Follow TV Tropes

Following

Characters / Pact: Others

Go To

Tropes related to supernatural creatures, aka Others. For other characters in Pact see here.

Supernatural Creatures (Others)

    open/close all folders 

    Goblins 

General Tropes

  • At Least I Admit It: Goblins feel that while they may be wicked, they don't pretend they're not like fairies do.
  • Attack! Attack! Attack!: Goblins are mainly good for destroying things and tend not to be much for strategy.
  • Body Horror: They tend to have piercings in places like their genitals and eyelids.
  • The Bully: They love pushing around anything perceived as weaker as they are, whether it's a weaker goblin or humans.
  • Cannot Cross Running Water: A slight variation. They cannot cross power-infused metal, and water running through metal pipes infuses them with power for that purpose. This makes modern cities close to impossible to navigate for them, and this is (partly) why they mostly attack homeless and poor people, living in more reachable places.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: The ones that can speak tend to have every other word be a swearword.
  • Dirty Coward: Like most bullies, goblins tend to be a cowardly bunch if their target can actually fight back.
  • For the Evulz: Apparently, this is the main reason for goblins to do anything, the chance to ruin someone's day for little more than personal enjoyment.
  • Foil: To fairies, being rather gross beings (figuratively and literally) that don't do well in cities, while fairies cover themselves in glamour and do very well in cities. According to Maggie they don't like eachother very much as a result.
  • Gonk: All goblins are described as ugly.
  • Griping About Gremlins: Gremlins are a subcategory of goblins who happen to be trap makers who build things to catch their prey and generally live in junkyards.
  • Heavy Sleeper: According to Andy they normally sleep for about sixteen to twenty-two hours a day. The only exception is when they've become a familiar and can call upon that bond to cut down on their sleeping hours.
  • Kick Them While They Are Down: In the words of Maggie, they prey on people who have fallen through the cracks of society. This makes Blake realize that both times he was physically attacked when he was living in the street, his aggressors were not A Clockwork Orange-like teenagers, but goblins. Maybe.
  • Large and in Charge: Goblin society works on law of size, so the biggest goblins tend to be the leaders.
  • Logical Weakness: As very crude and direct beings, they're weak against refined things and cleverness.
  • Made of Iron: While goblins that are killed tend to stay dead, they can take a lot of punishment before dying.
  • Mirroring Factions: To fairies, as both groups of Others are capable of great brutality for no reason other than amusement, but fairies use glamour to pretend they're anything but.
  • Our Goblins Are Different:
    • They're for the most part little violent bastards that get off on the suffering of others and enjoy making people feel a little lower about themselves, and have names based around some variant of swear word. They're weak to metal charged with power and because of underground plumbing (the running water charges the pipes) they're weaker in the cities, so they loiter on the outskirts.
    • The two main stories on their existence theorize that they're either what amounts to magical hairballs created by people, or the leftovers of humans becoming faeries.
    • Sizewise they can be no bigger than a squirrel or a bar or soap to five times bigger than a man. A greater goblin that Blake spots in the Drains takes the form of a massive dragon.
    • Upon getting bound, or just for fun, they turn into some sort of weapon.
    • While weaker goblins tend to have gross names, middle-tier goblins start taking on more dramatic or outright scary ones, and superior goblins will take on prefixes and affixes.
  • Poisoned Weapons: Sandra Duchamp notes that goblins like to cover their weapons with stuff such as feces, since it causes infections.
  • Smarter Than You Look: While gross and ugly, goblins are capable of great cunning, especially when it comes to making people miserable. The goblin woman used bone bridges to successfully raid a town when their piping systems normally prevent all but the smallest and weakest goblins from getting in, and Buttsack has a special trick in order to get around openings guarded with stainless steel.
  • Squick: Goblins seem to run on being as gross as possible, from having piercings in uncomfortable places to their names often being some shade of inappropriate. invoked

Dickswizzle

A chimp-sized goblin bound to a flute and owned by Maggie Holt.


Arsepint

A goblin that was once bound to a clay doll by Rosalyn Thorburn as a child.


  • Familiar: While not a proper familiar in the Pact sense, Arsepint followed Rosalyn's orders in exchange for being fed.

The Hyena

A quadrupedal goblin that Conquest wants Blake to bind. It is killed by Conquest in Void 7.6, but its weapon form is still used by Blake.


  • Anti-Regeneration: Due to absorbing part of the Abyss into itself, the wounds it makes don't heal, even for those with Healing Factors.
  • Breath Weapon: Its breath is so noxious that it makes you vomit the moment you inhale.
  • Character Death: Is killed fighting Conquest in Void 7.6, and its corpse in sword form becomes Blake's main weapon.
  • The Dreaded: While considered a mid-tier goblin, it's still extremely dangerous.
  • It's Personal: To Evan. If given the choice between Blake and Evan, it wanted the kid's ghost, because he's the only one to escape being hunted long enough to die a natural death and even then eluded it.
  • Kryptonite Factor: It serves as this to those with a Healing Factor due to absorbing Abyssal energies during Blake's time in the Drains, since it prevents healing, and makes an excellent anti-Boogeyman weapon due to its ability to kill them so dead that not even the Abyss can revive them.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Not only is it tougher and stronger than most other Others, it's faster and silent as it moves.
  • Living Weapon: In its bound form, a massive, jagged sword with a spiked handle. When it dies, Rose makes it return to that form, and Blake continues to make use of it.
  • The Minion Master: Has the ability to command lesser goblins.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Has red eyes and is an extremely dangerous Other.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Seals itself in a sword after Blake defeats it.
  • The Unintelligible: It can speak, but in a simple tongue that certainly isn't English.
  • Urine Trouble: Has no trouble pissing on its opponents.
  • Your Soul Is Mine!: Whatever it kills, it mauls them in both body and soul and keeps them around as a ghost or spectre. The connection allows it to influence them and knows where they are, so if you run across run of them the Hyena knows where you are. Aside from humans, it can also ensnare Others, including Faerie.

The Goblin Woman

The leader of the goblins who destroyed Maggie's old town, who made her agree to bring forth three rounds of blood and fire in return for the lives of her, her father, and Chris.


  • Bad Boss: Implied from what's mentioned of her in Pale, Bluntmunch fled to Kennet in the first place to avoid her, and Breastbiter the Chonk would rather risk being unmade in the battle for the Carmine Throne than continue working for her.
  • Bishōnen Line: Is among the most human looking of any goblins seen so far, but she still looks off, with feet akin to a lizard's and generally weird facial structure. This is later revealed in Poke to be because similar to Crone Mara, she straddles the line between Other and practitioner with all the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.
  • Blood-Splattered Warrior: Her hair is soaked red with blood, and she's a Redcap Queen, a type of goblin even more associated with violence than goblins usually are to begin with, and bathe their hair in blood in order to acquire strength.
  • Cruel Mercy: Initially she intends to leave only Maggie's father alive since he'll be hurt the most by everyone else's deaths.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: Was once Gabrielle, a poor girl living in Detroit, before managing to defeat a goblin with sheer luck and becoming perhaps the most dangerous goblin queen in North America.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: In Pale she's implied to be the goblin queen Bluntmunch has gone to Kennet to escape, as its Warrens are close enough for him to recognize, but far enough away that he's unlikely to run into her or her forces, which he confirms later. Breastbiter the Chonk, a goblin vying for the Carmine Throne, is said to be one of her lieutenants and is trying to free himself of her service by winning. It's also repeatedly mentioned that she's been consolidating power and will be a major issue to everyone in roughly five years.
  • Monster Lord: Is the leader of a massive horde of goblins, with her three redcap goblin lieutenants counting as superior goblins.
  • No Name Given: She isn't given a name in Pact proper, but Poke reveals she goes by Gerhild the Redcap Queen.

Screwloose

A gremlin under the control of Maggie.


  • Ass Shove: Literally pulls a gremlin-made shotgun shell out of his ass to use.
  • Evil Brit: Speaks with a distinct English accent.
  • Eye Scream: Has a bottle jammed into his eye socket a la the Batman: Arkham series' version of the Penguin.
  • Urine Trouble: Will piss on his opponents as a surprise tactic.
  • Wild Card: Shot Blake with a shotgun for no good reason, while also attacking the Behaim children.

Douchegargler

A female gremlin under the control of Maggie.


  • Wild Card: Like Screwloose she was just as much a danger to Blake as she was to the Behaim children.

Buttsack

A goblin caught by Maggie in Signature 8.1. He is described as being small enough for most practitioners to simply ignore him, but large enough to boss the smaller goblins around, and is very intelligent as well. Mags eventually ends up binding him in service to her.


  • Country Matters: Refers to one schoolgirl he spots as a cunt, and every other female as a bitch.
  • Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Would rather be called Forsworn (Which would mean being completely unmade) than get into a fight with the dragon and demon in Judgement 16.11.
  • For the Evulz: Tries to get a girl hooked on cocaine by lacing it in her insulin for not having any money to steal, and forges suicide notes for no real reason at all.
  • Humans Through Alien Eyes: The first portion of Signature 8.1 is from his POV as he sneaks through St. Sebastian.
  • Impaled Palm: Maggie stabs her stiletto into both of his hands before dragging him with her into Johannes' demesne in Signature 8.5.
  • Sinister Shiv: Wields a ragged-looking shiv as his weapon.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Maggie binds him again and forces him to work for her, which he's quite displeased about.
  • To the Pain: When he corners Maggie in Signature 8.5 he states that once he kills her he'll make a thong out of her face with her eyes pointed towards his groin, and her lips kissing his ass. As for the death itself, he states it'll be so painful that it'll create about a dozen ghosts, who will then be bound to said face thong so that Maggie can feel it.

Gallowscream

A particularly vicious goblin who serves as King Spikedick's familiar and enforcer, considered a moderate leaning towards superior goblin. His body is completely shot through with metal and he carries a number of powerful weapons.


  • Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: A goblin who wields an axe with a screaming face on the blade which causes whatever it hits to erupt into gore and entrails, including non-biological matter like bricks and mortar.
  • Cyborg: His body is essentially a lumpy fusion of flesh and metal, and he has a multi-barreled gunpowder cannon concealed in his mouth.
  • Epic Flail: Has a flail as one of his weapons.
  • Eye Scream: His eyes are held open by rusty pins.
  • Familiar: To Hal Spikedick.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Exceptionally fast despite all the metal weighing him down.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: The effect of the axe he carries, blood and gore wherever it strikes, even if it's nonorganic material like concrete.
  • Mook Maker: His rusty dagger causes baby goblins to erupt out of whatever it cuts.
  • The Musketeer: Uses both ranged and close range weaponry.
  • Super-Strength: Is extremely strong.
  • Unusual Weapon Mounting: He has a cannon, in his mouth.

    Faerie 

General Tropes

  • Allergic to Routine: Fairies constantly try something new because once they've run out of things to do they end up in the Winter Court, which is effectively death for them.
  • Cold Iron: A variation: Any crude, unworked material carries this property for them.
  • The Fair Folk: Pact takes this view of faeries, with their mortal enemies goblins actually calling them "the unfair folk."
  • Foil: To goblins, being beings that cover themselves in glamour and do very well in cities, while goblins are extremely gross and don't take well to cities. As a result according to Maggie they don't like each other very much.
  • Glamour: Are constantly wrapped in illusions upon illusions.
  • Intrigued by Humanity: Fairies have a great interest in humans since boredom is like death to them. Of course this often means treating them as playthings to do as they see fit.
  • Mirroring Factions: From goblins, as both groups of Others are capable of great brutality. Goblins are merely more honest about what they are than fairies.
  • Scenery Porn: Invoked in their realms, which are made pretty through heaps of glamour.
  • Stepford Smiler: They build up layers and layers of artifice and artistry around themselves until it becomes unsustainable, at which point a revolution occurs, a new guard steps into place, and the cycle begins all over again.
  • Was Once a Man: One story told by goblins regarding their origins states that faeries were once humans who used glamour to get rid of the bits of themselves they didn't like, those bits becoming goblins.

Padraic

A fae that was exiled from his realm to Jacob's Bell. In chapter 13's gathered pages his p.o.v chapter/diary he alludes to his mother being the one to have sent him to Jacob's bell, earlier it was implied that he was banished by a member of royalty. This likely makes him a prince.


  • Affectionate Nickname: He likes to give people these, at least in his own narration. Sandra is "Lady Macbeth" and Blake is "the blighted Rose."
  • Blood Knight: He's very at home in conflict-he's had a lot of time to build up experience, after all.
  • Bored with Insanity: He's bored with reality.
  • Bullet Dodges You: He can make bullets miss with a wave of his hand.
  • The Charmer: Due to his glamour he's very charismatic. Enough to turn Letita to his side, and trick Joanna into a celebration that she's never left.
  • Consummate Liar: In spite of not actually being able to lie. He even describes himself as a liar in his writings.
  • Creepy Crossdresser: As Maggie, for all of her appearances during the Conquest arc, and Joanna, before the series even began.
  • The Exile: For some reason he has been exiled from the land of the fae.
  • Exact Words: He offers Maggie Holt several things, including a ring that allows one to draw out power from him until he's spent. The catch?
    “The deal was that the ring would go to Maggie Holt,” Patrick said. “Maggie Holt is my name.”
  • False Reassurance: See above.
  • High-School Hustler: In his guise as "Patrick."
  • Kick the Dog: Taking Maggie's very identity is bad enough, but freeing most of her goblins of their bindings and promises and allowing them to run amok is another.
  • Loss of Identity: He pulls one of these on Maggie Holt, taking her name for himself.
  • Manipulative Bastard: He deliberately ruins friendships and lives at the local high school for amusement. Also shown when he tricks Maggie Holt into letting him take her name for himself.
  • Not-So-Harmless Villain: To most of Jacob's Bell and the Faerie Court that exiled him there. He plays everyone for fools. Especially the ones that deal with him.
  • Pass the Popcorn: He can and will take time out to enjoy the play (and even comment on it). Whether he's responsible for the chaos or not. Case in point: watching Corvidae work.
  • Really 700 Years Old: He's perpetually young, and therefore includes himself in the councils of the young practitioners of Jacob's Bell.
  • Small Town Boredom: He's trapped in Jacob's Bell, and hates it. He's forced to resort to messing with the local high school and ruining the lives of a quarter of the graduating class just to get some entertainment.
  • Time Abyss: Maggie mentions that he's got a bit of this going-he's old, and he's seen the same acts play out dozens of times. At this point, he's just trying to avoid boredom. Of course, this doesn't make him any less dangerous.

Essylt/Evonne

An exiled fairy whose father was a torturer before he was executed.


  • The Exile: Like Padraic, she's been exiled to Jacob's Bell.

Keller

An exiled fairy who was the apprentice of Essylt's father, and follows her out of loyalty. He focuses on fringe groups for his personal amusement.


Letita

Joanna Duchamp's familiar.


  • BFS: The 12-foot sword oft-mentioned on the main page.
  • Familiar: To Joanna Duchamp, taking the form of a chickadee. She's pretending, actually working with Padriac.
  • Lady of War: Projects this image.
  • Glamour Failure: Her sword breaks into four pieces once Blake starts noticing how unwieldy it should be.

Arthild

A fairy in the service of Johannes as a teenager, who was originally part of the winter court before being bound by him, and was killed by Faysal.


  • Fur and Loathing: Wore a rat pelt over her shoulders.
  • Rodents of Unusual Size: Could transform into a giant, bloated rat bigger than a small room, that could also spawn masses of smaller rats from her stomach controlled by Johannes' pipes.
  • Swarm of Rats: She could spawn smaller rats from her stomach while transformed into a giant rat.
  • Transformation Trinket: Uses a rat pelt and possibly glamour to turn into a giant rat.

    Demons 

General Tropes

  • Always Chaotic Evil: Demons are nearly universally reviled by all other beings, and for good reason considering their abilities and dispositions. They exist only for destruction and what they destroy is gone forever, no exceptions. As such, a single demon is worse in the long term than a thousand non-demonic horrors.
  • Apocalypse How: Their ultimate goal is a Class X-4, the destruction of the universe, if not a Class Z, the destruction of all reality.
  • The Corruption: Demons have rot that corrupts everything they're around, which serves as their main identifier, and is often compared to radioactive fallout. Just summoning them causes damage to the world. Rosalyn Thorburn theorizes in Histories 7 that the universe might be the remnants of a feast devoured by the demons of the first choir, and in Histories 12.
  • Creative Sterility: Demons cannot create, only destroy.
  • Deal with the Devil: Diabolists make deals with them for power, which incurs a massive karmic debt.
  • Entropy and Chaos Magic: Their nature is fundamentally entropic, which is the reason why, in a straight fight, an angel will ultimately lose to a demon-entropy will ultimately win over order. The first choir especially this, described as "entropy distilled."
  • Hellhound: The lawyer firm uses demon hellhounds to track down practitioners.
  • Hate Plague: Demons of the fifth choir specialize in this.
  • Manipulative Bastard: The demons of the Choir of Unrest get people to summon more demons in the form of creating books to trick them.
  • Mirror Monster: Demons like Ur and Barbatorem can travel through reflective surfaces, in the case of the former necessitating the prevention of direct eye contact.
  • Mook Maker: Powerful enough demons end up casting-off imps. Pauz for instance was cast off from Marquis Andras, a member of the Choir of the Feral, and in Histories 7, the Abstract Demon reveals that it's making several of its own in preparation for its bindings breaking.
  • Our Demons Are Different:
    • Demons and Devils come in seven different choirs, listed from most to least powerful:
      • Choir of Darkness: The Abstract Demon, Caacrinolaas, Shabriri, Tobu-Bōkyaku, Bazuili, Coronzon, Ouhim
      • Choir of Chaos: Morax, Hauri, the Screaming Demon
      • Choir of Ruin: Barbatorem, Zapan, the Cube Woman
      • Choir of Madness: None in-story.
      • Choir of the Feral: Pauz, Marquis Andras, Surbas
      • Choir of Sin: Succubus from Black Lamb's Blood interlude
      • Choir of Unrest: Agares
    • In terms of power they're ranked from imps, least, lesser, moderate, and demon nobles such as Agares.
  • Speak of the Devil: Some demons can be summoned by saying their name several times, like Ornias and what is hinted to be Baphomet.
  • You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Rosalyn theorizes that the aftereffects that demons of the first choir leave behind aren't creations of the demons (who cannot create) but distortions of reality that try to fill the void they've left.

Barbatorem

An Other in service to the Thorburn family since the 1950s and a demon of the third choir of Ruin, named after the fact that in the past Barbers were surgeons and the shears it carries, it remains locked away in a room in their house.


  • Absurdly Sharp Blade: For two cupped handfuls of flayed flesh from its practitioner, it can ensure that blades never go dull. The blades are even sharpened enough that it can be used to sever reflections.
  • Animalistic Abomination: One of its forms is a mostly bald bipedal sheep with patches of hair.
  • A Fate Worse Than Death: Since it can't directly kill, this is its specialty. It splits its victims in two, and makes the pieces destroy each other-whichever survives is forever diminished.
  • Bald of Evil: His forms are always bald.
  • Big Bad Duumvirate: The Barber, alongside the lawyers, is the main antagonist of the story. Though his impact on events is subtler than those of the diabolists who work for his kind, the method by which he created Blake and Rose is responsible for the fights that consume their relationship for much of the serial. Once the lawyers release him in the climax, Barbatorem immediately becomes the biggest and most dangerous contender for Lordship of Jacob's Bell, working alongside Ms. Lewis to secure his claim and using Faysal to unleash more demons upon the world.
  • Deadly Doctor: Barbatorem can perform incredibly reliable, life-saving surgery in exchange for lowering the recipient's resistance to possession.
  • Demonic Possession: Johannes tries to trap the Barber in the Abyss by allowing it to possess him. It works, at first. Then the lawyers come to break Barbatorem out. The possession allows the Barber to control Faysal.
  • The Dreaded: Is so feared that Laird states that if he were released he'd kill his family rather than leave them to its nonexistent mercy if he thought he couldn't defend them against it.
  • Evil Smells Bad: Barbatorem is known for his repulsive stench consisting of rot, burning hair or/and blood.
  • Hannibal Lecture: Does this in Judgement 16.10 to Blake's party while using Johannes' body, attempting to break them down.
  • Humanoid Abomination:
    • His first form seen in-story is that of a old Middle Eastern or Indian man with a potbelly formed by hunger with a leg gouged open by his shears.
    • Upon getting freed from his bindings in the Abyss, he takes on a more muscular form covered in bruises and scar wearing either a bleeding mule or horse head.
  • Immortality Inducer: It can extend the lifespan of others at a cost of them smelling like it.
  • Implacable Man: When it is freed in the Abyss it starts chasing after the other characters, who are trying to escape. Even when it runs into a bunch of Others, even when it gets squished by giant worm monster, it just keeps coming.
  • The Juggernaut: Upon getting freed it more or less shrugs off everything thrown at it, save for the Dionysus smiting that stunned it, before Johannes sacrifices himself.
  • Literal Split Personality: It can create these. And then make them kill each other.
  • Mage Killer: It's especially good at evading defenses practitioners set up, and can cross into demesnes (But not the houses of non-practitioners) without permission.
  • The Medic: For enough blood that it would make the practitioner pass out, it can do medical treatments, but it leaves the practitioner in danger of getting possessed.
  • Morphic Resonance: Barbatorem's forms are always bald or balding and wield some sort of cutting implement, normally shears or scissors, though in one case it carried around a sickle.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: It believes that humans are going to end up in the Abyss and then the age of demons will come, so it's best to just get it over and consume everything now.
  • Power Nullifier: Can get this effect by mutilating the soul of its victim, preventing them from using magic and also potentially denying them access to the afterlife.
  • Reflective Teleportation: Barbatorm can move between reflective surfaces such as glass, metal, and even one's eyes. It's advised that one should not look at it directly lest it enter their eyes and never leave.
  • Shapeshifting: Has no real defined form, having taken forms including but not limited to a mostly bald bipedal sheep with patches of hair, a bloated man disfigured to a monstrous point by lash-wounds, two children hand in hand, and a legless man on a horse. The form he took when Rosalyn Thorburn bound him was that of a fat, festering man with a horse’s skull fixed over his head wielding a sickle.
  • Shear Menace: Often carries scissors, clippers, or shears.
  • Sinister Scythe: When Rosalyn Thorburn bound Barbatorem while using her firstborn Charles as bait, it was wielding a sickle.
  • Straw Nihilist: Acts this way while possessing Johannes. It talks about how humanity is ultimately doomed so it might as well put us all out of our misery.
  • Teleport Spam: It can do this by transferring itself to the reflection in its shears, and throwing the shears.
  • The Voiceless: Barbatorem is mute and can't talk. After possessing Johannes it gains the ability to speak.

Ornias

A powerful demon that can be summoned by saying his name seven times.


  • Chekhov's Gunman: Subverted, despite Ms. Lewis' attempt to summon him he never shows up during the story.
  • Fallen Angel: is billed like this by Ms. Lewis, "He who placed the stars in the firmament, he now calls them down to earth."
  • Playing with Fire/Casting a Shadow: Briar Girl's description of his powers (as Blake relayed to her) suggest these power sets.

Pauz

An Imp of the fifth choir of the Feral, feral and foul. It is a mote, a cast-off of a larger entity (in this case Marquis Andras), and one of the three things that Conquest wants Blake to bind and bring to him.


  • The Beastmaster: Can control animals.
  • The Corrupter: Corrupts animals and people just by proximity, spreading seeds of malignity. If related to a nuke analogy, it's the fallout and radiation that comes after. And it's thinking of trying it on Conquest.
  • Cunning Linguist: Knows over thirty languages, but not Pig Latin.
  • Demonic Possession: Does this to whoever it chooses as a host, taking from them bits and pieces of them in the process and adding to itself.
  • Didn't Think This Through: It's a fundamentally short-sighted creature, if a cunning one. Blake and Rose offer it a great opportunity, which it recognizes, but it still attempts to kill Blake through Exact Words after being bound, even though this would prevent it from reaching that opportunity.
  • Evil Smells Bad: Not only does it register as a scent that rivals feces, hot garbage, and blood, but it has a sort of radiation effect that makes animals and beings like Isadora hostile to those it bleeds into since they can Detect Evil.
  • Exact Words: Pauz agrees not to act against Blake once the sealing is done. Which means once he was sealed then all those feral animals plus his human host that were under his control were set free inside the house with Blake, mauling him.
  • Flies Equals Evil: And Blake is covered in them after binding Pauz.
  • Fisher King: Once its finds a host and settles into an area, it upsets the natural order of thing to cause chaos in an effort to further along whatever goal it has. This includes connections, such as reversing Blake and Rose's power connection.
  • Hate Plague: Its very presence, the radiation or "ambiance" it gives off, causes people and animals to become irritable and aggressive.
  • More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Has a mangled, double row of fangs.
  • Summon Bigger Fish: Rose gets it to behave by threatening to summon his master, who is hinted to be Baphomet (who is probably in the top tier of the Feral Choir), but it turns out to be a Marquis of Hell, Andras, instead.
  • To the Pain: Describes in excruciating detail what horrible things he'll do to Laird once he's been captured by Blake and company, to the point that Blake asks him to shut up about it.

Marquis Andras

The being that Pauz is a mote of, a far more powerful demon.


  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Marquis Andras is currently sealed inside of a sabre and powerless until it is found.

The Abstract Demon, Ur

The third being that Blake has to bind for Conquest, a demon of the first choir of Darkness capable of destroying the connections of others and rendering them unpersons. It also has the ability to travel inside mirrors and other reflective surfaces, including human eyes.


  • Abstract Eater: Gets around telling its true name by eating the word as it comes out, with Ur being the only thing left.
  • An Arm and a Leg: Blake manages to sever one of its limbs while retreating.
  • The Chessmaster: It deliberately fortifies the structure it's bound inside, because it knows it'll be free in a decade anyway, and it's not so much 'bound' as 'nesting'.
  • Dark Is Evil: Is part of the first choir of darkness, considered the most powerful.
  • Deliberate Injury Gambit: It deliberately immolates a massive chunk of its body and sets its lair on fire by setting off Blake's gasoline, only to reveal that it can spread to the smoke that fire generates as well as shadows.
  • Eldritch Abomination: It constantly shifts form and is capable of eating abstract concepts, such as its own name. Isadora senses that it's so big that it fills up a deep chasm under the factory.
  • Fate Worse than Death: See Ret-Gone below.
  • Fire Purifies: Contact with flames automatically makes whatever part it touch with go up.
  • Hero Killer: In Void 7.11 it ensnares Blake and severs his connections, causing him to fall through the cracks.
  • Logical Weakness:
    • Since it is from the Choir of Darkness, fire and light does wonders against it.
    • Also, because demons are by nature destroyers, an act of creation can bind it-the binding on the factory, for example, takes the form of graffiti.
  • No-Sell:
    • Can get around having to tell its true name by eating it.
    • Can get around fire by hiding in the smoke.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: It's implied in it's narration that its ultimate goal is to consume everything. In Null 9.5 it's even found eating its way into the Drains, held back only by a long forgotten god of light.
  • Ret-Gone: The Abstract Demon can inflict this on its victims, removing all their connections in order to make them nonexistant. When Blake confronts the demon, it attacks 3 unknown and unremembered beings, implying that Blake had 3 allies who have been destroyed by the demon. Allies whom he doesn't remember and who are not mentioned previously in the text, implying that they have not only been erased from existence, they have also been erased from the minds of the readers.
    • In Void 7.11 it appears to have done this to Blake, with only Isadora remembering the most about him, though she can no longer remember his name.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Is currently bound inside an abandoned factory, though after a decade the seals will break and it shall be free again.
  • Xenofiction: It gets a brief moment of narration at the end of Histories 7. It's even more monstrous than you'd think.

Caacrinolaas

A demon mentioned by Rosalyn Thorburn in one of her books. It has a venom that eventually eradicates a person's entire being. Those close to them upon their eradication will be afflicted by a pining so intense that they will never move of their own volition again, only staring into the distance.


Shabriri

A demon mentioned by Rosalyn Thorburn in one of her books, she has a lantern that turns people blind, and a bell that makes her victims deaf.


  • Brown Note: Her bell makes people deaf.
  • Go Mad from the Revelation: Those afflicted by her tools end up perceiving everything that doesn't exist in that space and time, as their eyes and ears are opened ever wider to true void.
  • Light Is Not Good: Her lantern turns people blind, and she happens to be part of the Choir of Darkness.
  • Oxymoronic Being: Part of the Choir of Darkness, and happens to have powers over light.

Agares

One of the demons of the seventh choir of Unrest, whose powers involve bringing great things low.


Ouhim

A demon of the first choir of Darkness once summoned by Rosalyn Thorburn as a demonstration to Alister Behaim. Its abilities seem to be based around making cracks in the fabric of reality.


  • Black Eyes of Evil: It's described as having black pits for eyes, and is a demon of the first choir.
  • Humanoid Abomination: Unlike the other demons shown so far it takes on a more humanoid form, but its inherent wrongness is very plain to see.
  • Slasher Smile: Literally, as its smile causes cracks in reality.

Morax

A demon of the second choir of Chaos once summoned by Rosalyn Thorburn as a demonstration to Alister Behaim. Its abilities seemed to distort the environment, and Rosalyn's warning to Alister suggests that panicking makes it worse.


  • Acid-Trip Dimension: Its presence caused the room it was summoned into to turn into one of these, "compressing" the colors of the room into just black and red and making all other stimuli sharp and unpleasant to Alister's senses.
  • Big Red Devil: When Alister gets a glimpse at it, it's described as deep red, muscular, and hairy.
  • Dissonant Serenity: It has a pleasant smile on its face even as it's distorting reality around it. Rosalyn and Laird adopt this attitude while it's summoned, and the former advises Alister do the same.
  • Occult Blue Eyes: It has these, contrasting its other Big Red Devil features.
  • Up Close with the Monster: It does this to Alister; while it's technically confined to a summoning circle, Alister percieves it as standing right behind him, its hand on his shoulder, stock still while it turns reality into an Acid-Trip Dimension.

Zapan

A demon from the third choir of Ruin once summoned by Rosalyn Thorburn as a demonstration to Alister Behaim. Its abilities seem to involve assaulting reality with the chaos and cacophony it creates.


  • Brown Note Being: It is this. While we never see it directly, it seems to manifest as a chaotic mass of images and noises designed to draw attention and damage whatever perceives it.
  • He Who Must Not Be Seen: As an abstract demon, looking at it is a good way to open yourself up to being possessed by it.
  • Hell Is That Noise: The screaming cacophony it creates quite literally assault reality.
  • Sensory Abuse: It does this to reality itself; it presents itself as a screeching, ever-shifting mass of chaotic noises and images.

Hauri

A demon of the first choir and a mote of Flavros summoned by Ms. Lewis in order to punish Rose following its original binding by Marissa de Roust. As a result of Flavros being a demon of triality, it is a demon of duality that works by creating dissonance and splitting things in two, including itself.


  • Decapitation Presentation: Nick shows its head to the other motes after cutting it off.
  • Giant Mook: Was the noticeably largest of all the imps summoned by Ms. Lewis.
  • Multiple Head Case: Has another head growing out of one of its shoulders.
  • Off with His Head!: Rose defeats it by binding it through invoking Marissa de Roust, before Nick cuts its head off in order to ward off the other imps.

Surbas

A demon of the fifth choir summoned by Ms. Lewis to punish Rose, he has the ability to get larger from eating everything in its surroundings. Its voice is described as literally cutting.


    Ethereal Beings 

The various types of ethereal beings that make up the Pactverse can be found here.

General Tropes

  • Jacob Marley Apparel: Ghosts are dressed in whatever clothing they died in.
  • Living Memory: Ghosts are psychic imprints left by people as they died, with traumas being the most common, though brilliance can manifest a ghost as well.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different:
    • Ghosts are Psychic impression left on the world, with traumas being the key ones that remain although moments of sheer brilliance can be there too. They tend to be single-minded and whatever sensation gripped them spreads around, such as June Burlison's death by hypothermia giving her a cold aura in death.
    • Spectres are volatile ghosts that are akin to old explosives and not to be bound.
    • Wraiths or Boggarts are ghosts loaded with enough negativity that they went off the rails and built with echoes that aren't their own making them closer to different Others.
  • Salt Solution: All are weak to salt being thrown on them.

June Burlison

A woman who died of hypothermia, and the spirit currently inhabiting Blake's frost hatchet.


  • An Ice Person: Has ice powers.
  • Cessation of Existence: With her power spent her ghost faded away for good.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: She is nothing more than the impression of dying from hypothermia. At first, Blake is understandably uneasy with this, but removing that suffering means removing June entirely.

Leonard Harlan

A man who drank himself to death after his son died, formerly inhabited a bottle.


Evan Matthieu

An eight year old who died of hypothermia after escaping the Hyena, who later ends up becoming Blake's familiar.


  • Badass Adorable: He's about eight, likes motorcycles, and generally acts like a normal kid who's been through a traumatic experience (dying). He's also saved Blake and Rose numerous times. Will crow about beating you in any given fighting game (especially if he defeated the epic slog against the controller to do it).
  • Barred from the Afterlife: Due to the Hyena scaring off whatever was supposed to take his soul. Later, when given the option, he refuses, as it isn't in his nature to go willingly to death. There's just too much to see, first.
  • Beleaguered Assistant: He becomes this to Blake as Blake steadily loses more of himself and gets more self-sacrificing.
    I can push him out of the way of dragons or demons or whatever but I can’t push him out of the way of being an idiot! The last time I let you guys talk he talked himself into letting you kill him!
  • The Conscience: To Blake, reining him in and pointing out when Blake starts to go overboard. After Blake becomes a bogeyman, he realizes that he can no longer trust his instincts, which are geared towards murder and mayhem, and relies on Evan's input much more heavily.
  • Creepy Child: When he still existed as a disconnected ghost in the Hyena's territory, he tended to repeat actions and phrases he used in life, often with disconnects-he was at his most realistic when being hunted by the Hyena, where he could can draw upon reactions he had in life, but even then he tended to flicker, vanish and reappear, and repeat the same phrases over and over. Once bound to Blake, his true personality returned; see Badass Adorable above.
  • Determinator: Never gave up and evaded the Hyena and its ensnared Others for days, only dying due to running out of strength and succumbing to hypothermia. Even after death, he continued to defy the Hyena by constantly escaping it.
  • Escape Artist: Since he was one of the few people who managed to constantly evade the Hyena both before and after death, his powers as a familiar focus on escapes.
  • Familiar: To Blake, taking the form of a sparrow.
  • Fantastic Angst: He misses his parents and friends, who he can't talk to due to being dead, and he comments that he's actually sort of glad he died-because towards the end of it his life started to suck.
  • Five-Finger Discount: Despite not having five fingers when he's solid, Evan is a skilled enough thief to steal multiple items from an alert practitioner without him noticing until it is too late.
  • In the Hood: When in ghost form, wears a hooded jacket, the clothes he died in.
  • Intoxication Ensues: Gets drunk without even drinking anything when Dionysus "Jagerbombed" the place. He didn't like it.
    Evan: This is been' drunk? Bluh. What's wrong with people? Why would they want this? Can't even fly proper.
  • Kid Sidekick: To Blake, before and after becoming his familiar.
  • Odd Friendship: He and Tyler get along great, same with Blake. Heck, any bloke with some remotely healthy connection to their inner child tends to melt to some degree around Evan. Even a few of the Knights were susceptible.
  • Open and Shut: In sparrow-form, he demonstrates the ability to open locks without a key, or, indeed, hands.
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: Even more so than normal ghosts for the setting. Due to dying in the Hyena's domain, Evan couldn't fully pass on and as a result is far more lucid than most ghosts. A brief conversation he has with some Behaim familiars implies that he's actually a young Heroic Spirit, empowered by achieving an impossible task in evading the Hyena for so long when alive.
  • Playing with Fire: He's very enthusiastic about finding a way to set him on fire. He doesn't want to go out in a blaze of glory, he wants to go out as a blaze of glory. He finally gets his wish in Judgement 16.4 after the Elder Sister fills him with the Eye.
  • Polly Wants a Microphone: As a talking bird.
  • Resurrective Immortality: Thanks to being Blake's familiar, he is protected from death so long as Blake has the power to keep his mortal body animate.
  • Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Averted. Evan retains his childlike qualities even after he was killed by a goblin, came back as a ghost, became a diabolist's familiar, spent a month in a house under siege by monsters, and even after being an accessory to Blake's murders of Duchamp husbands.
  • Undead Child: Since he's a ghost.
  • Voice of the Legion: Occasionally speaks in a half-dozen different intonations of the same phrase, overlapping, though a rare occurrence since partnering with Blake.
  • Your Days Are Numbered: Following Blake getting his connections severed by Ur, Evan is currently living on borrowed time and requires constant power transfusions.

Mary Frances Troxler

An Other that is a wraith and was used before the start of the A.D calender by mediums to find fiances for women, before the ritual was messed up in the late 19th Century and she started murdering women instead.

  • Evil Evolves: She's constantly evolving as time passes.
  • Legacy Character: One of the Nine Entities that make up the 'Bloody Mary' Urban Legend. She even has the right name.
  • Magic Mirror: Her rituals used mirrors, now she emerges from them when summoned.
  • Mirror Monster: What she basically is. She has been constantly changing how she operates with them when it comes to the specifics, yet mirrors are always linked to her on a fundamental level. This was one of the reasons why Rose was interested in summoning her in the first place.
  • The Matchmaker: Used by mediums in the past to find husbands-to-be for women, until the ritual got corrupted about 120 years ago and she now kills women who inadvertently summon her instead.
  • Psycho Knife Nut: A malevolent wraith that attacks with knives.
  • Serial Killer: A killer of women and only women, she's part of the 'Bloody Mary' legends for this. Although, she started out defending women from abusive partners when things first started to go off the rails. "Serial killer" or "mercy killer", take your pick.

    Subhumans 

General Tropes

  • Hillbilly Horrors: Generations of descendants that come from feral children and isolated families who practice incest lead to almost-humans called subhumans. They have less human trappings and if they become Other enough they can be summoned. They fall into their own categories as well:
    • Natural: They get twisted by their environment. Built for cold, desert, for living in ravines or deep caves, inhospitable places.
    • Social: They form tribes, cannibal families, or that sort of thing.
    • Loners: Break from the pack, their pack dies, or they’re exceptional members of a family unit, too crazy or brutal to be allowed to mingle.
  • No Social Skills: Are not exactly well versed in human social mores, but they're not stupid.
  • Smarter Than You Look: Do not mistake their misshapen bodies for misshapen minds, the only skill they lost in the transition was their social one. Cunning is a survival trait.
  • Wild Card: Can be just as dangerous to the summoners as to whatever they're being pointed at if not properly bound. Which makes sense when you think about it: pacts, bounds, promises, contracts and seals are social constructs, and these guys are not good at normal social interactions.

Midge

Daughter of Rackham Thin and of Fat Mam, she's a subhuman-turned-Other. What kind of Other is... debatable.


  • Achievements in Ignorance: Her more or less going all sullenly "whatever" rather than openly agreeing or even disagreeing to the terms of her binding allows her to very easily use Loophole Abuse without blow-back on herself.
  • Barred from the Afterlife: When vigilante practitioners came to visit doom on her family, they officially killed and bound her to the Seal before whatever claimed the dead could take her; so, officially, that's how she was stuck in the darker patches of Limbo only to be called up by Rose or other summoners. As a result, she's an iffy subhuman-bogeywoman. As it turns out, those practioner-binders got that just a teensy bit wrong: more border-hopping bogey than subhuman by that point, she was.
  • Creepy Child: What her own parents thought of her before chasing her off. Uh, yeah. So creepy, she managed to crawl into the Abyss on her own, survived for years hunting Others, and came back before officially being "killed" and sealed.
  • Combat Sadomasochist: Blake notes she either doesn't feel pain or get a different sensation akin to this. Creepy either way. Turns out she had this even when she was a child.
  • Eaten Alive: The end of Duress has her being eaten alive by Others, but it's unlikely that she was truly killed.
  • Genius Bruiser: She's large and powerful, but hardly dumb. As soon as all the enemies were dealt with she tried to get rid of the only person who could banish her.
    Maggie: Subhumans aren’t stupid, they’re socially backward.
  • Hates Everyone Equally: She seems to be powered by hatred towards just about everything, probably due to her upbringing.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: She was brought up to eat and hunt people and has continued to do so since whenever she gets the chance to. Heck, she doesn't just stop at humans: Others are also fair game, if she can bag them. She also isn't in it just for the calorific/spiritual content. It Amused Me is in play, too.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Has very, very good aim with just about anything she gets her hands on.
  • Improvised Weapon: An expert with these, turning damn near anything around her into a projectile weapon.
  • Leaking Can of Evil: She was improperly bound to the Seal of Solomon from the start. Probably because she was a bogeywoman already, and the those who sealed her didn't realise this about her nature... Nor did they realise that she didn't give a damn about much of the meaning of the words they used and could shrug some of the Seal off as a result. This goes a long way in explaining just how easily she can use Loophole Abuse in general.
  • Loophole Abuse: The terms she was bound by were that she needed to defeat all the enemies in the immediate area. Because Blake's group interfered she was unable to compete it and nulled the binding, giving her enough freedom to do as she pleased.
  • Made of Iron: Tanks bullets like they weren't anything, and even as a child could shrug off knife wounds. It took an entire horde of different Others hours to bring her down after the residents of the Hillglades House fled and its implied she took down a ton of them in the process.
  • Stout Strength: Packs enough strength to bring down a house, tear apart a fully-grown goblin, and rip off a person's head. When she puts it behind throwing something it's akin to a cannonball.
  • Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: So much so that even her own cannibalistic parents locked her away.
  • Turned Against Their Masters: Turned on Rose the moment she opened her mouth after summoning her due to the above Loophole Abuse. She actively waits until whoever summons her makes a mistake and then takes advantage.

Fat Mam

Midge's mother, who was killed by vigilantes.


    The Undead 

General Tropes

  • Flesh-Eating Zombie: Ghouls that have flesh-rotting bites and are individuals who’ve interrupted the circle of life and death, usually by eating the dead, coming back from near-death one too many times, or practicing necromancy badly. They're out of balance and need to stave off their death by hibernating for months or years and eating flesh when they wake.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Much like every other creature imaginable in Pact, they also come in different flavors:
  • Revenant Zombie: Those that died, or suffered some gruesome injury, but didn’t go down. The spirit didn’t leave the body, and the body came back for unfinished business.

Tallowman

A talented candlemaker who scrimped and saved to buy a woman’s love. He was betrayed by greedy brothers and their families who wanted the savings. He was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead, but filled the injuries with candlewax and went on to seek his vengeance.


The Bane

Constructs made from perverting death with necromancy and alchemy, one of them was sent to attack the Thorburn base of operations and was made of bones. Since it lacks any fleshy parts it is incredibly difficult to take down physically.


  • Achilles' Heel: Despite their toughness Banes are vulnerable to a number of natural objects and phenomena such as fire, green wood, broken stalactites, daylight, living bone and, most likely, blood (don't think about it) and natural running water.
  • Anti-Magic: Sloughs off hexes and offensive magic like it's nothing, although barriers will bar it.
  • Dem Bones: The Bane sent against the Thorburn Family was basically a skeleton with its bones stripped of flesh, softened, and then hardened again in alchemical mixtures.
  • Mage Killer: Their venom and thrice-bound attributes make them a potent weapon against practitioners.
  • The Plague: Can be, depending on the nature of the illness the person had when it was formed. Even if it's not carrying something easily transmittable, it's still going to be The Blight in some way: usually as transmittable necrosis. Worse, Banes can create Banes of their victims, under special circumstances.
  • Poisonous Person: Their attacks impart a corrosive, necrotic venom known as Blight strong enough to eat through wood.
  • Powered by a Forsaken Child: Or in this case, some poor, very ill sod a necromancer thought would prove useful. Natural ones can occur (referred to as Nosferatu), but... you've still got the tortured soul of somebody powering the whole "entity".
  • Sinister Scythe: The one sent to murder the Thorburns had mantis-style sickles for arms.

    Bogeymen 

General Tropes

  • Emotion Eater: They sustain themselves and gain power by leaving an impression through fear, as the very thought of them forges a connection so they remain out of Limbo. They can actually use other emotions as hooks to reality, but panic, terror and fear are the most viscerally immediate and the easiest for them to raise.
  • Determinator: Each and every one of them has had to be this just to survive losing everything the first time and being changed by a manifestation of Limbo enough to come back and be a bother.
  • Humanoid Abomination: They often take vaguely humanoid shapes.
  • Our Slashers Are Different: They have been explicitly compared to villains in Slasher Movies.
  • The Power of Hate: The most reliable way out of the Abyss is clawing their way out through pure hatred and grit, especially if they died or were lost in a really gruesome way. Sometimes they get lucky and get out by other ways, however.
  • Serial Killer: Rose describes them as "loner Others with a penchant for terror or murder". When you look at their powers you see why.
  • Resurrective Immortality: If strong or clever enough, they'll bubble back up from Limbo again and again — even if you thought you'd killed them. The problem with inflicting enough damage on them to end them is that they can bungee back to the Abyss generally faster than most can inflict critical damage on them. Getting back out, however: that's the neat and difficult trick.
  • Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: See above.
  • Was Once a Man: Most were human at some point, until they fell into Limbo. But, as the Abyss takes anything and everything that falls into obscurity (be it Other, a place or just some unlucky sod), breaks it down and reassembles it in various different configurations, most are not just made of human, any more.
  • Wrong Context Magic: Due to being relatively young as a group compared to most other Others, bogeymen are not automatically under the jurisdiction of the Seal of Solomon and can attack who they please, though as a consequence they have to get energy through other means.

Joseph's Familiar

A bogeyman who served as Joseph Attwell's familiar.


  • Ditto Fighter: Word of God on the subject is that, when the bogeyman takes a face, he becomes skilled at whatever weapon his victim would favor if they happened to be inclined towards brutal murder.
  • Face Stealer: This particular Bogeyman had the ability to cut the faces off of people and wear them as a mask. Depending on how long ago it was done, it can appear as that person flawlessly.
  • Kill and Replace: Since it needs to carve off faces of others to get its disguise, they usually die.
  • Made of Iron: Took several shotgun rounds and got back up.
  • Replicant Snatching: When Joseph Attwell found him, he had killed and taken the role of a factory worker so perfectly that even his family couldn't tell the difference.

James Corvidae

A bogeyman who has existed since the arrival of Europeans in the New World, it stirs up conflict by rearranging connections to be inconvenient. It is literally an embodiment of discord and currently serves Rose Thorburn Jr.


  • Affably Evil: Just because he's working against most people is no reason to be openly rude about it. He's always polite, seemingly helpful and will even offer up genuine, workable advice if asked. While he's also carefully moving people into checkmate and earmarking precious things to steal for himself that'll cause knock-on harm down the line—not necessarily just for those who have summoned him.
  • Ambiguously Evil: Hero or Villain; Good or Evil? Depends entirely on which side of the fence you are looking at him from, really. If you settle for "goodish", then he's certainly Not Nice, at the very least and one of the darker strains of Anti-Hero for sure. Best Served Cold is most definitely in effect. Otherwise, we're in Anti-Villain territory—it's hard to think that the probable embodiment of the resentment of those slowly and excruciatingly watching their way of life dying through colonial expansion is totally wrong in doing what he does, however nasty. It is, at the very least, understandable.
  • Anthropomorphic Personification:
    • Thought by most practitioners to be a curse bestowed onto settlers from the First Nations, over some slight. Backed up when it is stated that said curse preferably targets powerful men, mainly white men, and only appeared when the settlers did. Which is his MO when left to his own devices. Further backed up by the fact that Mara and he seem to know each other enough to be nodding acquaintances. And, have a modicum of respect for each other, too.
    • His creator was an Algonquin shaman, according to Histories 11. But, he's not exactly a curse, as much as an evolving greater-spirit with a mission who's been a bit battered and altered by time, but who is still ticking along. All this means that he's rather more than "a curse", and maybe not really a standard Bogeyman at all (if there is such a thing).
  • Animalistic Abomination: When originally created, he took the form of a crow greater-spirit, making him what amounts to a lesser god. He has since taken on more human traits to appear as a Humanoid Abomination most of the time, though he can still take on the crow form if needed. However, that corvid-like Morphic Resonance stays with him, regardless.
  • Apple of Discord: Causes situations to occur where conflicts emerge by manipulating emotional connections so that what belonged to one person now belongs to another, thus causing them to fight over it. Histories 11 loosely implies that he was responsible for the creation of the Thorburn family in the first place, and is using them in a century long plot to get back at the descendants of the settlers. But it's not confirmed.
  • Best Served Cold: He had a mission given to him upon his creation: to repay the settlers who took what became Jacob's Bell from those who it originally belonged to... with three times the interest in pain and suffering they gave those they supplanted. He's not exactly in any great rush to do so, given that he's been working for over 200 years on this task using whatever he can get hold of.
  • Bestiality Is Depraved: He gets his revenge on the priests who bound him to the Seal of Solomon by rearranging connections so that they'd be found with their privates inside cattle, but it cost him a lot of power to do so.
  • The Chessmaster: Yup. Has a number of people in and around Jacob's Bell he routinely moves in his own game. Over generations. Including the Thorburns.
  • Conflict Ball: Creates one between the Sisters of the Torch and the Astrologer by having their fire spirit decide it likes to reside in one of the Astrologer's properties, making it hers and robbing them of their power unless she gives it up, which she won't as the property belongs to her predecessors.
  • Clever Crows: Messes with people's relationships to others and things for a living. Gets a power-boost from doing this... Has his own agenda which involves a lot of trolling off his own bat and getting around rules in inventive ways. Yeah, he counts.
  • Deader than Dead: Seemingly dies upon Blake stabbing him with the Hyena.
  • Disaster Dominoes: When he's not inflating the Conflict Ball for others to play with, he's patiently setting dominoes in place to fall in dramatically bloody patterns with just a little push in the right place triggering the whole mess. He pretty much took the powder keg situation with the Duchamps and made it go off, dividing the family and leaving them useless for whatever plans Blake had.
  • Gone Horribly Right: Well, he wanted the inhabitants of Jacob's Bell to suffer before it got wiped off the map... However, taking himself and Mara down with it was probably not at all what he intended as he moved all the pieces in place to achieve that aim. Lesson number one: don't mess with demons, even if you are a spirit. And, beware contributing to the creation of a family of demonologist determinators because they might prove a little too stubborn for your own good.
  • I Have Many Names: James Crow, Jamie the Rook, Jay Chough, and so on. When Rose summons him, he goes by "John Pica." Spot the corvid connection...
  • Let's You and Him Fight: His stock in trade.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Who'd've thunk that the relationship manipulator would be playing with the summoners who use him for his own, hundred-years-long plan? Just about anybody who realises how sodding dangerous his powers are: including many of the summoners, like Rose. However, he knows they think they know how much and to what extent he does this... He's not compared to summoning a demon for nothing.
  • Morphic Resonance: All his humanoid forms have a slouch, black hair that's carefully slicked back, a hook-nose, skin that marks him as heavily Native American in background and nice, dark clothes that have seen too much use. He also sports a harsh, fairly croaky voice when he speaks and his laugh is... distinctively unique. For a human.
  • Ravens and Crows: He seems a grab-bag mix of the various corvid tropes. Emphasis on Creepy Crows, but not exclusively so. His ability to take connections and mess with them certainly alludes to the magpie myths. He also originally took the form of a crow-spirit. Traditionally, raven- and crow-spirits are seen as Chaotic Neutral bordering on Chaotic Good and often linked to renewal and creation as a well as destructive, status quo upending messes. Corvidae, has, however, been been given an agenda, put through the Solomon Seal mill and had time to build up personal resentments as well as hit the Abyss: so all bets are off as to his closest appropriate alignment.
  • Sarcastic Devotee: At best and if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, he may be your dangerously Treacherous Advisor under the cover of being a Sarcastic Devotee, instead. He has barely-concealed contempt for most who summon him, for all he does tend to seemingly stick to the spirit of the rules in front of others rather more than many practitioners do (not much of a recommendation, that). About the only person he has any real respect for is... Crone Mara.
  • Shoot the Dangerous Minion: More like Banish the Dangerous Minion back to Limbo, because Rose did not trust him with her while she was unconscious...which is probably a good reason.
  • Too Clever by Half: What summoners are basically warned about him being in all literature that deals with him. He's not in it for them, after all. Arguably, what you have to be to even think about summoning him in the first place. Or, just really desperate.

The Faceless Woman

One of the top five horrors in Jacob's Bell before the battle for lordship began, described as extremely territorial. She came from a manifestation of Limbo known as "The Forest".


  • The Blank: Shockingly enough, she lacks a face.
  • Body Horror: Can trap someone in their own skin by knitting it together with a mere touch.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: She needs holding back from going with her first instinct in practically every scene she's been in. Said first instinct is always to cause havoc after becoming quickly annoyed by somebody either 1) encroaching on space that she's deemed hers or 2) even looking like they're thinking about thinking about it.
  • Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Carries around a cigarette. Although, how she can even hope to smoke it is anybody's guess.
  • Morality Chain: The Pizza Man revenant pretty much keeps her behavior in check when it will endanger her and she does drop a fight to make sure he lives.
  • Pet the Dog: After part of Green Eyes' face is scraped off, the faceless woman helps her rearrange her hair to hide the injury.
  • The Voiceless: Can't talk, presumably due to her lack of a face including the lack of a mouth.

Green Eyes

A bogeyman/mermaid who Blake met in The Drains, he later frees her.


  • Beware My Stinger Tail: Her tail is sharp enough to cut people in half.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: She's a genuinely nice girl...mermaid...thing, but she has teeth sharp enough to tear out a giant's spine and claws that can cut through thick hides, and she has no hesitation in using them if asked by Blake. And if you think not being near water would stop her, you're wrong.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Has a very distinctively different take on the concepts of "friendship" and "reciprocation" and "food" than most. Mind you, she's not as extremely odd as you'd expect. By Drains standards.
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: She and Blake mostly talk about relationships when they're about to kill something.
  • Color-Coded Eyes: When Blake first meets her, her eyes are reflecting green in dim light. When the lights come on, they become pale white.
  • Cute Monster Girl: Despite her description being less than attractive, her personality and quirks mark her as this.
  • Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Lacking a purpose is part of the reason she fell into the Drains, and she remarks that she's a little sad that she doesn't have anything that she wants badly enough to drive her as a bogeywoman.
  • Eagle-Eye Detection: Don't knock her ability to see tiny details: her eyes are as good as Evan's in bird-mode. She's also able to draw conclusions from what she senses in jig time. Even if whatever she suggests sounds like coming right out of left-field, it usually winds up having a good basis in fact.
  • Eye Scream: She gets half her face scraped off to save her from a dragon's undying flames. Her eye goes with it.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: She doesn't need to eat people, but she did ask Blake when she was in The Drains if she could when he died and, to be fair, just about everything ate anything there. She even refers to Evan as bird-morsel in her head when summoned.
  • In Love with Your Carnage: She really likes it when Blake goes Bogeyman on other people.
  • Interspecies Romance: Had a thing with an Other in "The Drains" after it saved her in the water and kept her alive. He got eaten at some point. Seems to have a thing for Blake at present and is open to a relationship.
  • The Nose Knows: She has an incredibly good sense of smell, being able to gauge how often somebody resorts to drink and drugs, even.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: She's a human who turned into a predatory mermaid because her skin was rubbed off and then scarred over, and she mostly eats fish but humans are good too. Or really anything meat.
  • Scary Teeth: She's a carnivore, and has about the teeth that you'd expect. The fact that her lips are transparent only adds to the effect. And those teeth can tear out the spine of a giant.
  • Transhuman Treachery: Played for Laughs. She's shockingly bad at trying to hide her desire to eat Evan. Although it never quite goes away, she also seems to genuinely quite like the lad for himself over time, and not just because Blake likes him (and won't let her eat him). At the very least, she won't let anybody else eat this nugget.
  • Undying Loyalty: Is completely loyal to Blake for bringing her out of the Drains.
  • Violently Protective Girlfriend: Blake and Green Eyes aren't an item per se, but she's quite willing to destroy anyone who wants to harm him.

The Diary Girl

"E-X-S-A-N-G-U-I-N-A-T-E"

A bogeyman that takes the form of a young woman in 40s attire made of paper clutching a diary. Has a quirk of spelling out certain words.


  • Ambiguous Situation: In Pale Lucy briefly fights a bogeyman clutching a bleeding book that fits her description, but it's never outright stated if it's her or not.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: She kills by flaying people alive with paper cuts.
  • Genuine Human Hide: Her book is bound in human skin.
  • I Gave My Word: Blake defeats her in their second confrontation by getting her to agree to never harm another soul in return for not destroying her diary with the Hyena.
  • Soul Jar: Her diary appears to contain her soul, as Blake threatening its destruction causes her to submit to defeat.
  • Paper Master: She controls the pages that make up her body, letting her levitate and shapeshift for both offensive and defensive purposes.
  • To the Pain: Asks Blake to join her in cutting the group in numerous places to sip on their fear in a way that he thinks is almost seductive in how she breathes the words out.
  • Turned Against Their Masters: Andy and Eva manage to bounce her back at the group during the invasion of the Thorburn house.
  • Verbal Tic: Likes spelling out certain words.

The Chain Man

A bogeyman who takes the form of a thin but powerfully built man wearing a kilt and not much else. His name comes from the numerous chains and hooks which sprout from his exposed flesh. Spawned from a variant of the Abyss known as the Machine and shows a keen interest in feeding others to it.


Bristles

A bogeyman taking the form of a dog summoned by Rose.


  • Ambiguous Situation: It's not clear whether Bristles started out as a dog who took on human-like traits or happens to be a human taking the form of a dog, since its resistance of Johannes' pipes makes it clear that it's not just a dog-like Other either way.
  • Animalistic Abomination: A bogeyman that takes the form of a dog, though it's unclear whether Bristles was truly originally a dog or a human that became like a dog since it can resist the effects of Johannes' animal-controlling pipes.
  • No-Sell: Resists Johannes' pipes due to what Blake theorizes as it not truly being a dog but a human who took on doglike traits in the Abyss, or conversely a dog that took on human-like traits.
  • Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Small, but Blake describes it as being like a squirming child with a pitbull's bite. It even manages to hold off Barbatorem for quite some time.

The Nurse of Darnby

A bogeyman who sought to put others out of their misery so much she crawled out of the Abyss to keep doing it.


Gunter Veit aka The Welder

A bogeyman called out by Rose during the final arc.


Defenestration Bogeyman

A bogeyman met in the Tenements, he's set loose during the Lordship battle as part of a deal.


  • Androcles' Lion: Blake helps him escape from the Tenements in exchange for a vague deal for assistance later, not really expecting much out of it. At the climax of the story, he pops back up to defeat Barbatorem with one extremely well-timed push.
  • Boring Yet Practical: His power breaks down to pushing people out of openings, but that makes him incredibly dangerous - in the right time and place, he's able to beat Barbatorem with it.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: Blake releases him from the Tenements and he disappears only to pop back up and kick Barbatorem out of the opening, damaging Johannes' body enough to sever his claim to his demesne.

    Angels 

General Tropes

  • Arch-Enemy: Angels are by nature directly opposed to demons as beings of creation, and care little for those who pervert the natural order such as goblins and fae.
  • Angelic Abomination: They aren't necessarily good, and space seems to distort around their true forms. According to Pactdice, those who deal with angels must keep themselves safe with very strict rules and vows, lest even the weaker cherubim alter them irrevocably like demonic motes. This can range from the relatively minor, such as the Cherubim Abd Al Sami giving hearing loss to the corrupt or those who fail to protect themselves with proper vows, to the more dramatic such as an evangelist having a limb or their whole body turned into salt by a Cherubim who makes walls of salt. For this reason, only the most powerful of evangelists deal directly with true angels as opposed to mere constructs such as Cherubim, Powers, Virtues, and even Thrones.
  • Our Angels Are Different: They're an antithesis to demons whose purpose is to be the enemies of all those who mess with the natural order of creation or bend the rules a bit too much. Like demons, they come in choirs. (Only the third, Structure, is named in the text, but the other 6 are inferred from Structure's opposition to the third demonic choir, Ruin)
  • Perception Filter: Angels can render themselves completely invisible to all forms of detection, even the Sight, while observing. You only notice them when they want to be noticed.
  • Light Is Not Good: While opposed to demons, in terms of morality they're closer to neutral.
  • Logical Weakness: Angels are connected to everything, which means that if they take more corporeal forms they take on the weaknesses of that form, such as Faysal being effected by Johannes' pipes due to turning into a dog as his Familiar.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting: Histories 14 shows that angels can change their form at will.
  • You Cannot Grasp the True Form: If Faysal Anwar is any indication, angels tend to take on more comprehensible forms when dealing with mortals. When Blake sees his true form he describes it as impossible to look at due to space distorting around it.

Faysal Anwar

Johannes' familiar, an angel of the seventh choir. Takes the form of a white Afghan Hound.


  • Affably Evil: Like Johannes, he's far too polite and courteous for someone that auctions off the suffering of others for profit. Blake feels compelled to address him as "sir," which he says "just feels right" and the deal he offers to Blake in exchange for the safe release of an Other that attacked him is more than generous.
  • Big Bad Wannabe: The reveal of Faysal's true intentions opens the climax of the serial and seemed to set him up as a major antagonist for the finale. However, leaving Johannes to be taken by the Barber backfires on him hard, allowing the demon to reduce him to a puppet once Mann, Levinn, and Lewis free him from the Abyss.
  • Canine Companion: He takes the form of an Afghan hound as Johannes' familiar.
  • The Chessmaster: He anticipated and planned for Johannes' fall, using him as a pawn to remove Barbatorem.
  • Demonic Possession: Or rather, angelic possession. His Histories reveals that he and Johannes are basically analogous to the Briar Girl and her familiar in terms of power differential, meaning that he can usurp control of Johannes effectively at will.
  • The Dog Was the Mastermind: Quite literally, since his familiar form is that of a dog. He manipulates Johannes into sending the town into the Abyss so that he can permanently bind the Barber there, and cooperates with the Barber by offering him the Thorburns in order to keep him there.
  • Fallen Angel: Mags seems to consider him an at best morally ambiguous angel for helping Johannes with his schemes, with Johannes being Lucifer. Whether he is is up for debate, as Johannes has mentioned that his current position is closer to a sabbatical than a defection. In fact, he is nothing of the sort. He has been furthering angelic ends the entire time.
  • Familiar: To Johannes, taking the form of an Afghan hound.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: Faysal is the mysterious party responsible for plunging Jacob's Bell into the Abyss during the fight for Lordship, having been working all along towards the removal of the Barber from the earthly plane by any means necessary.
  • Hazy-Feel Turn: Was originally sent to destroy Johannes before joining him.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: Faysal's plan to send the Thorburn house and Barbatorem into the Abyss ends up backfiring when two things happen. First, Johannes allows himself to be possessed by Barbatorem in order to trap the demon in the Abyss. Second, the lawyers bring Barbatorem, still in Johannes's body, out of the Abyss. The familiar connection, plus Johannes's pipes, means that Faysal is now enslaved by the Barber.
  • The Juggernaut: When Johannes attempted to fight Faysal when they first met, no weapon he used nor bound Other he summoned could work to defeat him, most prominently when he tried shooting him to no effect. He notes that as a being of creation, he cannot be permanently harmed by non-demonic methods of attack because they merely change the matter they hit, not completely destroy it like demonic taint does. It's made all the more impressive by the fact that Faysal is only a minor Angel, which speaks volumes to how powerful the really strong angels are.
    Faysal, after shrugging off getting shot: "Bullets change, they affect structure, even if that is tearing down blood, muscle, and bone."
  • Manipulative Bastard: As an angel of the seventh choir, opposing the Choir of Unrest, this is his main MO. He more or less forced Johannes to take him on as a familiar, and then manipulates things so that Barbatorem will end up in the Abyss.
  • Meaningful Name: His name is transliterated from Arabic-Faysal, also spelled Faisal, meaning "separator of good and evil" and interpreted as both "judge" and "sword," while "Anwar" means "luminous."
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Faysal brings Green Eyes out of the Abyss as basically a freebie for Blake, only for her to turn out to be one of the greatest thorns in his side when it comes to leaving everyone trapped in the Abyss with the now Barber-possessed Johannes.
  • Portal Door: As part of his duties as a Gatekeeper Faysal can casually make openings between realms.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Is more than fair in dealing with Blake, even allowing him an extra favor "in payment for what you have lost fighting demons."
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Upon being freed from his binding by the lawyers, he immediately hightails it out of the area.
  • The Stoic: He remains calm and reasonable in every situation that comes up, be it hostage negotiations, hostile negotiations, or briefly explaining how he's cooperated with a demon before setting it loose on everyone in the building.
  • Thinking Up Portals: His role in the universe is to create paths, including rivers and natural paths, which lets him open gateways anywhere he wishes. He can even make pathways into manifestations of the Abyss such as The Drains and allow free passage, or free Blake from the mirror-world.
  • Time Abyss: He mentions that sometimes, when his labors were finished, he would do nothing beyond sit on a mountaintop and watch for centuries at a time.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: He believes that what Johannes is doing is for the best. However, he considers it small potatoes next to the opportunity to permanently bind a moderate demon, for which he sacrifices Johannes without remorse.

Harith

An angel of the third choir of structure, who informed Faysal Anwar of Johannes' plans.


  • Small Role, Big Impact: Only shows up in one Interlude, but it's his informing Faysal Anwar of Johannes' plans that sets up a large portion of the story.

    Djinn 

General Tropes

  • Foil: To Sphinxes, both being Others of Balance, the difference being that genies work on a macro scale and are naturally created, as opposed to Sphinxes who work on a micro-scale and are artificially created.
  • Our Genies Are Different: Born of elements and divine fragments, they are similar to sphinxes as Others of Balance but work on a macro-scale in power.
  • Reality Warper: Can do this on a macro scale due to their knowledge of the cosmic makeup of reality.

Eblis

A djinn currently in the service of Johannes.


  • Elite Mook: Serves this purpose amongst the numerous Others in Johannes' service.
  • Mundane Utility: Reality warper on a macro-scale? Try "emergency glazier of many, many broken windows".

    Trolls 

General Tropes

  • Dishing Out Dirt: They have a strong connection to the element of Earth.
  • Dumb Muscle: Their main use for practitioners if bound.
  • Had to Be Sharp: The remaining trolls are those who were too strong or too smart for most practitioners to kill or bind. Hildr happened to be the latter.
  • Our Trolls Are Different: A species of Other native to the mountains of Scandinavia, most of them are either dead or bound due to their general lack of subtlety.

Hildr

Sandra Duchamp's familiar who she captured and bound over the course of ten months, who takes on the form of a stoat. While smaller than most trolls, though still pretty large, she possesses great cunning.


  • Blood Knight: Like most trolls, she loves fighting and violence.
  • Braids of Barbarism: Has her hair done in braids about as thick as the average human arm.
  • Familiar: To Sandra Duchamp.
  • Genius Bruiser: Hildr is about as smart as she is strong, which is very.
  • Large Runt: She's actually on the small side for a troll, which is still pretty large by human standards.
  • Lightning Bruiser: She's pretty fast as well.
  • The Silent Bob: While Hidr can speak, she prefers gestures and grunts.

    Dragons 

Greneral Tropes

  • Draconic Abomination: Dragons are snarls in reality that take mostly reptilian forms.
  • Dragons Are Demonic: While they aren't literally demonic since they lack the presence of rot, there's no doubt that most of them are malevolent beings, though most lack rational thought.
  • Dragons Are Divine: Some dragons are formed from gods.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons are beings formed from something feeding into itself when the stars align just right, such as a lesser god that worships itself or an elemental that takes in more than it puts out. They can be fully or partially elemental, spiritual, or even deific. They're believed to mostly take reptilian forms mainly due to the world remembering the dinosaurs, giving them elements of Dragons Are Dinosaurs. They also lack any real weaknesses, with the only real way to defeat them being either backing from a god, or being overwhelmed in whatever element that embody. ie. A poison dragon getting outpoisoned, or a mountain dragon getting hit by a bigger mountain.
  • Wrong Context Magic: Most types of Others have some sort of easily exploitable weakness they all have in common, taking the form of a polar opposite to their being. Dragons don't as a result of being snarls in reality, often comprised of a number of different things, so the only way to defeat them is through brute force.

Johannes' Dragon

A massive dragon in the service of Johannes, Blake and company fight it and a giant while invading his desmense.


  • Asteroids Monster: Not normally, but when Barbatorem slices it in two, the two portions become two separate dragons.
  • Dual Boss: Said dragon is fought alongside a giant.
  • Playing with Fire: This particular dragon is a firebreather.

Top