Suren was one of the three — one of three angels of Grandex's twelve sent to retrieve the Ember of the Abyss from a fortress on Kolonoth in the chronicle's deep prelude, and the first of the three to enter the hall when Drexel's working table was found. By his own order's long account of the morning, Suren went in first because Suren always went in first when Iliach and Vehrun were behind him; the order had been built on a small careful arithmetic of who carried what at the front of any expedition into the unknown.
What Drexel did to him was not killing. The chronicle has spent its first chapter and its many subsequent ones explaining that the warlock did not kill the three. He stripped almost all of their essence and bound it into his staff through the Ember. They remained alive — barely. They cannot, by the order's diagnostic, be raised; they are not dead. They cannot be healed; too little of them remains. They cannot be found; their celestial signal is too weak.
Grandex held Suren's brow on the floor of the hall when he came up the stair too late. Suren did not answer. He could not. The flicker that remained of him in the body was not at the level of recognition or speech. He was a body, and a breath, and the faintest possible memory of having been Suren.
The order keeps him in a small black room, with Iliach and Vehrun, with a single jar of slag from the night Grandex burned the predecessor's shield. Grandex has never asked after the jar. The three have not, in the chronicle's record, looked at it.
