Gelnor is a Tuktuk, which is the first strange thing about him, because the Tuktuk are a fire people. They forge in volcanic glass on the black island of Tyvern, they settle their quarrels with the axe, and they pray to Tyvarn for the strength to win them. Gelnor was born among them attuned to fog and water, the inverse of everything Tyvern is, and he spent his early life making himself a warrior anyway, hard enough that no one held the gift against him. He was good at it. That is the part that matters.
Centuries ago a faction of his own kin rose against the clans that held Tyvern. Gelnor was sent to put the rising down, and he did. His gift made it quiet. Where another commander would have left a field of dead and a story everyone could see, Gelnor brought the fog in off the water and let it sit. The rebels died inside it, scattered and blind, unable to find each other or the shore. What the clans wrote down afterward was not a massacre. It was a hard, lean year of attrition, a rebellion that wore itself out in bad weather and worse luck. He hid the killing inside his own gift, and the gift hid it perfectly.
Gelnor held the eastern coast through the whole of that wet year and never once broke. When the rising had spent itself he asked for no holding and no honor of it, and he sailed north alone. A warrior's modesty. We should all end so well. — from the clan-record of Tyvern, on the year of the rising
That is the trap he built for himself. Tyvern remembers Gelnor as the steady commander who held the clans together through a bad season, not as the one who drowned a thousand cousins in a fog so they would never see it coming. No one hunts him, because no one knows there is anything to hunt. His name is clean on the island that made him, and that clean name is the thing he cannot stand beside.
So he left it. He went as far north as the world reaches, to the foggiest rocks he could find at the edge of the Shroud Isles, and he has stayed there for centuries with the only tool he has left. The standing fog over the islands is his work, the same attunement that hid the slaughter now keeping him hidden in turn. He made himself a lich to carry the penance past the span of a life, which is less a reach for power than a refusal to let an easy death close the matter. He keeps no harbor and posts no warning. He turns away anyone who comes to him with a home still waiting somewhere, and takes in those who have none.
He is not the only deathless thing in these waters. Bzulakar holds the central archipelago, and the two of them keep to opposite ends of it and have never had cause to test one another. Gelnor wants nothing Bzulakar has. He is not building toward anything or waiting for anyone or planning a return to Tyvern. He is a murderer no one is looking for, holding his own fog over his own head until the world forgets his name without help. For a lich, that is a long time to wait.