Ileot Swacc — The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound

Ileot Swacc is an ancient image practitioner who first approaches the frontlines under the false name Cail Tweocs. Cail is not another person or one of Ileot's duplicates: it is the name attached to the same slight, hairless form while Ileot falsely claims Xyrt Brigade authority. As the Duplicator, he creates projected worlds and brings their inhabitants into the present, most consequentially producing multiple lives derived from his sister Vualla and attempting to obtain a copy of Randidly's real inner world. (Chapters 1094, 1139–1142, and 1219–1223)

Biography

Cail Tweocs and the concealed investigation

Ileot arrives as Cail Tweocs, presenting himself as a special investigator from the Xyrt Brigade's Internal Affairs division. The disguise lets him move beside Vualla Meteo, intimidate Lady Iellaya, and claim the authority to recall Randidly Ghosthound from a dangerous mission. He pressures Vualla to join the Brigade by using Randidly's life as leverage and offering an intentionally unequal duel, while privately treating Randidly as the true subject of his investigation. (Chapters 1094 and 1106–1108)

When Randidly meets him below the Great Rift, the same hairless man drops the cover story and gives his true name as Ileot Swacc. He admits that he is not a Brigade member and that the Vualla project partly explains his presence while he studies Randidly. His interest is the Alpha Cosmos: ordinary image worlds are limited by their creator, whereas Randidly's interior world can grow as something genuinely real. Ileot therefore proposes a ritual capable of duplicating Randidly and the reality housed within him. (Chapters 1139–1141)

The bargain over Vualla and the projected battlefield

Ileot explains that his duplications usually contain an Aether core that guides the created person, monitors their actions, and shields them from friction with the current age. When Vualla's core is destroyed, sustaining her grows more expensive. He uses that vulnerability to propose an exchange: he will fund her natural lifespan if Randidly cooperates with the duplication ritual. He initially offers time for a decision, then retracts that assurance as the Nether King's army arrives and demands an immediate answer. Randidly refuses because he will not entrust either Vualla or his world to Ileot's control. (Chapters 1142 and 1187–1188)

The emergency is itself part of Ileot's larger design. With Aether supplied by Lord Miln, he constructs an enormous projection of an earlier battlefield, duplicates its dead Aether and Nether forces, and uses those Nether copies to locate a Prince whose loss will draw a King. His stated objective is to confront the Nether King that embodies his oldest fear. The method treats created lives as expendable pieces: he withdraws their protection when their existential shock can destabilize the battlefield, then expects the resulting crisis to provide both a personal victory and leverage over Randidly. (Chapters 1187–1188 and 1219)

Eliot's altered life and the return of karma

Ileot's own history begins with Vualla's brother Eliot. Mortally wounded after protecting her, Eliot wishes to relive his life strong enough to prevent that failure, and his projection ability answers. In the alternate life, Eliot becomes Ileot, pursues power early, brutalizes his family in the name of preparation, and returns to the original moment carrying a much harsher Vualla shaped by those lessons. The alternate and original brothers become connected, while the violent Vualla overwhelms her meeker counterpart and takes the dying original Eliot's life. Ileot is thus a transformed continuity born from Eliot's projected second life, not Cail Tweocs or a newly invented stranger. (Chapters 1219–1221)

Three thousand years later, Ileot recreates enough of that history to produce a recent, innocent Eliot duplicate and several distinct Vualla-derived minds. The original Vualla uses the repeated scene to confront him with the sibling bond he discounted, while the projected Vualla refuses to reenact the killing of her brother. Ileot insists karma cannot compel him to intervene, yet his attempt to escape the old pattern leaves him divided between fear, guilt, and the need to defeat the Nether King. His creation's independence exposes the central flaw in his worldview: a reproduced life can make choices its maker never planned. (Chapters 1219–1223)

The Nether King battle and incapacitation

Ileot meets the Nether King with three millennia of accumulated power, projected-world pressure, white lightning, and liquid Aether. He can stagger Heralds and grind away the King's liquid exterior, but direct contact transmits a resonance that rips his skin and shakes his organs. Once his stored Aether falls, the Great Rift imposes severe maintenance costs on his enormous inner world. Randidly recognizes the resulting Aether sickness, steals more energy from him, and forces Ileot to destroy one of his own Skills for a few additional moments of activity. (Chapters 1219 and 1224–1227)

Randidly's Lantern of Harsh Truths disrupts the duplicated Vualla bound to Ileot, and Ileot abandons restraint in a futile effort to batter through the Nether King's core. The dependent consciousness later controls his hands, covers them in black energy, and keeps them clamped around his throat. He remains barely alive but permanently suppressed. Vualla retains the body so the original Vualla can substitute it for her own body at the center of the System overlay, turning the Duplicator who treated other lives as replaceable architecture into replacement architecture himself. (Chapters 1227–1235 and 1265)

The Swacc legacy after his disappearance

Ileot's removal does not erase his designs. His projection energy remains on Earth through manipulations such as the alternate newspaper given to Decklan and other agents raised to watch or influence Randidly. The acting head of the Swacc family treats Ileot's disappearance as a threat to family honor and sends representatives after the Ghosthound, even though Ileot had not participated in the family for centuries. His old contribution to the family's rise still gives the name political and martial force after his own body is gone. (Chapters 1244–1307)

Later confrontations continue to trace consequences back to him: Randidly connects the Swacc family's harassment, Shal's suffering, and the fractured Vualla identities to Ileot's willingness to reduce people to possible versions. Edraine's use of his body in the overlay helps establish her independent life, while Pangu's reflected-world experiments eventually remind Randidly of Eliot and Ileot as opposite choices made materially present. These later echoes are legacy rather than renewed direct action by Ileot; his last sustained personal state remains the suppression imposed after the Nether King battle. (Chapters 1353–1507, 1605, 1935, 1955, and 2287)

Appearance and personality

In both the Cail Tweocs cover and his revealed Ileot identity, he uses a short, slight, completely hairless body with pale grey skin resembling a fresh corpse. His image is so solid that nearby visual distortion stills around him. A smile exposes rows of rotten teeth, while his voice is shrill, high-pitched, and prone to unsettling giggles. Whether this is his original appearance remains uncertain; Randidly notes that Ileot simply retains the same form after abandoning Cail's name. (Chapters 1094, 1106, and 1139)

Ileot is manipulative, avaricious, theatrical, and profoundly afraid of repeating his original death. He treats leverage as friendship, living creations as investments, and withheld information as an entitlement of power. Yet his fear does not make him a coward in every encounter: he deliberately engineers the Nether King confrontation and continues fighting after his reserves fail. His tragedy is that courage remains subordinated to control, so every attempt to master the past reproduces the relationships and choices he most wants to escape. (Chapters 1139–1142 and 1219–1227)

Abilities and progression

Ileot's defining image creates detailed projected worlds and can extract duplicated people and forces from them into the present. A chosen life-core moment supplies the template, while a specialized Aether core usually manifests near the subject as an innocuous guide, monitor, and protective vessel. The duplicate can be sustained for a natural lifespan if sufficient Aether is provided, but temporal friction causes hemorrhaging when the vessel is destroyed. Created minds remain capable of independence, emotional divergence, rebellion, and growth beyond the role Ileot assigns them. (Chapters 1139–1142 and 1219–1223)

The ability extends to Ileot himself. Eliot's dying desire initiates a projected alternate life in which he becomes Ileot, and that altered self returns to the crucial battlefield carrying the consequences of an entire different upbringing. Later, Ileot can build a projection large enough to reproduce armies, Aether forces, Nether forces, and a formative period of Vualla's life. Scale requires immense external funding and preparation, while inaccurate assumptions about a template create blind spots: Ileot fails to recognize his own importance in Vualla's remembered life and cannot dictate the choices made by those he brings out. (Chapters 1219–1223)

In combat, he can press the weight and detail of a projected world directly against another image, briefly staggering even a Nether Herald. He can also render an image environment as convincingly as a frozen tundra, with cold and frost that persist on Randidly after the scene ends. His most visible attack is brilliant white lightning powered by refined liquid Aether. The bolts can curve, form whips, tear through Nether, steal energy from targets, and return that fuel to him, while concentrated burning Aether supports much larger fields of annihilating light. (Chapters 1141 and 1219–1227)

His ancient body has high Stats, rapid healing, and enough image solidity to withstand momentary exchanges with a Nether King. Those advantages depend on Aether. Inside the Great Rift, maintaining his body and vast inner world consumes reserves at a punishing rate; once depleted, he develops Aether sickness, stiffens, and begins falling unconscious. He can recycle the Aether construct of one of his own Skills for emergency fuel, but doing so sacrifices part of his accumulated ability. Randidly's energy theft and the Nether King's persistent pressure exploit this maintenance limit. (Chapters 1219 and 1224–1227)

His largest limitation is structural rather than simply energetic. Duplication preserves enough reality for its inhabitants to reject him, and the cores meant to control them can be destroyed or turned against him. The recent Vualla resists her intended history, the original Vualla emerges through overlooked connections, and a bound duplicate finally uses Ileot's own hands to suppress him. His creations therefore provide formidable breadth and long-term influence, but the more complete their personhood becomes, the less safely Ileot can treat them as extensions of his will. (Chapters 1142 and 1219–1234)

Relationships

Edraine: The surviving continuity of Ileot's original sister Vualla. His altered life and repeated projections entangle their histories, while her eventual use of his body in the System overlay reverses his practice of treating other bodies as replaceable structures.
Vualla Meteo: A younger projected incarnation created from Vualla's life. Ileot attempts to guide and bargain with her existence, but her independent decisions help defeat both his plan and the fatal sibling pattern he expects her to repeat.
Randidly Ghosthound: Ileot's intended duplication target and eventual combatant. Randidly refuses the bargain over Vualla, exploits Ileot's Aether dependence, and helps expose the emotional flaw behind his control.
Lord Miln: Ileot's financier and operational ally. Miln supplies Aether for the projected battlefield, but Ileot conceals the full plan and leaves him trapped in the consequences of the Nether King confrontation.
Lady Iellaya: An officer Ileot initially intimidates under the Cail identity. Her image later carries a separate Vualla-derived mind and helps oppose the crisis his projections create.

Items

Ileot relies on projected worlds, stored liquid Aether, and his own image rather than a stable named possession. No distinct carried item is established strongly enough to separate from the mechanics of his duplication ability.