In his earliest incarnation, in a valley near Göbekli Tepe, he was Kariru, the Restless Bark. It was there when the Numen first spoke, conscripting him to chronicle the developments of an emerging world in order to mend a rift older than time—the sundering of the One World into two: the First, realm of the Ouranians, and the Second, the realm of humankind. The goal is to heal this cosmic rift and Kayin is tasked with tracking the world’s progress toward this ideal—as well as its setbacks. 

He travels in the guise of a soothsayer (hence “the Ariole”), wrapped in a long dark cloak, a silver bell fastened to his ironwood staff—the only sound to mark his solitary path. To some he appears as a biblical prophet, as a Harbinger of Heaven’s Whisp, or even as the Angel of Plagues since he often turns up where calamities strike. But he is only ever doing his job, serving as reluctant eyewitness for his Numen.

Kayin is the ultimate sceptic, believing neither in gods nor in destiny nor karma. “Why would it matter how you live,” he asks Aušrinė, “if your fate is decided by someone else? No, your grace, humanity is both its own executioner and savior.” His loyalty is not to a particular creed but to memory itself—to the right to remember, and thus to retain one’s identity and true Sense of Self over time, including from one life to the next. He pleads with the Numen to spare humankind from the end-of-life memory purge that erases the record of their good and bad deeds alike. “If you cleanse them of what they hated,” he argues, “you also cleanse them of what they loved.” To him, that is the ultimate injustice.

Kayin abhors killing and enslavement—not out of sanctimony but because they breed regret, the very reason the Sky Lords use to justify forgetting. “The blameless forget nothing,” he tells Aušrinė, “and that is why I would never kill. The regret of having killed outweighs all regrets of not having done so.”

While chronologer of humanity’s conscience, Kayin remains a man at odds with heaven—a skeptic pressed into divine service, condemned to remember what the rest of humanity mercifully forgets. Yearning for peace and freedom, Kayin nevertheless soldiers on, knowing that as the Numen once said, “We must all pay a price for the privilege of existing . . . and the price cannot be too low considering the alternative.”

For all his cynicism, Kayin is capable of great love. Once, in a forgotten age, a woman named Y’lira saved him. Her devotion provided him with a new Sense of Self after two thousand years of self-inflicted oblivion. Ever since, his tireless wanderings carry a faint echo of her name, though he rarely speaks it aloud. “I was saved not because of myself,” he confesses, “but because of the boundless love of another.”

When we meet him in Masks of God, in the plague-besieged city of Kaffa in 1347, Kayin has grown weary of cosmic errands and divine whispers. He yearns only for release—from duty, from mission, from himself. Yet the Numen has other plans. Kayin must travel to a mysterious “Hiding Land”—a technologically upgraded Plato’s Cave where souls, cut off from conscience, live deceived in a counterfeit reality.