine must wear white). Her eye color is never mentioned. She’s extremely wealthy, having parlayed her seed stipend into a fortune by means of judicious investments; she uses this wealth to buy influence far beyond her assigned kingdoms. In secret she despises her own father for having failed his succession contest (being killed by Dekarta afterward) and leaving her at Dekarta’s mercy; because of this she is determined to win her own contest, even if it means killing the brother she once loved.
By day, Scimina keeps the human form of Nahadoth in her quarters, using him for sex or other entertainments. She is well aware that he hates her and will kill her if her control of him ever slips; it’s a safer version of the game she plays with god-Nahadoth, though she knows better than to use the latter for sex.
During the Ritual of the Succession, Scimina witnesses Itempas’ appearance and Yeine’s transformation into a goddess. She murders Relad during the distraction. Afterward, the newly-freed Nahadoth takes her away to the gods’ realm, where it is implied that she died eventually.
Kinneth Arameri
Daughter of Dekarta and Ygreth Arameri, mother of Yeine Darr. At one point, Kinneth was the sole heir to Dekarta, before she abdicated her position and left the Arameri in order to marry Mineiyi (Yeine’s Darren father).
When Kinneth was five years old, her mother vanished. Though she was told that her mother was simply gone, she spent the next few years trying to find out what had happened. By questioning the Enefadeh and, eventually, seducing First Scrivener Viraine, she learned that her father had killed her mother as part of the Arameri Ritual of the Succession. As Dekarta loved Ygreth and she him, most likely he convinced Ygreth to willingly kill herself in order to make him Lord Arameri — since otherwise Dekarta’s brother (Relad and Scimina’s father) would’ve killed him and possibly Kinneth.
This knowledge had a profound effect on Kinneth. She continued to play the role of the dutiful Arameri heir, but in truth she turned against her father and dedicated herself to revenge. To that end she conceived a daring plot to free the Enefadeh, since they were the source of Dekarta’s power. If Dekarta treasured his power more than even his own family, she decided, she would take that power from him. She was fully aware that this would trigger a second apocalyptic Gods’ War. As Viraine later notes, Kinneth was a quintessential Arameri, with a very Itempan dedication to getting her way regardless of moral right.
As part of this plan, she made contact with a secretly heretical nobleman, the Baron Mineiyi Darr. Though it isn’t clear whether she initially loved him, eventually she chose to marry him. Dekarta forbade the union due to Baron Darr’s status as a lowly noble and non-Amn, but Kinneth chose to abandon the family to be with him. This devastated Dekarta, who disinherited her but continued to hope that Kinneth would recover her senses and return. It also devastated Viraine, who had been in love with her.
At some point about twenty-one years before HunThou, Baron Darr came down with the Walking Death — a terrible illness caused by magic. Kinneth brought him to Sky and demanded to know whether her father had had him afflicted with the disease; Dekarta denied this. She then begged her father’s help in saving him; Dekarta refused. However, as she left, the Enefadeh approached her, offering to heal him in exchange for another life — Kinneth’s unborn daughter Yeine, whom they wished to use as a vessel for the soul of Enefa. Kinneth agreed and the bargain was made. As a consequence of Kinneth’s leaving a second time, Dekarta then disowned her altogether. Her Arameri blood sigil was burned off at this time by Viraine, leaving her vulnerable to the Enefadeh. She bore a scar on her forehead until the time of her death twenty years later.
Unbeknownst to Kinneth, her husband’s illness was caused by Viraine, who had hoped to kill Baron Darr and get Kinneth back to Sky. When this gambit failed, Viraine turned to Itempas for help instead. This eventually led to Kinneth’s death, as Kurue, in an effort to win Itempas’ favor, put in motion a plan that would deliver Enefa’s soul to him. Kurue murdered Kinneth, making it look as though the Arameri assassin corps had committed the crime.
Kinneth is not seen in HunThou. Yeine remembers her as a tall, slender Amn woman with “hair like clouded sunlight” and bright green eyes, who was often angry and driven. Kinneth attempted to train Yeine to control her emotions and facial expressions, with limited success. There are tales in Darr that Kinneth attempted to kill Yeine at birth, by crossing her legs in the middle of labor and refusing to deliver the child. Though the Darre think this is just postpartum depression, Yeine later realizes it is because Yeine carries the soul of a goddess, and Kinneth had grown frightened of what her child might become.
At the end of HunThou, Kinneth posthumously achieves her goal; using her daughter as the instrument of revenge, the Enefadeh are freed and Dekarta loses substantial power.
T’vril Arameri
Yeine’s first cousin, an Arameri halfblood. T’vril is half Ken, and the illegitimate son of Dekarta’s nephew (elder brother of Scimina Arameri and Relad Arameri). T’vril’s father raped the underaged daughter of a Ken noble family, resulting in T’vril’s birth. Using T’vril’s existence as evidence to prove their case, the noble family pressed for justice. Since sex with a child is illegal by the laws of the Bright — and since the Ken family was influential — Dekarta therefore had T’vril’s father executed, and formally adopted T’vril into the family as a halfblood. T’vril was raised by servants, and eventually became the palace steward (as of HunThou).
T’vril is extremely competent as palace steward, briskly efficient and detached about the various palace intrigues. He keeps bribes ready in his office and tends to avoid social gatherings with other highbloods, preferring to keep company with the lowblooded servants. This is largely because he possesses the status of a highblood but not the parents, resources, or patronage that would protect him in a political contest; he is well aware of this, having been reminded of it frequently during his life. In an effort to cheer Yeine up, he brings her to a lowblood celebration, and afterward has sex with her “between friends”. Though he expects nothing further from this liaison, he remains friends with her afterward. After her ascension to godhood, Yeine tells Dekarta to name him as the next family head as a result of this friendship, and she later assigns Sieh to keep an eye on him (in Book 2).
It is later (bk 3) revealed that T’vril married an Arameri fullblood woman to cement his power base. When he caught his wife with Nahadoth’s daytime form — the being known then as Hado Arameri, who later discovered himself to be a godling — he was actually pleased. In addition to paying Hado for his “service” (and to leave Sky), T’vril had the scriveners ensure that she became pregnant as a result. He also had his wife’s blood sigil modified to prevent her from ever telling the truth (even after T’vril’s death), and treated the resulting male child as his own, naming him sole heir at the time of his death.
T’vril is tall, with green eyes and waist-length red hair that he normally wears in a braid. The red hair is a legacy of his Ken heritage. He has freckles across his back and shoulders, and a permanent sigil to prevent fertility on his inner thigh, as he has no intention of ever bringing another part-Ken child into existence.
Haker Arameri
Arameri family head, about 1000 years before The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Caused the destruction of the Maroland by using Nahadoth to defeat an enemy army; Nahadoth turned himself into a miniature black hole and destroyed not only the army, but the continent. The original version of Sky, and Haker’s wife and children along with most of the other Arameri of the time, were destroyed in this incident. Haker rebuilt Sky on the Senm continent, then was forced to have as many children as he could throughout the rest of his life, to replenish the family ranks.
Nahadoth
Nightlord Nahadoth, firstborn of the Three, god of chaos/night/cold/darkness. He existed alone for aeons before the birth of Itempas. During this time of solitude he went repeatedly mad, at one point unintentionally beginning to create the universe out of the substance of his own body. It is implied that his blood became dark matter, and in The Kingdom of Gods Sieh implies that the matter of the mortal realm is corrosive to ethereal beings (like souls and gods) because it used to be Nahadoth’s stomach acid. (Refs consubstantiation.)
He became sane after the birth of Itempas, focused on the fight for dominance between himself and his brother. This period of fighting inadvertently shaped the universe into its present form: time, dimension, stars and planets, etc. The war ended when the two gods became lovers instead, establishing a kind of precarious stability between them. The stability strengthened when Enefa was born, for a time.
Nahadoth has no single appearance. He most often appears, during the time of the trilogy, as a very pale adult human male with wild black hair, wearing a voluminous cloak that conceals most of his body. The hair and cloak appear to blend and are in constant motion, even when he is still. He casts no shadow under normal circumstances, and never holds completely still. During The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, while he is a hobbled slave, he differs from his natural state in three ways: a) his appearance and personality shifts to conform to the desires of the mortals around him (e.g., he becomes brown-skinned, with a more High Northern facial structure, for Yeine), b) there is always a corporeal form somewhere within his darkness, and c) he is able to function only at night, becoming subsumed within a human body and mind by daylight. His eyes are black, with no discernable difference between iris and pupil. His hair, Sieh implies, is capable of devouring a god; Sieh stole some once and it nearly killed him.
Nahadoth is biological parent in some way (mother, father, or asexually-originating-force as in the case of Hado/Ahad) to the majority of the godlings and demons of old. He considers the rest his children as well, and he takes a proprietary, distinctly parental interest in the universe as a whole, it having sprung largely from the substance of himself. Nahadoth was a woman at the time of the Gods’ War, and had been one for several millennia at that point. (Itempas prefers him as male, and turned him male as part of his imprisonment.) He is also seen as a black hole (bk 1) and as “a great star-eyed beast” (bk 3) in Yeine’s or Sieh’s memories. When he is angry or in battle, he assumes his truest shape: an immense swirling cloud of blackness which “hurts the eyes” and damages the mind of any mortal who looks into it long. He loses the power of speech and is difficult to dissuade from violent action at this time; he no longer reasons, and pretty much descends into a state of berserker rage.
From the perspective of his fellow gods, who see more than physical appearances, Nahadoth closely resembles the Maelstrom that birthed all of them.
Prior to the Gods’ War, Nahadoth’s personality was drastically different. She (female at the time) loved easily and widely, readily taking her siblings and her own children as sexual partners, and later humans and other mortal beings too. She had a wry — if capricious — sense of humor and a merry disregard for propriety of any kind, and she was far slower to anger than either of her siblings. While she played favorites among the godlings, lavishing affection on those of her children who pleased her and neglecting the rest, this was not merely to be cruel; Nahadoth’s nature demands that she love all her children in different ways (Itempas loves them all equally). Enefa used this aspect of her nature to give humans free will and the ability to love freely.
Since the war, Nahadoth has become cold: rarely speaking, smiling less, doing a much poorer job of controlling his chaotic and violent nature. He seems to feel little besides anger and sorrow, and his sanity is more precarious; he often loses control of himself. After HunThou when he’s free again, he is standoffish towards those godlings who betrayed him, though he still loves them enough to grow angry when some are murdered during The Broken Kingdoms. The gods are all wary of him, sensing that he is much closer than he seems to the madness that consumed him before Itempas’ birth. Sieh fears that if Nahadoth ever goes mad enough, he will become a new Maelstrom, irreversibly.
His feelings toward Yeine by the end of 100K are indefinable. He may love her, or he may be simply clinging to her as a hedge against loneliness and grief. He still yearns for Itempas despite himself, though for the time being his fury toward Itempas subsumes any warmer feelings he once had.
Itempas
Itempas (also known as Bright Itempas, Dayfather, Lightbringer) is the secondborn of the Three. He is god of light/order/heat/daytime, and the other lord of the sky (in addition to Nahadoth). During the Bright, he claims lordship of the entire sky, day and night, and is called the Skyfather or the Master of All.
Itempas, like all of the gods, was born from the Maelstrom. The first thing he did upon attaining consciousness was escape from the Maelstrom before it could devour him; the second thing he did was attack Nahadoth, who inadvertently harmed him by drawing near. This began a lengthy war between them (the length is unknown/indefinable; time did not exist at this point) which created the structure of the universe.
At some point during this war, Itempas and Nahdoth both realized fighting was pointless, and instead they made a truce. This truce quickly deepened into friendship and love, thus stabilizing the newly-made — though sterile — universe. The arrival of their sister Enefa destroyed much of what they had created, but they rebuilt it, adding life to transform it into the universe in which the trilogy takes place.
Itempas is father, via Enefa or Nahadoth, to a small number of godlings (e.g. Madding), although he considers himself father to them all. He has also fathered two demons via mortal women: Shinda Arameri and Glee Shoth. He is disinterested in sexual relations as an ephemeral act; he seeks intimacy only where he feels some deeper connection to another. As he is generally hostile to strangers, this means he tends to be serially monogamous (or polyamorous when with his siblings). He also does not mate with godlings, because he believes firmly in the boundaries of family relationships, and for most of human history would not mate with mortals because he simply considers them beneath him.
Itempas’ appearance while among mortals varies only in intensity. He always appears as a tall, physically imposing man with dark brown skin and kinky hair. He never looks entirely human, although in his human shape he has chosen to resemble the people of the Maroland. His hair is white despite the apparent youth of his features, and his eyes are the color of the setting sun — basically ranging from bright glowing yellow to baleful deep red. (The variation in his eyes’ color is not random, but few have determined the pattern. It’s linked to various stars’ solar activity.) In mortal guise his eyes appear to be shades of brown. His hairstyle does vary somewhat — he wears it short in HunThou, shaves bald in BrokeKing, and wears long dredlocks in KingGod. Beyond this he makes few concessions to mortal aesthetics, even when this makes him stand out among other humans.
When exerting his power, Itempas’ mortal form is suffused with light and heat; the intensity rises with his power, until nearby beings risk immolation or blindness just by standing near him. Those who can bear the light will see that his magic surrounds him in a series of concentric, gyroscoping rings of marching words and figures; these are composed of his own personal language and numbering system, which he uses to commune with the universe. No other living being, including his fellow gods, can speak this language; he sees nothing wrong with this.
Itempas is always male, even in worlds where the male gender does not exist. He appears as human even where no humans exist, though generally his aura is too bright for others to see through. His truest shape is an immense blue-white sun.
Itempas’ affinity is deceptively simple: heat and light. But in addition, his nature requires him to systematize everything around him, and to maintain those systems at all costs once they are established. Because of this, Itempas is precise, reserved, and intensely change-resistant. Though he does have a sense of humor — a very dry one — he is so literal-minded as to often render humor pointless. As befitting his nature, he is prone to intense, even obsessive attachments. Once engaged in battle, Itempas does not stop unless something stops him. Itempas’ antithesis is solitude — something he only discovered recently, when Nahadoth and Enefa briefly withdrew themselves from his presence. Darkness and chaos cause him great discomfort and affront, but he can endure them; an extended period of solitude would kill him. If he had carried out his threat to rid the universe of life at the end of HunThou, this too would have killed him (given Nahadoth’s rejection). Nahadoth — who does not know of Itempas’ true affinity — does not realize this was a threat of suicide on Itempas’ part.
Despite all this, Itempas was generally the “warmest” of the gods prior to the Gods’ War. He was solicitous of his few lovers and he considered himself a protector and guide for the godlings created by him and his siblings. In the aftermath of HunThou, Itempas is regretful of the wrong he has done. To reduce the pain of his antithesis, he is forced to rely upon mortals for companionship, which in turn forces him to temper some of his own most extreme personality traits — but despite this, he is weak and in near-constant agony without the love of his siblings and children to support him.
Itempas sometimes wields a sword of white metal whose blade is etched with thousands of tiny characters (his own language again). Only he knows the name and full abilities of this sword, and only he and Glee Shoth can wield it — anyone else who touches it is burned to ash.
While bound in human form per the geas placed on him at the end of HunThou, Itempas a) cannot tell mortals what he is, unless they already know; b) cannot remain in the same location for long; (a and b are because Nahadoth commanded him to wander unknown among the humans he despised so much), and c) he feels compelled to right all the wrongs inflicted in his name. Due to c) he forms an organization with the aid of Glee and some of the godlings which is dedicated to countering the chaos that the Arameri have inflicted on the world. However, his imprisonment can be broken if he “learns to love truly”, per Yeine’s command — although Nahadoth will not permit Itempas to love truly anytime soon.
Enefa
Enefa, Mistress of Twilight and Dawn, also known as Enefa of the Earth, was a member of The Three. Her affinity was earth/life/death/balance, and of the Three she was last-born, raising herself to adulthood in the company of her older siblings.
Because Enefa came late to the partnership between Nahadoth and Itempas, she did not share an equal role in the relationship. Initially she was content to be a secondary partner to both, and the relationship remained stable. Over time, however, she yearned to be first in Nahadoth’s heart. When she achieved this goal, Itempas was devastated, both by what he perceived as a betrayal and by his first experience with solitude. Before he could recover from this, his mortal lover Shahar Arameri murdered their demon son, driving him over the brink of madness. He used his son’s blood to murder Enefa, thus triggering the Gods’ War. In addition to killing her, he tore open her body and removed an ovary, which he preserved; this became the Stone of Earth, a locus for her lifegiving power and the anchor for her soul. Her soul therefore remained in the mortal realm — gradually decaying, as the mortal realm is an unsafe environment for disembodied souls.
Nahadoth and the other prisoners of the Gods’ War discovered Enefa’s damaged soul after some time. To repair it, they sought a mortal body in which to nurture it, eventually making a deal with Kinneth Arameri to use her unborn daughter, Yeine. This gave Yeine two souls, and eventually Yeine was able to establish a kind of communication with Enefa’s soul. At the end of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Enefa’s soul “moves on”, after triggering the merger of the Stone of Earth with Yeine’s dead mortal body; this transforms Yeine into a new god, with all Enefa’s abilities.
Before her death, Enefa created all the godlings (usually as their mother, sometimes as father or another role), and all mortal life. All life other than her siblings and the Maelstrom, therefore, is tied to her. If she dies, all else dies.
Enefa is never seen alive in the Inheritance Trilogy. Enefa most often appeared as a small woman with deep brown skin, green eyes, and black, curly hair. She tended to wear very simple clothing in the color silver or gray. Her hair is longer than Yeine’s, and she looks more mature since Yeine was barely past adolescence at the time of her apotheosis. This reflects Enefa’s greater role in the creation of life. (Now that her ovary has become Yeine’s heart, Yeine may take a less generative-motherly role in the maintenance of the future universe, instead opting to be more the caregiving-motherly type.)
According to Nahadoth in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Enefa “was always the strongest of us.” It is unclear what this means, but given that her apparent role in the Three was to balance and complete her siblings, it seems likely that she had greater raw magic and could, if necessary, dominate either of her siblings individually. However, Yeine notes that “a single member of the Three could never hope to defeat the other two”. Therefore, if they combined their efforts, Nahadoth and Itempas could defeat Enefa.
Her specific abilities included the creation of life, and the infliction of death. Enefa was capable of spontaneously generating other living beings in any form, though she preferred to do so within carefully-established parameters (e.g., reproduction, evolution). She was also capable of killing anything that she created, at will. She frequently experimented with creating new forms of life and death.
Though most godlings claim to love her, Sieh admits that she was an unsentimental mother, readily killing her own children whenever they displeased her. Of the Three, she appears to have been the most distant parent. Sieh also notes that she was reserved and slow to anger, though she had a temper that was “magnificent when it finally blew.”
She did, however, love Nahadoth. While she loved Itempas as well, they both competed for Nahadoth’s love, with the competition growing more intense over time. She became the ultimate victor of this competition — for which Itempas later killed her. She also loved Sieh, and may have had some inkling that Sieh was approaching his time to “grow up”; perhaps because of this, she attempted a relationship with him and chose to bear his child. Unfortunately this ran afoul of Sieh’s antithesis, so to protect him she erased his memory of the child, imprisoned the child (Kahl) in another realm, and concealed all knowledge of the affair from her fellow gods.
It is likely that Enefa knew she could and would die at some point in the future. Most likely she regarded this as an interesting potential experiment.
Madding
Madding is one of the youngest godlings, although he is effective leader and most powerful of the niwwah godlings who dwell in Sky-in-Shadow. (Lil, an elontid, is more powerful at times.) He is the god of obligation and a successful businessman selling godsblood and divine favors to the wealthy and deserving. His truest shape is an aquamarine humanoid figure, sometimes appearing solid/crystalline and sometimes liquid. However, while in Shadow, he mostly appears as a nondescript Senmite man with dark hair and a swarthy complexion.
As the god of obligation, Madding’s business is a way for him to gain strength by exploring the limits of his affinity. He has no interest in profit, and will often do favors in exchange for favors or promises rather than money — but for those who do not repay, he takes something of equal value (to the debtor) to settle the debt. Altruism is his antithesis. Since altruism is readily encountered in Sky, Madding is often weakened. To protect himself when his powers wane, Madding has cajoled and coerced several of his siblings to assist him while they are in the mortal realm. He is also instrumental in organizing the godlings of Shadow, convincing them to adhere to a basic set of rules in order to prevent a further Interdiction, and enforcing those rules when necessary.
Madding is one of Itempas’ few biological children, via Enefa. He loved both his parents openly before the war, and since the war retains the hope that Itempas can be healed — though he’s still quite angry and disgusted with Itempas. Madding also loves Oree Shoth, a mortal woman, although he does not know she is a demon until her blood is used to kill him.
Nahadoth’s Shadow/Hado/Ahad
Once merely the daytime form of Nahadoth. This entity was “born” when Itempas crafted a mortal body to imprison the god Nahadoth in the mortal realm — a kind of flesh-and-blood ball-and-chain. Lacking Nahadoth’s mind or personality or even his own soul, he was essentially a human infant in a grown man’s body. Given to Sieh for rearing, he eventually developed a mind and soul separate from that of Nahadoth. When Yeine became the new goddess of life at the end of HunThou, she imbued this entity with completion, allowing him to exist separate from Nahadoth. In the process, she also made him a godling — a fact he does not discover for some time after his second “birth”.
During the Enefadeh’s enslavement, the entity lived a bitter existence, often enduring all the humiliations and hardships that the Arameri hesitated to inflict on Nahadoth himself. After Nahadoth’s release and his own separation, the entity took the name “Hado” (naHADOth) and spent some time as an Arameri fullblood, briefly meeting Oree Shoth during a mission on behalf of the family. Eventually growing disgusted by the Arameri, Hado later left Sky (after unknowingly fathering T’vril Arameri’s adopted son and later heir) and started a quasi-legal series of businesses in Shadow. At this time he took the name Ahad (nAHADoth). He is later found again by Itempas, who recognized his nature when they met previously (bk 2) and explains to him that he is a godling. With Itempas’ help, Ahad begins exploring his godling nature and makes contact with other godlings in Shadow. Eventually he merges his own organization with that of Madding/Kitr, and they begin gathering power — under Itempas’ guidance — so that they can function as a clandestine counterbalance to the chaotic actions of the gods and the Arameri.
Ahad eventually falls in love with Glee Shoth, and thus discovers that his affinity is love. He has unrequited feelings for Yeine, mostly stemming from his gratitude over an incident she does not remember (she ordered him to have good dreams in 100K, and he has had good dreams whenever he sleeps, ever since). He loves Sieh too, even though Sieh was a terrible parent; he now understands that Sieh’s nature prevented him from being a better father figure. He hides all this, however, beneath a jaded and viciously sarcastic exterior. Having spent two millennia enduring the Arameri’s worst, he also has a substantial sadistic streak and superb political/diplomatic instincts.
During the Enefadeh’s imprisonment, this entity mirrored Nahadoth’s most recent appearance, albeit “humanified”. As a separate being, he resembles a High Northern man in his thirties with long black hair. He is capable of altering his appearance, being a godling, but chooses to keep the face Yeine gave him.
Sieh
Eldest of the godlings, the child of Enefa and Nahadoth. As the first child ever, Sieh’s nature took a predictable form: he is the personification of Childhood, gaining strength from anything affiliated with the concepts of youth, mischief, growth, play, etc. He is older than mortal life itself — several billion years old, though neither he neither keeps count of nor cares about his age. In nearly all his appearances, he takes the shape of something playful and cruel — most often a large black feline, a cranky old human man, or an innocent-looking child.
Sieh’s history is too long to recount fully, and he does not remember some of it due to the sheer amount of time that has passed since his birth. He was created as an experiment by Enefa — one of her first successful attempts to create new life in the image of the gods. She was disappointed, however, that he lacked much of the strength of her fellow gods, and would have discarded (destroyed) him as a failure. Nahadoth convinced her to let the child live and see what he might grow into. Enefa did so, and was pleased once she realized Sieh would eventually grow into a proper god — though she did not tell Sieh this, as she also realized Sieh would be forced to leave his birth-universe when the time came.
Sieh was content to live as an eternal child, exploring the early universe and helping to shape much of it to suit his own whims. He acted as a big brother to most of his godling siblings, and was especially close to their three parents. Because of this, he was devastated when Itempas killed Enefa, and he joined Nahadoth in striving to punish Itempas for his misdeeds. Instead, Itempas defeated and imprisoned them in the mortal realm — a crime that Sieh struggles to forgive, even after he and the other Enefadeh win their way free.
Sieh was once a champion of mortalkind, but after enduring their cruelty for 2000 years his feelings for mortals now verge on hatred. He’s not fond of his fellow godlings either, having seen the whole divine family tear itself apart during and after the Gods’ War. Sieh’s personality combines the worst of Nahadoth’s caprice with Enefa’s systematic cruelty; he is a playful, but vicious, trickster. Yet at his core he has begun to feel the need for something more fulfilling — much like an adolescent on the precipice of adulthood.