PRINCE ILIAUBEN (pronounced: Ill-eye-aw-ben) “Auben” for short.
Race: Thauron
Eye Color: Gold
Hair Color: Dark Brown
~Story~
One of the five Rhendain princes in Thauron, he is sent to Silon under the pretense of solidifying an uncertain alliance between Avenan and Thauron by marrying the princess Mereet. Bitter to the point of resentment and wary of the silenes, he is all but helpless in his assigned position, ensnared in a political trap, bound by his title and oaths to his country. He cares little for the woman he is to marry, feeling chained among the silenes like a dog in a rat pit, and mutters incessantly about his homeland and the power he once held there. He is unpredictable and hard to please, easily bored and insulted, finding the life and principles of the silenes to be intolerable. He masks his disturbed pride beneath a passive guise in order to keep peace, but scorns all company, even that of his wife. Though she is pretty enough, he finds as little pleasure in her as he does in the towering black-rock palace which confines him. Saberondan’s castle was a fortress and he used it as such, isolating himself with his most trusted men and seeking to hasten the time with drink and sleep.
His only other escape from his dreary fate is in riding his prized black horses, which he takes on occasional hunting jaunts to the mainland. But a near fatal accident during one of these hunts causes his virulent mistrust of the silenes to turn suddenly into fear. Injured and forced to destroy his beloved horses, he begins to suspect the silenes are secretly plotting his death, arranging ways to rid themselves of him by staging accidents. Obsessed by a terrible caution, he confiscates all letters arriving to the castle and any leaving, touches no food made by silene chefs, and guards himself against all visitors. Feeling ambushed in the castle hallways and watched in his own quarters, he imagines he hears voices in the darkness. Believing his own wife and her family to be in on it, he schemes together with his guardian Ryvan to destroy them first. Desperate to free himself, his irrational declaration of war severs the treaty between Thauron and Silon and plunges Saberondan into the midst of a bloody power struggle that rends the island asunder. Lost in the turmoil of his own making, he drinks himself into long stupors, accelerating his collapse into a paranoid, delusional recluse irrevocably tormented by the fires of madness.