The Ilken · The full story

Bred to hunt, spent by the hundred

Erawan's winged hunters can wear another person's face, sense a shard of Wyrdstone across a forest, and speak your true name — and every one of them burns like paper.

What Morath made

The ilken are winged creatures the Valg made at Morath — Erawan's scouts, hunters and message-runners. They fly, they carry poison in their claws, and they can sense Wyrdstone from a distance. They are not dumb beasts: they speak, they reason, they pursue a named target clear across a continent, and they seem to relay what they learn straight back to Morath. When four of them corner Elide and Lorcan in Oakwald, their leader already knows to ask for Elide by her real name — which is how Lorcan first learns 'Marion' is hiding who she is.

The one that wore Fenrys's face

At sea, an ilken called Erawan's Bloodhound impersonates Fenrys — the real Fenrys still standing on deck — to deliver a message: Erawan knows Aelin holds a Wyrdkey, and knows where she is. Its venom dampens magic; it poisons the real Fenrys. Then the whole flock hits the ship. Dorian kills the Bloodhound; the rest go down to beheading — twin flame-swords through two necks, the heads rolling onto the blood-slick deck, and Aelin taking one with Goldryn. Fire, and a clean cut. That is the entire recipe.

Burned by the five hundred

At the Stone Marshes, Lorcan warns of an aerial army — five hundred ilken bearing down at once. Aelin walks out into the marsh and, with Rowan and Dorian, unleashes everything, and all five hundred go up in a single blast. It is the clearest proof in the series that ilken, like most Valg-made things, are catastrophically weak to fire. It also nearly ends her: the burn drains her well so completely that Maeve leashes and captures her moments later. The swarm's whole purpose is to be expensive to kill.

Hunters, then hearses

Early on the ilken are pursuit — trackers sent after Elide, cornering her at an inn to box her up for shipment back to Morath. It is there she beheads one herself, her first ilken kill, and later says she has loved Lorcan since he fought them for her. By the end they have become swarm and getaway car both: near Perranth one poison-claws Lysandra in mid-air, and at Orynth's southern gate a single ilken hauls Erawan bodily out of the battle — frontline fodder, and the escape vehicle for the Dark King himself.