Myria LeJean

Myria LeJean
Name	Myria LeJean
Race	Auditor, though she becomes more and more human
Age	As old as time
Occupation	Auditor
Physical appearance
Residence
Death	By Chocolate
Parents
Relatives
Children
Marital Status
Appearances
Books	Thief of Time
Cameos

An Auditor embodied in a human, well, body. When the Auditors attempted to re-create the human body, they found that it would just lie there, decomposing, unless one of them entered the body and steered it around.

Myria's physical form is based on the famous Leonard of Quirm portrait of Woman Holding Ferret, but with all the organic imperfections (such as asymmetry) removed. The result is a rather colourless copy of a beautiful woman.

She employed Time's son, Jeremy Clockson, to build the perfect clock, in order to stop time. She went insane, as she further experimented with the experience of being human (watching the opera, tasting food, etc...), and attempted surreptitiously to stop the clock from being completed.

Once time was stopped, she aided in Jeremy's escape, and also helped Susan and Lobsang in fighting the Auditors, who swarmed Discworld in corporeal form once time stopped.

Her name defines an important aspect of the Auditors: Myria stands for "myriad", a number once meaning "ten thousand" in Greek, but now means "very many"; LeJean is a pun for "legion", also meaning many, and can be connected to the demons exorcised by Jesus. The Auditors believed that the name of an object or a person ought to describe what it or he/she really is, and they believed that there is safety in numbers; an individual identity means death.

It was Myria who found out that chocolate could kill Auditors. She was renamed "Unity" by Susan (who nonetheless still thought she was more insane than a loft full of cuckoos). Unity killed herself by jumping into a huge vat of pure chocolate, her swan dive into the brown material witnessed by Kaos and Death.

Smitten by the combination of beauty and a fascinating knowledge of the possibility of clocks, Jeremy falls in love with her. Ambushed by the physicality of her own body, she is attracted to him. She starts staying in human form all the time, going to art galleries, and even tasting food. She discovers poetry. She allows a cat to move into the place where she goes, and starts to paint. More and more wrapped in flesh, Myria begins to lie to herself, and to the monitoring Auditors. Even Igor begins to suspect that she is sabotaging the clock on her visits, in which he is correct. She wants more time.

Myria is caught trying to destroy the clock by the Auditors. She goes on the run with Jeremy, whom she may have carried, because he could barely walk. She hides in the attic of the Art Museum, barricaded behind paradoxical commands to confuse her still super-disciplined colleagues. She discovers how to kill them with chocolate. Lobasang and Susan find her there. She and Lu Tze distract the Auditors while Susan and Lobsang set off to destroy the clock. She is captured, saved by Lu Tze, and when the clock is destroyed, ends up with him 60,000 years away eyeball to eyeball with a mammoth.

It would all have ended on rather a tragic note, except that after she plunged into the vat of chocolate, she is astonished to find herself talking to Death again. "But... I died," she said. "Yes," said Death. "This is the next part." She had become human enough to find herself on the journey through the desert.

Annotation

Death by Chocolate is a rather twee name (at least, it's witty the first time you come across it) for a very rich, glutinous and intense chocolate sponge cake, saturated in chocolate liquor, filled with chocolate icing and topped with - guess what? rich chocolate sauce and decorated with chocolate shavings. As well as describing the mode of Myria's death, it has also been sent up in Mort, where * Ysabell's favourite dessert is named as Genocide by Chocolate.