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	== Relationships ==		== Relationships ==
	- '''[[Kiffel ea Leachan]]''' - Descendant and last champion of the Leachan line. For the duration of the war Conn's ghost inhabited Kiffel's muscles, making her strong and graceful; she loved and revelled in that borrowed prowess - ch 2. The Palleseen extraction severs the bond before her eyes, and she crumples in weeping "for an ancestor who'd died a millennium ago but hadn't left the world until just now" - ch 2. After the extraction, the relationship inverts: the name and legend of Conn Leachan become the price Kiffel must pay to the Widow for a surrogate power, and she walks out uncertain whether she completed her family's ruin or severed the last of her chains - ch 13. When the demon in the sword wears Conn's face and drives her body, Kiffel's confused grief-"She gave me my ancestor back"-is immediately undercut by the narrator's correction: it is a demon surrogate, not the man - ch 26. By the final chapter he is spoken of as simply "taken away" from her - ch 42.		* '''[[Kiffel ea Leachan]]''' - Descendant and last champion of the Leachan line. For the duration of the war Conn's ghost inhabited Kiffel's muscles, making her strong and graceful; she loved and revelled in that borrowed prowess - ch 2. The Palleseen extraction severs the bond before her eyes, and she crumples in weeping "for an ancestor who'd died a millennium ago but hadn't left the world until just now" - ch 2. After the extraction, the relationship inverts: the name and legend of Conn Leachan become the price Kiffel must pay to the Widow for a surrogate power, and she walks out uncertain whether she completed her family's ruin or severed the last of her chains - ch 13. When the demon in the sword wears Conn's face and drives her body, Kiffel's confused grief-"She gave me my ancestor back"-is immediately undercut by the narrator's correction: it is a demon surrogate, not the man - ch 26. By the final chapter he is spoken of as simply "taken away" from her - ch 42.
	- '''[[Eres Ffenegh]]''' - Conn Leachan founded the city and kept it free across a thousand years of warfare; his ghost was dedicated to its defence, and his sword passed through successive champions who carried that duty - ch 2. His name and the champion tradition are embedded in the city's martial vocabulary and songs; during the Palleseen assault, Guillen oa Pedrig halts the Dead Companies by reciting a banned sea-song that invokes Conn Leachan's legacy - ch 12.		* '''[[Eres Ffenegh]]''' - Conn Leachan founded the city and kept it free across a thousand years of warfare; his ghost was dedicated to its defence, and his sword passed through successive champions who carried that duty - ch 2. His name and the champion tradition are embedded in the city's martial vocabulary and songs; during the Palleseen assault, Guillen oa Pedrig halts the Dead Companies by reciting a banned sea-song that invokes Conn Leachan's legacy - ch 12.
	- '''[[Usrach]]''' - In the aftermath of the Lich Queen's departure, Usrach reveals that the Crabshell armour was never Conn Leachan's, undermining the material basis of the Leachan claim to his legacy - ch 36.		* '''[[Usrach]]''' - In the aftermath of the Lich Queen's departure, Usrach reveals that the Crabshell armour was never Conn Leachan's, undermining the material basis of the Leachan claim to his legacy - ch 36.

	== Notable Quotes ==		== Notable Quotes ==

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Conn Leachan is the patron hero and legendary founder of Eres Ffenegh, a thousand-year-old ghost bound to the gilded sword of the Leachan line, a slayer of giants, and the greatest warrior of his age. His spirit inhabited the muscles of each successive champion of his bloodline, lending them "iron and sinew" in place of their own flesh, and he was dedicated across the centuries to the defence of the city he had built. He is not a background myth: within the events of the story he is a present, active guardian until a Palleseen specialist physically extracts and annihilates him in a prisoner-of-war camp, converting an entire ancestral spirit into a few hundred gold tablethi. His destruction in the opening chapter is the catalytic wound of the novel, the loss that defines his descendant Kiffel ea Leachan's struggle and hollows out the martial mythology on which Eres Ffenegh's identity rests.

Beyond his own existence, Conn Leachan functions as the novel's central argument about the machinery of heroism. His name and face become a commodity: Abellaime the Widow offers to anchor a demon in the emptied blade for the price of Kiffel's entire inheritance-the legend and line of Conn Leachan itself-and the resulting entity, a demon wearing the dead champion's shape with fangs and horns, performs a violence that violates every convention of the "thousand years" of chivalric combat Conn's name once sanctified. The Widow's agent Valkazar states the thesis plainly: stripped of the stories that made heroism legible, what remains is blood, butchery, and joy in the horror. Conn Leachan, who is no longer there to defend his own legacy, is reduced to an "echo in a particularly ugly piece of ironmongery."

His arc across the book moves from lived presence to annihilation to afterlife as contested signifier. He exists as a ghost for the first chapter and is then destroyed utterly; for the remainder of the story he persists only as name, armour, oral legend, and a demon's borrowed face. By the final chapter he is spoken of as "taken away," his name spoken without ceremony at a meeting where neither Kiffel nor Niev ea Galeaff is thanked for what they carried under his banner. The book closes the question of whether the legend was ever more than a convenient story told over a thousand years, leaving the actual warrior-iron, sinew, and all-gone.

== Character ==
=== Appearance ===
Conn Leachan is never seen alive. His presence is registered only through its effects on his hosts: the champion who carries his ghost feels "his iron and sinew" rather than the "softness" of her own body, a borrowed muscularity that transforms flesh into something hard and lithe - ch 2. His physical visage is recovered only by a demon that assumes it: "Conn Leachan's face with fangs and horns," a shape that is recognisably his yet distorted by the creature wearing it - ch 26. The sword he was bound to is described with eel-head quillons and a spiked, sickle-curved blade of gold that turns brassy as the spirit drains from it - ch 2.

=== Personality ===
The only sustained portrait of Conn Leachan's character comes from the oral legend recited in the manner of in-world heroic lore: he ate a whole feast and broke every knife, sailed into Eres Nairn with one boat and left with their entire fleet, caused snows to come off mountains with his laugh, and took a hundred heads at the battle of Cevaern Straits, so that "the sun borrowed red from the waves rather than the other way round" - ch 26. This is explicitly legendary register, recited rather than witnessed, and its boisterous, world-bending confidence may be as much the shape the Leachan line gave him as any record of a man. What the narrative confirms, in contrast, is the quiet of his ghost's long service: a guardian spirit "dedicated to its defence" of the city across a millennium, never described in the text as anything other than a sustained, unglamorous function - ch 2.

=== Beliefs & Motivations ===
The narrative sections attribute to Conn Leachan a single organising motive: the defence of Eres Ffenegh, the city he founded, kept free across every generation that bore his sword - ch 2. No other desire, creed, or rule of conduct is stated for him directly. The closest the text comes to a philosophy in his name is the Widow's demystifying verdict, voiced through Valkazar: the stories wrapped around his legacy concealed that "heroism is blood and butchery and joy in the horror," and the demon in the sword performs exactly that truth without the lies that once made heroism legible - ch 34. Whether Conn himself would have recognised or rejected that framing is left unexamined by the narrative; he is no longer present to answer.

== History ==
=== Pretenders to the Throne Of God ===
==== The Infiltration of the Varinaen (ch 1-3) ====
Conn Leachan is the thousand-year-old patron hero of [[Eres Ffenegh]], its founder, a slayer of giants, and the greatest warrior of his age; his ghost has been bound across generations to the elaborate, gilded sword of the Leachan line, with eel-head quillons and a spiked, sickle-curved blade, and has inhabited the muscles of each successive champion, making them strong and graceful as his had been - "Not the rather slack tone of her actual body, the softness of her, but his iron and sinew" - ch 2. In the ruined Customs House on the occupied side of the Left-city, seven months into the Palleseen siege, a Pal specialist called "the weasel" prepares to extract the ghost from the sword using leaden lozenges connected by wire - ch 2. [[Kiffel ea Leachan]], the current holder and Conn's descendant, is pinned to a folding stool by a large Pal soldier and forced to watch as the sword's power drains out, its gold going brassy, a gem-eye falling from an eel-head, while the lozenges turn to bright gold [[tablethi]] marked with [[Pel]] words - ch 2. The extraction converts the entire guardian spirit into "a few hundred tablethi," and Conn Leachan ceases to exist; "Just one more piece of imperfection erased from the world, the way the Pals always did" - ch 2. Kiffel feels the loss as a physical clenching and crumples in weeping: "Losing all dignity, all composure, weeping for an ancestor who'd died a millennium ago but hadn't left the world until just now" - ch 2. The extraction was performed not in combat but by a specialist's apparatus, and was complete - the sword after this point is "just a weirdly-shaped piece of metal with cutting edges in inconvenient places" - ch 2. The big Pal soldier later returns the empty sword and the [[Crabshell|Crabshell mail]] to Kiffel in a leather sack and apologises: "I'm sorry. What they did to you. I wanted you to have it back. Probably I shouldn't." - ch 2. At the prisoner exchange at [[Godsgift Square]], [[Niev ea Galeaff]] recognises Kiffel as broken and stripped of privilege, deducing she has catastrophically failed as champion, losing [[Conn Leachan]], 'their hero' - ch 3. The mechanism of the loss is the Palleseen extraction while Kiffel was a prisoner; what Kiffel herself did or failed to do prior to capture is not detailed in this book.

==== The Osseach Meeting at the Pandaemonium (ch 7-9) ====
Days after the Decanting, Kiffel sits in the Hospitallers' tent with the empty sword and the Crabshell mail, ashamed; the doorman of the [[Pandaemonium]], a guardian demon of the building's former temple life, recognises the armour and says it served "in another life, to another master," then orders Kiffel to don it and say "Command me" before permitting entry - ch 7. In the Upper Parlour, [[Widow|Abellaime, 'the Widow']] mocks Kiffel's presence: "Such an honour to host the very Claw of Ffen, O Champion." - ch 7. The Widow examines the emptied blade with a monocle and confirms the Pals' decanting was brutally thorough - ch 7. In a boudoir confrontation, Abellaime presents her terms: she can anchor a demon in the hollowed-out blade, but the price is Kiffel's entire inheritance - the legend and line of Conn Leachan - fed to the demon, making Kiffel the last Champion; there is no restoration of the original ghost, only a surrogate - ch 9.

==== The Day of the Three Walls (ch 10-12) ====
Conn Leachan's name and legacy persist in the city's martial vocabulary. During the Palleseen single-day assault, Kiffel arrives at the third Ward wall drunk and wearing the Crabshell, which clatters like a load of pans and pots - ch 12. [[The poet|Guillen oa Pedrig]] strides to the barricade and recites an old banned sea-song that halts the Dead Companies in their advance; the poem invokes the legacy of Conn Leachan and the champion tradition, and after his final verse a shot kills him - ch 12. The Taela is then animated to break the Palleseen beachhead, and Kiffel, drained of fighting will, hauls stretchers with [[Usrach]] and with Devil Jack's malformed demons rather than fighting - ch 12.

==== The Palleseen Ultimatum (ch 13-16) ====
After the assault's pause, Abellaime demands that Kiffel surrender the Leachan name so the Crabshell demon can "guide you in battle as the great man did" - the name and "mantle" of Conn Leachan are the required price for the demon's activation - ch 13. The Widow's arrangement is framed as reducing Conn Leachan to "an echo in a particularly ugly piece of ironmongery" - ch 13. Kiffel weighs the future cession of children and lineage against what she has left and agrees: We do. Take it. - ch 13. She walks out uncertain whether she "completed her family's ruin or severed the last of her chains" - ch 13.

==== The Assault on the Lighthouse (ch 22-27) ====
The chapter opens with an unattributed traditional legend of Conn Leachan's deeds, recited in the manner of in-world oral lore: he ate a whole feast and broke every knife, sailed into [[Eres Nairn]] with one boat and left with their entire fleet, caused snows to come off mountains with his laugh, took a hundred heads at the battle of Cevaern Straits, and "the sun borrowed red from the waves rather than the other way round" - ch 26. During the renewed Palleseen assault, Kiffel dons the Crabshell in a boarding house and confronts the whispering influence of the replacement sword; when she finally draws it, a demon wearing Conn Leachan's face takes full control of her body, consuming her emotions and doubts - ch 26. The demon fights with brute bloodlust rather than heroism, cuts ghost from corpse to feed on severed spectral connections, and challenges the Dead Companies to a champion's duel in [[Os]], [[Pel]], and [[Lor|Loruthi]]; a ghost stretched across fifteen cadavers accepts, and the demon destroys it body by body while the living on both sides stare because "this was not how things were done, not these thousand years" - ch 26. The Crabshell breastplate cracks under a blow, briefly returning control to Kiffel; the demon re-enters and swings the sword at [[Yasnic|Devil Jack]], who deflects it with a conjurer's assault, and the blade cuts into him under the ribs - ch 26. Kiffel's confused grief is explicit: "She gave me my ancestor back," - ch 26 - immediately undercut by narration: "Not true, but what she wanted to be true. A demon surrogate, Conn Leachan's face with fangs and horns." - ch 26. The entity in the sword is not Conn Leachan's spirit but a demon wearing his shape.

==== The Culling Lists (ch 28-33) ====
After Jack recovers from the sword wound, Kiffel bursts into the Hospitallers' tent stricken with guilt and asks him to get Abellaime's help regarding what a demon found in her during a possession that was not [[Conn Leachan]] - ch 30. She is explicit that the entity that drove her body during the street fighting was distinct from her ancestor's former ghost; the original spirit was destroyed in the extraction, and the replacement is a different being that merely wears his face.

==== The Challenge to the Lich Queen (ch 34-38) ====
On the day of [[Hamriddy|Hamriddy oa Galeaff]]'s funeral, the front line thinks more of Kiffel since she carried the sword with the demon in Conn Leachan's shape, though the sword's truth is that it makes her a butcher: people died following her charge - ch 34. Kiffel demands the Widow take the sword back; the Widow refuses, explaining through [[Valkazar]] that the demon IS what Kiffel asked for - Conn Leachan's shape - but stripped of the lies that once made heroism legible; the truth is that heroism is blood and butchery and joy in the horror - ch 34. Kiffel cannot surrender the sword because she does not fully control it, and bolts from the room - ch 34. She returns to Niev and resolves to serve without the blade - ch 34.

==== The Final Assault at the Gaelensreach (ch 39-42) ====
In the aftermath of the Lich Queen's departure, Conn Leachan is spoken of as "taken away" from Kiffel - ch 42. At the surviving Osseach meeting in the Right-city, Kiffel appears in the gallery but is not named among the heroes; she and Niev share a brief, wordless recognition of their uncredited contributions - ch 42. At the Hospitallers' tent in the Left-city, Kiffel and Jack part amicably; Jack asks God to look after her, and God replies that happiness "doesn't last" - ch 42. Kiffel resolves to do what needs doing, recalling that carrying stretchers was the only time she did good - ch 42.

== Relationships ==
- '''[[Kiffel ea Leachan]]''' - Descendant and last champion of the Leachan line. For the duration of the war Conn's ghost inhabited Kiffel's muscles, making her strong and graceful; she loved and revelled in that borrowed prowess - ch 2. The Palleseen extraction severs the bond before her eyes, and she crumples in weeping "for an ancestor who'd died a millennium ago but hadn't left the world until just now" - ch 2. After the extraction, the relationship inverts: the name and legend of Conn Leachan become the price Kiffel must pay to the Widow for a surrogate power, and she walks out uncertain whether she completed her family's ruin or severed the last of her chains - ch 13. When the demon in the sword wears Conn's face and drives her body, Kiffel's confused grief-"She gave me my ancestor back"-is immediately undercut by the narrator's correction: it is a demon surrogate, not the man - ch 26. By the final chapter he is spoken of as simply "taken away" from her - ch 42.
- '''[[Eres Ffenegh]]''' - Conn Leachan founded the city and kept it free across a thousand years of warfare; his ghost was dedicated to its defence, and his sword passed through successive champions who carried that duty - ch 2. His name and the champion tradition are embedded in the city's martial vocabulary and songs; during the Palleseen assault, Guillen oa Pedrig halts the Dead Companies by reciting a banned sea-song that invokes Conn Leachan's legacy - ch 12.
- '''[[Usrach]]''' - In the aftermath of the Lich Queen's departure, Usrach reveals that the Crabshell armour was never Conn Leachan's, undermining the material basis of the Leachan claim to his legacy - ch 36.

== Notable Quotes ==
:"the sun borrowed red from the waves rather than the other way round" - oral legend of Conn Leachan's deeds at the battle of Cevaern Straits, ch 26

:"Just one more piece of imperfection erased from the world, the way the Pals always did" - narration on the destruction of Conn Leachan's ghost, ch 2

:"this was not how things were done, not these thousand years" - narration on the demon's breach of the champion-duel tradition, ch 26

== Tags ==
#ghost · #champion · #ancestor · #founder

[[Category:Characters]]

Conn Leachan - Revision history

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