An Illuminated is slender, no taller than most Humans, and it shines. Light comes from within the body, soft through the skin and brightest at the face, hands, and breast, in white, gold, or a shifting iridescence, so that it casts no shadow and lights whatever stands near it. The features are sharp and clear, without any softness or blur, as if cut from glass. The eyes are pools of pure light with no iris or pupil.

They wear little, since cloth turns clear on the plane anyway. They move directly, never sidelong. Their voices are clear and carry, and in the plane’s hum their words sound like pure tones. They smell of rain on dry earth.

They live across the crystalline plains and among the glass towers of the Radiance, where walls do not exist and every barrier is a field of light. They keep no private places.

They practise radical honesty: no diplomacy, no politics, no courtesies. If they dislike someone they say so; if they love someone they show it; a conflict is settled at once by facing it. They cannot understand white lies or politeness, and they see outsiders as broken or sick, because outsiders hide their true selves. They are not cruel by intent, and they do not attack; but they will say to a visitor, in front of others, exactly what they see.

They do not sleep, since a mind with no secrets needs no rest from them, and they do not eat: they absorb light and truth. They cannot be deceived. A lie told to an Illuminated is seen for what it is before it is finished.

How the Illuminated come to be is not known; the Confessors, who shed every secret of their own will, join them and are said to become like them. They do not grow old in any way a traveller can see.

The Radiance can cure madness or delusion with clarity, and agreements spoken there are unbreakable, and the Illuminated are their keepers. Their danger is exposure: every shame a visitor carries is seen and named.

At the Oracle Gates, places of judgement, of confession, and mirrors, the returned describe the Illuminated as burning angels, and some faiths on Caeldon are said to take them for messengers of truth. They are a people, not messengers. Those who follow Lux and Verba are said to honour the Radiance as the corrective that keeps the cosmos from sinking into deception, and anyone who lives by secrets fears it.

Lords have sent traitors through the Oracle Gates in chains to be made to speak before the Illuminated, and it is said of one lord who went through with them that he and came back unable to look his own household in the eye.