KILMANDAROS

' The naked creature that traversed the rough path formed by the fallen dragons was a match to their mass, yet bound to the earth, and it walked on two bowed legs, the thighs thick as thousand-year old trees. The width of its shoulders was equal to the length of a Tartheno Toblakai’s height; from a thick neck hidden beneath a mane of glossy black hair, the frontal portion of the head was thrust forward -- brow, cheek-bones and jaw, and its deep-set eyes revealed black pupils surrounded in opalescent white. The huge arms were disproportionately long, the enormous hands almost scraping the ground. Its breasts were large, pendulous and pale. As it strode past the battered, rotting carcasses, the motion of its gait was strangely fluid, not at all lumbering, and each limb was revealed to possess extra joints.

Skin the hue of sun-bleached bone, darkening to veined red at the ends of the creature’s arms, bruises surrounding the knuckles, a lattice-work of cracked flesh exposing the bone here and there. The hands had seen damage, the result of delivering devastating blows. (RG prologue)

' Opposite them, abutting the curved wall, was a raised dais on which heaps of silks, pillows and furs were scattered; and seated at the edge of that dais, leaning forward with forearms resting on thighs, was a giant. An ogre or some such demon, bearing the same hue of skin as Knuckles yet stretched over huge muscles and a robust frame of squat bones. The hands dangling down over the knees were disproportionately oversized even for that enormous body. Long, unkempt hair hung down to frame a heavy-featured face with deep-set eyes – so deep that even the lantern's light could spark but a glimmer in those ridge-shelved pits. (RG)

The creature faced the gate once more. Then Kilmandaros, the Elder goddess, strode through.(RG)

A sour grunt.  "You think this house let me go of its own will – proof to your gullibility, Knuckles.  Not even the Azath could hold me forever."

"Extraordinary,"  Knuckles said,  "that it held you at all."

This exchange, Bruthen Trana realized, was an old one, following well-worn ruts between the two.

"Would never have happened,"  Kilmandaros said under her breath,  "if he'd not betrayed me –"

"Ah, Mother.  I have no particular love for Anomander Purake, but let us be fair here.  He did not betray you.  In fact, it was you who jumped him from behind –"

"Anticipating his betrayal!"

"Anomander does not break his word, Mother.  Never has, never will."

"Tell that to Osserc –"

"Also in the habit of 'anticipating' Anomander's imminent betrayal."

"What of Draconus?"

"What of him, Mother?" (RG)

Kilmandaros straightened.  She had taken upon herself the body of a Tel Akai, still towering above them but not quite as massively as before.(DoD)

Kilmandaros strode at his side in a half-hitching gait, lest she leave him and Errastas far behind.  She had assumed her favoured form, bestial and hulking, towering over her two companions.  He could hear her sliding breath as it rolled in and out of four lungs, the rhythm so discordant with his own that he felt strangely breathless.  Mother or not, she was never a comforting presence.  She wore violence like a fur cloak riding her shoulders, a billowing emanation that brushed him again and again.

                She was a singular force of balance, Sechul knew – had always known.  Creation was her personal anaethema, and the destruction in her hands was its answer.  She saw no value in order, at least the kind that was imposed by a sentient will.  Such efforts were an affront.

                Kilmandaros was worshipped still, in countless cultures, but there was nothing benign in that sensibility.  She bore a thousand names, a thousand faces, and each and every one was a source of mortal dread.  Destroyer, annihilator, devourer.  Her fists spoke in the cruel forces of nature, in sundered mountains and drowning floods, in the ground cracking open and in rivers of molten lava.  Her skies were ever dark, seething and swollen.  Her rain was the rain of ash and cinders.  Her shadow destroyed lives.

                The Forkrulian joints of her limbs and their impossible articulations were often seen as physical proof of nature gone awry.  Broken bones that nonetheless descended with vast, implacable power.  A body that could twist like madness.  Among the believers, she personified the loosing of rage, the surrendering of reason and the rejection of control.  Her cult was written in spilled blood, disfigurement and the virtue of violence. (DoD)