We always felt there should be at least one mole in the group. Colonnus or Rabbit were the other major possibilities. Everyone else, we felt the readers knew too well. I mean, I guess we could’ve trampled your hearts even more and made it Braggadocio or Bert or Rendar, but they’d been central in key scenes where those other three hadn’t. I’d feel wrong about making such key supporting players secret Culitsts or Cultist allies and not dropping any hints beforehand. And Lectrus’ nature and powers made him a useful mole for us as storytellers.

This was as close as we got to resolving Lectrus’ part of the story until Chapter 50. At one point, Bandit was going to discover his treachery instead of crossing daggers with Brother Tom’s body: later on, he might’ve gotten a page or few panels showing his end at the hands of the Cultists he joined up with. But Flo maintained that we just had too much more important stuff to focus on.

So here’s the backstory that we could only imply in the text. Lectrus was a dedicated seeker of knowledge, arguably a compulsive hoarder of it. And the Cultists are keepers of forbidden lore. (I’m normally opposed to censorship, but if the book is something like Protocols of the Elders of Zion or How to Transform Anyone into a Crazed Murdering Monster in Two Easy Steps, there could be a defensible reason it’s restricted-access.) So Lectrus struck a deal with the Cultists, using his powers to guide Byron into Tom’s trap. The Cultists supplied some literature in exchange and promised more upon Byron’s capture. Although Lectrus did anticipate some kind of double-cross, the speed with which it arrived and the number of Cultists who enforced it caught him off guard. And for Lectrus the amoral adventurer, Lectrus the literature-lover, that was all she wrote.