Lycellis

Lycellis is a physician. He is also, by the end of Book One, something considerably stranger: a man alone in a dead man’s library, surrounded by secrets he was not supposed to find, trying to understand what he is looking at.

He came to the Crag as a former prisoner — the details of his imprisonment are not fully established in Book One — and earned his position through intelligence and medical skill. He is described as brilliant and curious, which in Mordikhaan is a combination that tends to get people into trouble.

The Task

Santaris Sendus has asked Lycellis to do something most physicians would refuse: find a way to kill him. Not from illness, not by violence — Santaris cannot be killed by those means, the Queen’s binding prevents it. Lycellis is searching for a mechanism that could undo or circumvent the mark on Santaris’s chest, freeing him to die as the shaking sickness has been trying to kill him for decades.

To find it, Lycellis has broken into a sealed library deep within the Crag. The library belonged to someone now dead, and its contents were sealed for reasons that are not immediately clear. What he finds there is not a cure or a poison. It is information — the kind of information that changes what you understand about the world you’re living in.

The Black Tree

Inside the sealed library, Lycellis encounters an enormous coal-black tree growing directly from the stone. This is not natural. This is not explicable by anything in his medical or scholarly training. His reaction on first seeing it is one of the book’s more deliberately unsettling moments — a man trained to understand the body confronting something that sits completely outside that framework.

What the tree is, what it means, and what connection it has to the secrets in the library are questions Book One does not fully resolve. What is established is that Lycellis, alone at the end of the book in that library, is in possession of knowledge that matters — and has no one to tell it to.