Ilyan's pale skin is so translucent that the blue-gray map of veins at his temples shows when the light catches him. His face is unnervingly symmetrical: a straight nose, clean sharp jaw, and long, upward-tilted eyes that give him the fixed, foxlike look of someone who has already guessed the answer. The eyes glow ember-red around narrow vertical pupils, framed by dark markings that are not paint but naturally pigmented skin. His obsidian hair falls in glossy, very wavy sheets to his shoulders; its center-parted bangs curve down to his temples. He moves with deliberate, economical steps, as if every room were a negotiation table and every person a possible witness. His most unexpected feature is his laugh: a broad, unguarded bark that makes his severe face look briefly, startlingly kind.

Ilyan is exacting and theatrical in public, yet unexpectedly patient with people who are overwhelmed. He enjoys winning a verbal contest but hates humiliating an opponent. In a crisis he becomes brisk and practical; in private he can be sentimental about family keepsakes and almost childishly pleased by a well-made tool. When betrayed, he grows formal rather than loud, and that composure is more dangerous than a shout.

Ilyan was born among the deep-forge dwarves of Khar Dagan, where his family cut funeral stone and kept the names of the dead. As a young master engraver, he learned to make an inscription precise enough to outlast both mountain and grief. A cave-in trapped his younger sister, Emina, and a dozen miners behind a sealed fault. The rescue crews had hours, not days. Ilyan bargained with a thing beneath the mountain, offering his own name and future service in exchange for the strength to open the rock. He saved the trapped miners, but the bargain made him a fiend in the eyes of his people and changed his eyes, skin, and shadow. He escaped before the clan tribunal could decide whether to exile or execute him. Now he operates as a discreet negotiator and collector of infernal debts, using contracts to keep lesser devils from preying on the desperate. Emina, who survived, now leads the tribunal that hunts him; she believes he chose the pact for power. He has never told her the full price: the entity owns the final memory of their mother, and will claim it when Ilyan dies. He is currently searching for a way to rewrite that clause without sacrificing another life.