Character from Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
Half-Jaghut gentle scholar who builds clocks and studies time — until his rage awakens, and then civilizations fall and even gods retreat. He never remembers the destruction.
Icarium is the most tragic weapon in the Malazan world: a being of genuine kindness and intellectual wonder who contains a destructive force that has leveled civilizations — and who remembers none of it. His amnesia is not convenient but foundational: after each rage, his memory resets, and Mappo must reconstruct a gentle fiction to keep him stable. He builds intricate time-measuring devices, studies ancient ruins with childlike fascination, and asks philosophical questions with the earnestness of someone who truly wants to understand. Then something triggers him, and the thing that wakes up behind his eyes has no philosophy, no curiosity, no mercy. It is pure annihilation given form. The tragedy is doubled because Icarium suspects the truth — there are gaps in his memory shaped exactly like atrocities — but he cannot quite bring himself to confront it. His friendship with Mappo is the only anchor he has, and it is built on lies that both of them need. He is the argument that power without memory is the most dangerous thing in existence.
Tall and lean with grey-green Jaghut skin, elongated features, and tusks that are modest by Jaghut standards. His expression defaults to gentle curiosity — an inventor's face, a philosopher's eyes. Carries a mechanized sword of his own design. There is something fundamentally wrong about the disconnect between his mild appearance and the reputation that makes Ascendants change continents to avoid him. When the rage takes him, his eyes empty of everything recognizable.
Also known as: Icarium, Icarium Lifestealer, Jhag, The Lifestealer