⚠️ This article contains spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1), up to and including Act 2.
"Neutrality is cowardice. Tross is corrupt. Rebellious. They have abandoned the natural order. They killed many Celestials like you and me. Why should we legitimise their degeneracy?"
— Derranon, Sky Court
Full name: Lord Derranon of House Emporios
Origin: Tross; arrived in Aeloria approximately thirty years before the novel's events
Wings: Four, pale silver — immaculately groomed
Position: Head of House Emporios; council member; controlling influence in Aeloria's Trading Guild
Tall but gaunt — the thinness of deliberate self-denial rather than illness. Stands perfectly straight with military bearing despite being a merchant. Snow-white hair, cut short, perfectly maintained. His face is sharp and aristocratic, deep lines etched around the mouth and eyes from decades of calculation and careful planning. Grey eyes that catalogue a visitor's worth, purpose, and usefulness in a single glance.
He dresses in dark silver robes of expensive fabric, restrained design, a single gold ring. No other jewellery. "Wealth displayed through quality, not quantity."
His wings are pale silver — four of them, immaculately groomed, carrying nothing of the golden warmth his son Tesseon inherited.
When Lia first sees him in the Sky Court he is "all hard edges. Pale silver wings, grey eyes, a face carved from stone. Older, severe, radiating barely contained fury."
The only detached building in Aeloria. The main body of the Emporios mansion sits on a platform of stone and crystal suspended in open air — no bridges connecting it to the surrounding district, no visible supports beneath. Gardens cascade down the sides. Terraces wrap the structure like ribbons. Fountains arc water into empty air before it falls back into ornate basins. Windows glitter gold in the afternoon sun.
Inside: gold everywhere. Gold leaf on ceiling mouldings, gold thread in tapestries, gold fixtures on every door, gold veining through the pale marble floors. Fountains inside, because why not. Gardens visible through tall windows — some floating independently on their own small platforms around the mansion.
Derranon's own study, by contrast, is austere. Plain stone walls. Simple dark wood desk. Ledgers and trade documents instead of art. No gold, no fountains. One wall entirely glass — floor to ceiling, edge to edge — facing the entire western quarter of Aeloria, the palace visible in the distance, the Core pulsing its slow light at the city's centre. From here, you can see everything.
He had a Core excavated from a smaller floating island at catastrophic expense and installed in the mansion's foundation. The building does not depend on Aeloria's Core to float.
Derranon came from Tross. He was a merchant there — moderate by the standards of the time, believing in Celestial rule but without cruelty, open to compromise. He had friends, family, a trading business his grandfather had started. When the Tross rebellion came, the rebels executed his friends because they were Celestials. His business was seized. His home taken. Everything he had built destroyed by people who considered hierarchy itself the enemy.
He fled to Aeloria young and destitute, with nothing but his wings and his will.
Thirty years later, House Emporios controls more than half of Aeloria's trade. His wealth exceeds the royal treasury. Other noble families come to him for loans and favours. He sits on the King's council. "The Second Royal House," Aelorians joke. The moderate rulers kept merchant families from the throne room's inner circles — Derranon knew his place and was made to feel it — but they could not deny the power of money. So he made sure he had more of it than anyone else.
He is not a man of simple hatred. He was a moderate once, and watched moderation fail catastrophically in Tross. What he took from that experience was not cruelty but conviction: that compromise, endlessly repeated, eventually gives away everything. That the natural order — Celestial governance, hierarchy maintained by principle rather than violence — must be defended actively or it will be slowly eroded by those who call each small concession reasonable.
In the Sky Court he is direct about it: "Neutrality is cowardice." When others argue for pragmatic engagement with Tross, with its equal-rights philosophy and its growing military power, Derranon names what he sees. He watched that philosophy destroy a city once. He is not willing to watch it a second time.
What makes him genuinely dangerous is that this worldview is internally coherent. He can make his case. He has the history to point to. He is not wrong that Tross was violent. He is not wrong that moderation has a cost. What he cannot see — or will not — is that the thing he is defending has its own violence, its own cost, written into every two-winged servant moving quickly with eyes down through the Celestial quarter streets.
His first major appearance is the session following the assassination attempt on Ambassador Atraeis. He rises to speak against Lia with formal precision — her presence is "problematic," her magic "an affront to everything we hold sacred," her existence in the palace "a magnet for instability." He does not look at her once during the speech. She is a thing to be removed, not a person to be addressed.
Kyrian holds. The motion fails. Derranon sits, jaw clenched, "his eyes full of cold fury."
He will not stop here. Beros makes this plain to Lia afterwards: "House Emporios won't stop. They might not have direct governing power, but they're very strong. Lots of influence, and more money than most. This is Aeloria — it lives by trade."
His son. Golden-winged, charming, the heir to everything Derranon has built. Kyrian beat him nearly to death in the palace courtyard over a careless comment about the wing taint — left him permanently grounded, his flight limited and painful, his life as a Celestial effectively over.
Derranon accepted the King's gold compensation because he could not refuse the King. Kyrian watched his face as he accepted it.
"The hatred. The cold calculation. He'll never forgive me. Never forget."
Tesseon and his father are not the same person. This matters.
This article is about a Character — Supporting Character
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