Arkos is an alchemical clone of Arcoms Cosmar, the Duward librarian of Mithranor, who serves Pope Alexander VI as historian and scribe and records the deeds of the Seekers of Ardis Vala. He is known as the Archivist of the Plata.
| Type | Character (alchemical clone) |
| Original | Arcoms Cosmar |
| Created | During the Fifteen-Year Hiatus |
| Serves | Pope Alexander VI |
| Based at | Palace of the Prism |
| Spanish entry | Arkos |
Origin
Arkos was made from the young version of his original, the father of Clarisa, before Arcoms passed into the lich state; he inherits the librarian’s trade, not the necromancy. He rose from a summoning circle during the Hiatus; the circle’s author is not named. The formula depended on the purity of the Mercurial Silver Solution, which was high. He emerged knowing fully what his original had been and, at the same time, that he was not him. Common clones, made with less pure salts, lack this second awareness and believe themselves the original. He describes himself as a clone, his present form as what remains, and his condition as the closest thing to hell he has known, saved only by the books. At his first audience he said «Nací hoy… Tuve madre y padre» (“I was born today… I had a mother and a father”).
He was born with a six-fingered hand, a mark associated elsewhere with the line of Graz’zt but in his case a wound of the conjuration’s birth, not of a pact. Those who received him, “some strangers”, removed the sixth finger; the scar remains.
Name
Oral tradition confuses him with Marcos the Mage, the necromancer lich of Alexandria, a distinct figure; Arkos rejects that name and “Saint Mark”. He drops the m of his original’s name (Arcoms → Arkos). Under the onomastic doctrine of the Decadian, a clone who keeps one letter fewer signs his diminution each time he says his name. He rejects the variant Arthoms less openly.
First encounter
The Seekers met him in a low corridor of the Palace of the Prism, after falling onto the prismatic pentagram of the Tribunal of the Custodians. He stood beside the Pope writing in an open book, wearing a shedding cape like blue-dragon scale mixed with feathers, with something like ink on his left hand. He recorded them before greeting them. His first words were “don’t call me that”: they had just called him Marcos the Mage.
Trade
He calls himself “the newsman, the historian” and is a scribe by guild. He writes in a hard-cover notebook, contrasting his freedom outside the Library of Midran with its limits. His notes carry Rioplatense Argentinisms inherited from the first mage he copies; hence “the Archivist of the Plata”, alluding both to the silver (plata) solution and to his dialect.
He knows the planes, Neoplatonic theology, scrolls, the ritual of redemption, and the realm that Decadian archives call Balacostales, an archaic name of the valley. He does not know the Mists: the realm is not mentioned in any book he has read in the library, though Paulus’s archive records it.
Service
The Pope took him under his command and assigned him to record what happens around the Seekers, to gloss what Paulus cannot reach from his cosmomantic distance, and to transcribe in Rioplatense the colloquialisms the major chronicles blur. He travels with the Seekers without belonging to the group and does not dispute the Pope’s orders. When his notes reach Paulus’s archives, by chronomancy, dream or coincidence, Paulus cites them with attribution. The two chroniclers have never met.
Caladan
Arkos witnessed the enthronement of Caladan as lord of Valakhan and is openly hostile to him: “He is not a lord of faith… He is the land itself made man. The land is him and he is the land. That land must be purified.”