Kyo Iseul

Kyo Iseul was one of the founders of Eniac and a trailblazer in the field of rune self-cycling. They died in 126 SE from side effects of a long-distance rune planting experiment.

## Early Life

Kyo Iseul was born in a provincial Ju town called Kyorgo to an aristocratic father and commoner wither. Their father's marriage meant he was removed from inheritance and stripped of his family name. When Kyo was born blind, their grandmother re-inherited her son and they moved in to the ancestral summer home, where Kyo was cared for by a Dhi healer, Rishi Erpa, and Diao nursemaid, Jin Xia.

Though hired to cure Kyo's blindness, Rishi had some experience working with disabled people in Malaku and insisted Kyo learn to navigate with a cane and read using their fingers. Rishi convinced the family matriarch to sponsor her journey to Aksai to get a spiral tattoo and Rishi taught Kyo their first spell, Anuhara, which announces the name of whoever enters a room.

Excited by the idea of accessible magic, Kyo fought their way into a school for spiromancers, insisting Jin could act as scribe and reader as necessary. Despite their best efforts, they were quickly siphoned into temancy, a discipline dominated by blind mages, and Kyo met other blind people for the first time at age eighteen.

They took to temancy quickly, outpacing Jin in their second year and graduating early. The observatory closest to their home recruited them but they wanted to strike out on their own and returned to their ancestral home to begin experiments with evaporation rates. When Jin died, they lost their access to most books. They did not like the idea of relying on a reader forever and decided to design a spell that could convert text to speech. To do so, they needed a sighted ally and a large corpus to draw from, so they set out to Seong, alone.

## Time in the Archives

In the national library, Kyo found in archivist Ahn Ji-yu the ally they needed. While they never created a reading rune, Ahn recruited Kyo to help her and close friend Ea Pema design a rune that, when cast, created another rune, proof that Reo Yun-seo's theory of self-casting runes had a basis in reality.

Electrified by their success, they translated Reo's work into Lingua and Tak so it could be distributed more widely. Kyo also insisted on translating them into Gaon, Rishi's native language, and dedicated that version to her healer. As they worked, it is likely Kyo entered a relationship with both Ahn and Ea, who some speculate were already in a romantic relationship. Their different classes, and the fact that both Ahn and Ea were women, made the situation somewhat taboo.

The triad also designed a rune that could split a different rune in the spiral into two, both of which still needed to grow, another breakthrough in the field and cause for much celebration. Their translations were not getting picked up as quickly as expected; only one person, a native to Somni, wrote a letter enquiring after any additional notes from Reo.

Work stalled somewhat. Unable to get funding, Kyo returned to working as a temancer. Ahn and Ea worked to get copies of Reo's notes stored at the other libraries so they'd be saved in case of fire or other natural disaster. When Kyo unexpectedly inherited their family's home, they suggested the three of them move from Seong back to Kyorgo. This caused a falling out and it is unclear whether Ahn or Ea ever spoke to Kyo again outside of journal correspondences.

## Eniac

Kyo assigned a proxy to care for their family lands and stayed in Seong, on the other side of the city from Ahn and Ea, where only aristocrats could live. They already knew Naeviok Reticula from their work trying to create a reading rune and invited them to live together and continue working on self-cycling, which Naeviok took to naturally.

When Enkhtuya Hsia visited the city, Kyo invited her to a meal as well, mistaking her for the woman who gave Rishi her tattoo, though this woman was actually Enkhtuya's master. Enkhtuya was so enamored with Kyo that she returned a year later to teach Kyo how to shoot a longbow, introducing her to Ae Duri, a spiromancer in the triple kingdom spiral tower who was fascinated by Kyo's self-cycling work and quickly entered into a relationship with Naeviok.

Inspired by the coincidences, Kyo pitched to the four of them that they move in together and work on the self-cycling problem. They all agreed, but Duri insisted they needed a cryptanalyst, as she knew Makkadi spiromancers were already using randomized magic, improved each time, to crack ciphers. Duri and Kyo visited Seong's cipher cracking houses and recruited the first interested person: Mehdi edj-Cheok.

Each letter in the name Eniac appears in their names: **E**nkhtuya, **N**aeviok, **I**nseul, **A**e, and edj-**C**heok. The name also resembles Eu Nok, divinity of unknown purpose.

Kyo traveled to Bhatan in 124 SE for the team's first big experiment, when they proved it was possible for someone in one location to plant a rune long distance through the mind and tattoo of someone else.

## Death

Because Kyo was not in a proper state of mind during the experiment, entering the spiral came as a mental and emotional shock to their system and mind. They lost consciousness for almost a day afterwards and returned disoriented. Naeviok took them up the Aleya to Dhi healers, who were unable to treat them beyond stabilizing their mental state.

On the journey back to Seong, they developed hallucinations, or an inability to tell the spiral from the physical world, and paranoia. They claimed they could communicate with "the beings in the spiral" and that they "came from deep in the earth." They no longer expressed any fear of death because "the mantle died and was reborn, as I shall be."

Eniac cared for Kyo in their shared apartment until they died in 126 SE.