Fornax
Faction: The Broken Circle · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook
The Broken Circle: 3 - ULLU (Power Level 3)
Fornax, the One Who Returns
Fornax has died forty-seven times. He knows the count because the Broken Circle kept it — carved in tally marks on the stone of his rank chamber, each mark a humiliation they could not erase because he kept adding to it. ULLU, third rank, a demon who ought to inspire dread — and he does, briefly, until something kills him. A blade. A threshold. Once, a door. The thirty-fourth death was the worst: buried in a Shropshire churchyard, perfectly conscious beneath six feet of Victorian clay, unable to move. It took him fifty years to dig out. He emerged in 1947, grave-dirt in his teeth, having missed two world wars and the invention of several things he still does not understand. He comes back every time, gasping into a body slightly worse than the last, his ashen skin a little more translucent, his eyes a little more hollow. The Circle called it a defect. They exiled him not for cruelty or treachery, but for embarrassment — for dying in front of mortals, for making the ranks look fragile. He arrived at the Lodge trailing grave-dust, and Amber poured him something dark without being asked. He has not died here yet. He is not sure if that is better or worse.