(aka The Death Speaker)
“He intrigued her. Which for some reason only made her want to stab him more.”
-From The Song of the Marked
The Captain of the Peace Keeper regiment of Varen de Solasen’s Grand Army at the beginning of The Song of the Marked/The Shadows and Crowns Saga. He wields Death magic, which allows him to do things such as drain energy (including some magic) from other living things, and to convene with the newly-deceased. His magical talents led to his employment by the most-powerful royal family in the Kethran Empire. However, his true reasons for getting close to this family are more complicated, and further revealed to Casia and her companions in later books of the Shadows and Crowns saga…
Elander is actually Kerse, the fifth Marr of Death and Destruction. He was cast out of the divine title and realm after breaking one of the laws of his domain (by saving the life of a mortal woman he fell in love with), but given a chance to reclaim his divinity if he could destroy the royal family that betrayed Malaphar, who is the Upper-God of the Shade his power ultimately derives from.
This chance ultimately fails as Casia—a member of that royal family—turns out to be the reincarnated soul of the woman he fell in love with and saved. Her rebirth was a calculated move, and part of an ultimate, larger battle that Solatis, Upper-Goddess of the Sun, has waged against Malaphar for centuries.
Before he ascended as the God of Death, Elander was originally one of Solatis’s vitala, a group of supernatural warriors tasked with protecting mortals.
Art by Natalie Bernard