Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The Reaper, broken to a fossil in a lightless stone box beneath the Jackal's fortress, wrestling the darkness for his sanity and his life.
After the massacre at his Triumph—Roque's poisoned kiss, the slaughter of his friends, and Fitchner/Ares's severed head—Darrow was not dissected as the Sovereign wished. Instead the Jackal bargained to keep him, interrogated him for three months in the Attica estate, and then lowered him into a meter-wide, twelve-meter-long stone box, hunched and naked, hands cuffed, fed and cleaned through tubes threaded into his gut. Nine months of solitary darkness follow.
He measures time only by breath and heartbeat, soothing himself by touching the walls in patterns, reciting the Odyssey and Ramayana in dead languages Matteo taught him, singing Lykos ballads, and weeping. The darkness speaks in his own cruel voice, urging him to say 'I am broken' and win comfort at the price of his family—whom the Jackal seized from Lykos—or else to die. He confesses that under torture he already broke, giving up Lykos.
Convinced there is no Vale and Eo is simply gone, and terrified he betrayed everything he loves, he resolves to kill himself, slamming his skull against the stone—until, mid-blow, the darkness cracks and a blade of light slashes down.
A withered fossil of the man he was: skeletal and pallid, ribs erupting from paper-thin skin, atrophied muscle, joints fused from a year curled in a ball, a ratty beard, long grasping toenails, scabbed scalp, feeding tubes still anchoring his belly.
Protagonist; the fallen leader of the Rising, imprisoned and unmade by the Jackal, fighting to keep his mind and his refusal to break.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: