Eamon Farthing

‘Eamon the Orphan’: a child with a name the city repeats like a sentence. Too young to grasp the games around him, old enough to feel their teeth.

Appearance

Eamon is a thin, barefoot slum boy of nine. After his transformation in the cathedral he becomes a towering creature: two black, backward-curving horns burst from his skull, his hair falls away to leave a ridged, pitted scalp, his eyes burn with a sulphurous red light, and vast black leathery wings tear from his back. His nails thicken into hooked black claws. When the demons are finally driven out, he is once more a boy with too-thin arms.

In The Outcast Knight

Eamon, called Eamon the Orphan, is a nine-year-old boy whose fall into blood magic forms the book's second thread. He was introduced in a cellar beneath a wealthy house, where his father, a Godless priest, was trying to revive his plague-dead mother with a blood ritual. His father cut him and painted sigils across his chest and throat in blood, and something vast in the dark took notice of him. When the rite failed, his father tried to cut out his heart; Eamon kicked free and fled into the trade district, where he hid behind Fi. His father followed in monstrous form and was killed by Fi, Usso and Balorin, but in the confusion Eamon slipped away.

The sigils left whispers in his mind. At the docks a vast, patient voice offered to make him strong, and when a ship's captain reached for him he lashed out in a blood-madness and was knocked senseless and taken to the cathedral. Balorin gave him a home there, but the whispers sharpened, and in a fit of madness he stabbed the young priestess Lira to death. Imprisoned, he heeded a demon's voice, tore his wrist on a ringbolt and escaped as a cloud of black smoke. The forbidden tome Perdition then vanished from the cathedral crypt, and Balorin concluded that the boy had taken it. In smoke form he confronted Balorin, speaking with two voices, one threatening and one begging for help.

During the tournament Haelun found him on the brink of giving in and tried to talk him back to the Light. The demons ordered Eamon to mark him; shadows pinned Haelun down while Eamon carved a binding sigil into his chest, and after Balorin ended Haelun's life Eamon transformed fully and burst out through the great window. He rampaged through the slums, killing many and raising the dead as red-eyed thralls bound by necromantic sigils, while the demons urged him to spill innocent blood and cast it into the Eye of Luna to open a door for them.

He sent his thralls against the residential walls as a diversion, smashed through the castle gate and the throne, and found the hidden stair to the Lightspire. There Ferrin and Usso's luminarite chains bound him and broke his hold over the thralls. During Balorin's ritual the chains burst; Eamon struck Balorin down and hurled Fi into the Eye. With that the demons were gone, and he was left a weeping boy who remembered everything. Astarion spared him, placing him under guard and questioning, and the book leaves him in a tower room beneath the scorched sky, resolved not to face what comes next as anyone's puppet.

In The Godless Priest

Eamon Farthing did not appear directly in The Godless Priest, which was set largely in Crowbrook, but he stood at the centre of its investigation. His cousin Lysa Farthing, Manus Farthing's niece, reached the city wounded and carrying a satchel of evidence about him: cathedral statements, guard reports, copies of his cell record, drawings of the scars his father had carved into his chest, a sailor's account from the Nightwind dock, and the words of a nine-year-old preserved by adults who had barely understood them.

From these papers Cassian reconstructed how a demonic voice had recruited the boy. Among many whispers one patient voice, which Eamon likened to deep water, became distinct. It offered to quiet the others, promised enough strength that nobody would hurt him again, claimed to want nothing in return, and spoke of Charon and the Stygian waters. In the cathedral cell it began calling him a child of destiny and itself a keeper of ancient secrets, which Cassian's own demon, Morrow, dismissed as a lie. Finally it told him to spill his blood willingly on hallowed ground. Cassian argued that Manus had forced the opening, but that the demon needed Eamon's consent to turn the wound into permission. After giving his blood Eamon became smoke, passed through the cell and escaped, laughing with a child's astonishment. A guard's note recorded him asking when he would be allowed to stop. Lysa and Cassian blamed Luna as well: its priests had kept him in a bright cell, treated his retreats as aggression and offered him sweets for demonstrations, leaving the voice as the only thing that seemed to understand him.

Later evidence showed that Eamon had been chosen before he was born. Morrow admitted that the voice using him had once offered it employment, years before his birth, and explained that the route had been the plan, not the child. The demon Toma carried said the boy was chosen for his blood near power and grief near blood, a child taught to mistake selection for love. A smuggler's skin ledger listed Eamon beneath his father's name as a dependent route with payment deferred. Manus's cellar held Eamon's first shoe, cut with route marks, and a map that drew him as a road through Purgatory and back up to the Lightspire. His demon was identified as an advocate serving the Crown beneath the Empty Chair, a rival to the Crown that rode Mother Avara Vey.

In Crowbrook Eamon became a political symbol. Recruiters put up posters reading SAVE THE NEXT EAMON, nobles laid wagers on whether he would manifest again, and Mother Vey's army marched on Luna partly in his name, though her hidden Crown described him as an asset to be received. Lysa wrote to him several times, admitting that she had read his first letter and never answered, and telling him that his choice could still change. The book ended without any reply from him, his fate unresolved as the army moved towards Luna.

Family

After the books

Still caught in the ripples of adult sins. In a realm obsessed with bloodlines, he is what happens when lineage becomes a curse.