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The last great Gold warlord, found a withered husk secretly poisoned years ago—who reveals the trap that undoes Darrow, then dies by poison and fire.
For a decade Darrow's supreme adversary across every theater of the war, the Ash Lord is discovered by Darrow as a skeletal, pus-weeping wreck, barely a third of the seven-foot giant he was, kept alive by medical machines and hidden in his seaswept spire—crippled three years ago by a poison Apollonius planted before his imprisonment. His broadcasts were a ruse. Proud and drum-voiced even in ruin, he meets Darrow without malice, philosophizing that 'war eats the victors last' and that Darrow remains, at his core, the perfect slave they designed.
Then he delivers his final victory: his daughter Atalantia has commanded his forces in his stead, engineered the peace talks to draw Darrow from his fleet, and now sails to annihilate it over Mercury—and, gloating, reveals that Darrow's son and Sevro's daughter have been stolen by 'one of yours.' Refusing to name the culprit, he bites a poison tooth, and as he dies Apollonius douses and burns him alive: ashes to ashes. Two Grimmuses have now fallen; only Atalantia remains.
A once-titanic Obsidian-dark Gold reduced to a skeletal husk—shrunken withered limbs, loose scabrous yellow-flaking skin oozing pus into bandages, a bald tight-scaled skull and sunken infection-yellowed eyes, wired to machines.
The war's supreme antagonist; the crippled warlord who reveals his daughter's trap and dies by poison and fire.
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