Illia

A painter whose paintings are not representations. She fights with them, and much later she uses them to reach somebody nothing else could reach.

Partial. Assembled from appearances across Acts 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, and 10, which have not been read back in full.

What she does

She paints, and the painting is there.

In combat it is immediate. Facing an opponent throwing "whips of materialized despair that could crush bone", the narration says only "But Illia was already painting" (ch. 48). The floor of that fight becomes her work: a blade leaves "a trail across the transformed marble floor, dark drops against Illia's painted galaxies" (ch. 49), and later "the painted stars beneath their feet seemed to brighten in response to her flames" (ch. 52).

She is unbothered while doing it:

ILA: Oh, come on! Is that really your opening move? I've seen children fing[er-paint]... (ch. 48)

Her actual rule, stated in ch. 48

The painting is the method. This is the power, and she explains it to Akumu mid-fight, leaning in like she is sharing a secret.

ILA: It's not because I'm stronger or faster or more powerful than my opponents. It's much simpler than that.

ILA: I'm always exactly as strong as I need to be. No more, no less. It's my whole thing, really. Fight someone who can lift a car? Suddenly I can lift a truck. Face someone who can destroy a building? Boom, I can level a city block. Take on someone who claims to be the end of all existence? Well...

ILA: Let's just say that existence is a lot more resilient than you thought.

That single rule accounts for everything else in this entry: the man erased mid-sentence in ch. 38, Akumu's wariness, and the casualness. She is not overpowering anybody. She is matching them, deliberately, by definition.

What she does with it is not violence. Every counter she uses against Akumu is a correction rather than a blow: liquid painted solid, larger painted smaller, split forms painted back together. Then she repaints the creature itself into pastels and flower petals.

ILA: I don't fight opponents - I improve them. Whether they want to be improved or not.

Her assessment of the enemy is aesthetic rather than tactical:

ILA: You're too predictable. Fear, tentacles, pink mist - it's all very "scary things 101." Where's the creativity?

And she does not finish the job. She checks the time on something like a phone, says she has a coffee date in ten minutes and promised not to be late, undertakes to undo Akumu's new form, and leaves.

ILA: the battle's over [...] Besides, I was only buying time for the main actor to arrive.

She was stalling for Icarus. The bracket closing the chapter is the third narrator's, and it is about the same appointment: "I'm so excited for my date with Remi!"

The camp she rewrote

Ch. 38 is the clearest demonstration of the ability in the saga.

Her canvas is cloth on a frame "no bigger than a dinner plate" and her brush is ordinary wood and bristle. Her palette floats beside her, and it is not paint: "liquid possibility, the raw materials of reality itself waiting to be given form".

She paints the fourth prison camp as it should be. Guard towers become flowering trees with birds' nests in them. Razor wire becomes silk ribbon. The locks become flowers.

The guards are the interesting problem. She could paint them away and it feels wasteful, because "they were just doing their jobs [...] in a world that didn't offer many choices". So she paints butterflies, "species that had never existed but should have".

Reality follows the canvas. The camp becomes the meadow she painted, and she seals it "for all eternity".

PR1: Thank you! How did you- ILA: Art, sweetheart. Art is the only magic that really matters.

She erases a man mid-sentence

A masked figure arrives to unmake her meadow, monologuing about entropy and doubt. She lets him get most of the way through a sentence.

???: You have potential, I'll give you that. But potential without wisdom is just- ILA: Booooriiiiiinggg...

One casual stroke, and where he stood "there was now nothing but empty air. Not destroyed, not defeated, just... absent. As if they had never existed at all."

Then she tells the shadows exactly who she knows is watching:

ILA: Next time try bringing someone stronger to fight me, Akumu. Still lurking in the shadows, I see. Still too much of a coward to face me directly.

She sticks her tongue out at the empty space, packs up, and leaves. The bracket, which is Akumu's, reads "What an annoying little girl."

Akumu is wary of her

Ch. 46 has her walk into the palace after Akumu has broken Neru and Shen, and Akumu greets her by name and stops mid-execution.

AKU: Illia. I was wondering when you might show up.

ILA: Well, well. Still playing with your food, I see.

Her counter-argument to it is the volume's thesis about her:

ILA: You think in terms of absolutes. Absolute strength, absolute power, absolute victory. But art... art is about possibilities.

And on why Neru and Shen losing was not a waste:

ILA: They did exactly what they needed to do. They showed me how you fight, how you think, how you move. They gave me all the information I need to paint your defeat.

A third voice in the brackets asks the question the reader has: "Why are you so wary of her, Akumu?" (ch. 46). It is not answered.

Ch. 46's narration says as much outright, watching the two of them greet each other: "There was history in that exchange, layers of meaning that spoke to encounters neither Neru nor Shen could understand."

Ch. 38 supplies that history, eight chapters earlier. After erasing the masked agent sent against her, she addresses the shadows without turning round:

ILA: Next time try bringing someone stronger to fight me, Akumu.

ILA: Still lurking in the shadows, I see. Still too much of a coward to face me directly.

The narration says she speaks the name "like a recognition of something that had been hunting her for longer than she cared to remember."

So by Acts 2 and 3 the two of them already have a history the saga never shows, and her contempt is habitual rather than bravado. She finishes by sealing her meadow permanently, packing up, and sticking her tongue out at the empty air.

Her sign-off is the register the whole entry runs on:

ILA: After all, I'm just a girl with a paintbrush. What's the worst that could happen?

What she paints

The dead. Ch. 100 names the practice: "The artist who stitched ghosts into color."

ILA: I cannot bring them back. But I can show you how they looked when they [lived] (ch. 100)

And she knows the limit of it. Aquila answers her doubt about it directly:

AQL: That's not a flaw, Illia. That's the nature of remembering. No memory can carry a person whole. (ch. 80)

That is the two of them, the Virtue of Balance and the painter of ghosts, in one exchange. See aquila.md.

What the portraits cost her

Ch. 80 is the only chapter that asks, and she answers at length. She is burnt out, and it is not the painting.

BLK: It's the storytelling, isn't it? Narrating them while you paint. That's what's burning you out. Not the strokes. The stories.

Her own account of what each portrait is:

For me, each one was a resurrection and a burial at the same time.

And the arithmetic of it, which is why the volume ends when it does:

ILA: Every time I finish one portrait, another waits. Another friend, another story. And when I tell it, when I paint it, I have to relive it.

She knows where Matta is, and that is the part she cannot put down. Ch. 79 is written by somebody who has been told the outcome:

ILA: every stroke I paint of her face feels like I'm betraying her, because she's still running, and I'm the one trying to make her stand still.

Aquila's answer is that the portrait honours rather than traps, and that Illia paints "so the world doesn't forget who she was before she became eternity".

The chapter ends without her agreeing. What she reaches instead is smaller and is named exactly: "Not hope, exactly. But endurance. Maybe that was enough."

Ch. 56 is her own account of herself

She narrates it in the first person, and it is the only place in the saga where she explains where any of this came from.

Her birth. "My birth was an anomaly." Paint seeped from walls that had never been painted, forming "murals that told stories of civilizations that hadn't been born yet". Her mother said every painting in the hospital glowed with colours that should not exist. The hospital painted over it, her colours bled through every layer, and that wing was closed for permanent renovation.

The memories start at five. Not dreams. "memories as vivid and real as my own recollections of learning to walk, except they belonged to beings who had walked through dimensions I couldn't even name."

In the memories she is not herself. This is the detail that matters:

I could move through those memories faintly, looking down at skeletal fingers that definitely weren't mine, ancient and weathered by eons of existence

That is the figure ch. 47 describes from the other side, from inside Zero's memories: "A skeleton, but different [...] They wielded a paintbrush larger than themselves." Two chapters nine apart, describing the same being, neither of them naming it.

She named something. In the earliest vision the skeleton faces an entity with "no shape or name", which "shifted and flowed like liquid starlight mixed with the deepest shadows".

Words left my mouth, not mine, ours, and we gave it a name.

The name is not given. It "wasn't in any language that existed on Earth".

What she concludes she is. Not a gifted child. "I was connected to a lineage, beings who saw existence itself as a canvas waiting to be improved."

And the question the whole entry turns on, asked by her rather than about her:

Who the hell am I?

She paints two knights before she starts

The first thing she does as narrator is portraits, one of herself and one of the man who died at the end of Acts 2 and 3.

• Herself: "a knight in vibrant armor that shifts colors with each movement, not wielding a sword but a paintbrush [...] a knight of creativity who fights battles by repainting the battlefield until victory becomes inevitable".
• Icarus: "a knight of freedom, dressed in armor whose back is torn by magnificent wings that refuse to be contained by any earthly design".

Neither title is awarded by the Order. She gives them herself, before the Order exists. See ../lore/the-order-of-knighthood.md.

Ch. 47 asks what she is, and gets it half right

Ch. 47 is a journal entry written by somebody carrying Zero's memories. Every other figure in the war fits a pattern that writer can trace. She does not, and the entry is mostly about how much that bothers him.

She is a descendant of Zephine.

she is a descendant of Zephine - that much I can trace through the bloodlines and the inherited gifts.

Zephine is one of the Fourteen, the storyteller whose told stories became real while she told them, and who dissolved into narrative itself in ch. 20. Illia's paintings become real while she paints them. See zephine.md.

And she resembles something far older. Buried in Zero's memories the writer finds a figure who "wielded a paintbrush larger than themselves, and with it, they could reshape reality itself", called "an artist whose very existence was an act of rebellion against the void".

The resemblance is explicitly not physical, "how could it be, when one is bone and the other flesh". It is method and temperament: "the same fearless creativity, the same absolute confidence in the power of imagination to triumph over entropy."

The writer cannot place her, and says what that might mean:

She is something unprecedented, something that could rewrite the very story our world has been telling itself.

Just how much of an anomaly is this girl?

Ch. 134 answers it, and the answer is larger than a bloodline. She is the right part of Zero's brain, and Blook is the left. See ../lore/the-fragment-theory.md.

So ch. 47 is the question and ch. 134 is the answer, eighty-seven chapters apart, and the writer of the question is probably the other half of the answer.

Astra

Acts 9 and 10 are the best evidence of what she is for. Blook sends her to Astra, who has stopped answering her door three days after a funeral.

ILA: I'm Illia. You probably don't know me. That's fine, I know you. Blook sent me, which mean[s] (ch. 194)

ILA: I know you're in there.

Astra does not open the door. So Illia leaves a drawing on the doorstep the next morning, and the morning after, for fourteen mornings, until Astra opens it herself (ch. 195 to 197). Illia's reaction to finally being let in is one syllable: "Huh."

Then they paint on a cliff together, and Illia asks the only question that matters, without softening it:

ILA: What was he like. (ch. 198)

Blook

She is the person who talks to him when nobody else does. In ch. 233 she finds him "in the heavens, sitting where he usually sat", and opens with "You've been quiet." In ch. 237, the last chapter of Acts 9 and 10, the exchange runs the other way:

BLK: Illia... ILA: You're being quiet again.

Ch. 233 is the fullest version of it. She finds him "sitting where he usually sat" with paint still on one knuckle, tells him she can tell the difference between "thinking-quiet and brooding-quiet", and then asks the question he has been circling for forty chapters:

ILA: Have you ever tried to [die].

She does not push him toward an answer. She sets the terms instead:

ILA: For what it's worth. I don't think wanting an ending makes you selfish. Even if the ending means forgetting all of us.

ILA: But I also don't think you have to decide today.

ILA: Just. Don't disappear without telling me first. When you do decide.

Then she changes the subject to a mountain she is painting, and he almost smiles, which the chapter says has not nearly happened in a long while.

Ch. 136 puts the pair of them in a list of things somebody was shown: "About Zero. About Illia & Blook. About the anchors."

By the planning for Acts 12 to 14 documents, both are alive centuries later, with Blook memoryless among monsterkind. See blook.md.

She was a knight

Ch. 233 places her generation exactly, in a single clause describing her:

this woman who had spent centuries painting things into and out of existence with a brush that answered to nothing but her own will, who had once been part of a generation of knights alongside Nilah

That puts her in Acts 4 and 5's cohort, which is consistent with her Acts 2 and 3 appearances and with Nilah's single human lifetime. See ../lore/the-timeline.md.

She is the last thing he forgets

Ch. 237 is Blook's unmaking, and the narration follows what survives longest as everything else goes. It is her.

He remembered hands holding a brush. Not his hands. Hers.

Specifically: the mountain she painted to see if she could, her agreeing to sit outside Astra's door before he had finished asking, her question about whether he had ever tried to end it, and her asking him not to disappear without telling her first.

the centuries of her particular brand of company becoming, in this final compression, the clearest and most solid thing he had left to hold.

His final words as himself are "BLK: Illia..."

Whether he keeps the ch. 233 promise is not shown. The last conversation the chapter replays is that one.

What she is

The same thing Blook is. Ch. 134 has Blook confirm that she worked it out first and told him:

You're the literal left part of Zero's brain. [...] 𝙻𝚎𝚝 𝚖𝚎 𝚐𝚞𝚎𝚜𝚜. 𝚂𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚍 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚛𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚝.

The left and the right of one mind, walking around separately for centuries. It explains why she paints reality rather than depicting it, and why she is the only person Akumu is wary of. See zero.md.

Ch. 56 has her lose herself while painting, "suddenly I wasn't Illia anymore. I was someone, something, else entirely", which reads differently once this is known.

She dies

By ch. 134 she is dead, and Blook reports on her cheerfully:

𝚂𝚑𝚎'𝚜 𝚠𝚎𝚕𝚕. 𝙽𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚝𝚘 𝚊𝚜𝚔. 𝚂𝚑𝚎'𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚎𝚗𝚓𝚘𝚢𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚊𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎, 𝚊𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚏𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚜, 𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚗𝚎.

Tough woman.

Ch. 55 promised all six Fables would die for the peace, and by Act 7 they have. Barring one, which the chapter does not name.

This is why her appearances in Acts 9 and 10 work the way they do. When she knocks on Astra's door in ch. 194 her opening line is "Blook sent me", and Blook is in the heavens. She is not travelling from across the country.

The museum's artist

Ch. 100, at the solstice gathering in Bloom Valley where the Hall of Heroes is still scaffolding, gives her an official post: "the museum's artist, the first official chronicler of their collective story."

Blook narrates that chapter and reads the cost off her:

The crowd treated her as a visionary, but I could see the raw edges beneath her careful smile. Every brushstroke had cost her something. Every painting was both a gift and a wound.

He also tastes what she is carrying, "grief like turpentine".

A note on ch. 100's pronouns

Ch. 100 genders her male, and nothing else in the saga does. The passage above appears in the chapter as "carried himself like a man half-possessed", "though he bowed humbly", "the grief he carried". It is quoted here in the feminine to match the rest of the archive, and flagged rather than silently corrected.

The archive checked every use of her name across all 329 chapters. Everywhere else she is she and her: she paints in ch. 38, she stirs her cup "like a woman coaxing ghosts out of hiding" in Acts 4 and 5, ch. 47 asks "what does that make her", ch. 56 is her own first-person account, and ch. 233 calls her "this woman".

One chapter out of the set, in one paragraph. Recorded as a slip, because a reader tracking her would otherwise find two Illias.

The same chapter also uses the feminine, which the archive missed until the full read and which settles it. Blook's survey of the arriving heroes is the masculine paragraph. Twenty lines later, at the ceremony itself, she is she again: "Finally, Illia stepped forward. She carried a paint-stained satchel, her hands trembling as if the ghosts of her canvases weighed more than stone."

So ch. 100 is not a chapter with a different view of her. It is a chapter that contradicts itself, and the correction happens inside it.

Open questions

• A pronoun discrepancy. Illia is she throughout Acts 2, 3, 9, and 10. In ch. 100 the text reads "The artist who stitched ghosts into color carried himself like a man half-poss[essed]". Every other reference read so far uses she. Recorded rather than corrected; it may be a slip, or it may be doing something.
• The anchors. Named in ch. 136 alongside Zero and alongside Illia and Blook as a pair. The other two items on that list are now answered and this one is not.
• Which of the six Fables is the one not in the afterlife with her.
• Ch. 56 has her lose herself while painting: "suddenly I wasn't Illia anymore. I was someone, something, else entirely". Nothing read so far follows it up.
• Ch. 147 refers to somebody coming "to take Illia with me" forty years before, at a cafe. Unexplained.