Icantha

"It's rude to stare, you know. Don't worry, I've no mind to start anything with you. After all, I've stayed in such good shape by choosing my meals carefully."

Icantha is a (now undead) scientist in.

She can be found in her house in the north-west corner of the Heritage Hill district of Defiance Bay.

Biography
A woman bends over a roaring fireplace, feeding a splintered chair leg into it. As you get closer, you notice something unnatural about her - a certain pallor to her skin, a lack of movement beneath her flesh even while her arms execute deft, efficient movements. And then you see the puckered flesh, ragged and bloodless, over her heart.

Icantha is unique in that she has weathered the animantic disaster in Heritage Hill by dying. Harnessing what knowledge and talent she had, she stabbed herself in the heart after taking precautions pioneered by Helig of Thein, surviving as an undead vessel. She maintains a strict regimen to maintain her body's freshness and avoid succumbing to the ravenous appetite of an undead monster. That includes feasting on captive humans she keeps locked away in her house.

Her unique status allowed her to analyze the Heritage Hill disaster with a scientist's eye and determine that an act of animancy on a great scale is responsible for it, on a scale unseen since Engwithan times. She speculates it's the work of Aldhelm, one of many charlatans claiming to be men of science. She hates him on the grounds of him mocking her long career trying to understand the Engwithans and their language. In fact, she's one of the few scholars to actually understand a portion of the language.

Quests

 * Undying Heritage: If you talk to her after you've already talked to Aldhelm during Undying Heritage, you can convince her to teach you the Engwithan language.

Trivia

 * If you attempt to attack her, dialogue will be triggered; she will tell you that as long as the tower remains active, she will return to her body.
 * Once you have completed Undying Heritage, (at least in the event that you destroy the machine), Icantha will have vanished. It is unknown what happens to her after this point.