Kolyat Krios: Thane's son and the hit he was stopped from finishing

Kolyat Krios was the son of Thane Krios and Irikah, a drell raised almost entirely by his mother while his father took assassination work further and further from home. When Irikah was murdered by Thane's enemies, Kolyat was hiding in the next room. Years later he was on the Citadel with a gun, working the same trade his father had, and Commander Shepard and Thane were both trying to reach him before he pulled the trigger.

Who is Kolyat Krios?#

Kolyat is Thane Krios's son, and for most of his life the person Thane was not around for.

At his birth Thane proclaimed him a gift from Arashu. In practice Kolyat rarely felt his father's presence at all, and Thane was too poor a parent to even acknowledge the gap. Kolyat knew his parents loved each other. He watched them through a door crack the night Irikah gave Thane her support for going freelance with his assassin's skills, and that support is precisely what made his father's absences longer and more distant, leaving his mother to raise him alone.

Then his father's enemies came for them. Irikah put Kolyat somewhere safe and told him to stay quiet until she came back. The intruder never found him. Nobody ever brought his mother back either. He was still in the custody of crime scene investigators when Thane returned from a job, and he watched his father's grief and breakdown from there.

The contract on Joram Talid#

Thane had left money with volus bankers on the Citadel as an inheritance. Kolyat took it early and went into business as a hitman, picking up a job from Elias Kelham on information supplied by Mouse. The target was Joram Talid, a turian politician, and the ground was the 800 Blocks.

He stalked Talid and got his opening just outside the turian's home, and he missed. The round hit Talid's Blood Pack bodyguard instead. Shepard and Thane had been watching Talid's movements from two separate positions, trying to head this exact moment off.

Whether they manage it comes down to coordination. If Shepard and Thane fail to update each other in time, Kolyat kills Talid and leaves in a skycar. If they do, the Commander shouts his name and breaks his concentration. Kolyat chases Talid down anyway and forces him into the execution position, and Thane and Shepard arrive as he does. Stopping him from there can take three forms: a warning shot followed by a punch to the face, a round through Kolyat's arm, or a round into Joram.

The room afterwards#

Kolyat is furious at the interruption and angrier at the sight of his father. His grievance is not about the hit. It is about the years Thane spent away, including the years after his mother's death, and he asks whether Thane has come for forgiveness so he can die in peace.

He settles as Thane explains why Irikah was killed and why he could not face coming back. What breaks him is his father saying that Kolyat is the only good thing he ever added to the world, having taken so many bad things out of it. He begins to cry.

The two are given time to talk in the interrogation room at the C-Sec office. Kolyat's sentence is settled there: community service, work for Captain Bailey, or a trial. In every version Thane stays in contact afterwards, trying to make up for it.

The prayer for Kalahira#

If the two of them reconciled in 2185, Thane mentions at his first meeting with Shepard in 2186 that they are still in touch.

Kolyat is at his father's side after Kai Leng mortally wounds Thane during the Cerberus attack on the Citadel. He gives him a blood transfusion. The late stages of Kepral's Syndrome make recovery impossible regardless.

When Shepard arrives at the hospital, Thane is too weak to finish his prayer to Kalahira, the drell goddess of oceans and the afterlife, and Kolyat picks it up and finishes it for him. Thane remarks that his son speaks as the priests do, and Kolyat confirms he has spent the last year with the drell priests, which appears to have been what his father wanted.

Kolyat has brought a prayer book, and asks Shepard whether the Commander would like to pray with him. He leads a prayer for redemption either way, and Thane dies as it ends. Shepard is left confused by it: a male Shepard asks why Thane would still be seeking redemption when he died a hero, a female Shepard asks why the last lines refer to a woman. Kolyat's answer is the same. His father had already made peace with himself. The prayer was for Shepard, and that was his dying wish.

The memorial#

Kolyat emails Shepard during the Citadel events asking for a memorial service for Thane. If the Commander agrees, it is held at Shepard's apartment with Thane's old Normandy crewmates and the salarian Councillor present. Kolyat's turn to speak includes an admission that he used to think his father was going soft, and that after the way things have turned out he suspects Thane had it worked out all along.

Afterwards he tells Shepard he intends to use the moment. The salarian Councillor is feeling grateful for Thane's sacrifice, and Kolyat wants to raise the salarian biologists who need funding to work on Kepral's Syndrome, because he thinks they can make progress on it. His read on his odds depends on who holds the seat. With Valern he points to the Councillor's recent speech about funding science even in wartime. With Esheel it is simpler: she could use the good press, so this is a good time to ask.

He leaves Shepard with one more thing. Going through his father's possessions, he found three video messages Thane had sent to Shepard's extranet address that were intercepted while the Commander was under arrest, and he has forwarded them on.