Azan

Advancing age shows in Azan's bald crown and the heavy dark mustache that lends him one of his many titles. His build stays broad and thickly muscled though squat, and he is seldom seen out of the armor he keeps on almost constantly, its helm styled after a samurai's kabuto. He stands a shade taller than the dwarves near him. Over the years he collects several names, among them the Bridge Knight, the Black Mustache Knight, and Iron Staff Demon Azan. Official reference material places him during the Fantasia era at forty-six years of age, one hundred fifty-seven centimeters, and ninety-five kilograms.

Honor shapes every choice Azan makes. He insists on meeting Guts one against one and waves his own soldiers back, and he holds that a fighter who can no longer raise a blade must never be struck down, an act he considers a disgrace upon every knight. He looks after his comrades and turns his guilt inward when he cannot shield them, extends help to strangers without being asked, as when he sides with Schierke against raiding pirates, and puts the endangered ahead of his own aims, once telling Jill's father to reach the children before doing anything else. Anyone who takes women or children as hostages earns his open revulsion. Duty makes him strict, and though his vows to the Holy See keep him a bachelor, he confesses to Serpico that he would gladly swap his robes for a wedding band.

Long before he ever wore the order's colors, Azan earned fame as the Bridge Knight, a name won when he guarded a wounded old man across a span while fending off close to a hundred mounted attackers. He climbed to become the order's vice-commander and stood as the last seasoned veteran the Holy Iron Chain Knights still had by the time Farnese took the reins. A year past the Hundred-Year War, he escorts her on a mission to look into the Falcon of Darkness foretold for the fifth solar eclipse; the two come upon the blood-reddened shallows the Holy See had foretold before setting out to seize the black swordsman.

Once the order runs Guts down, Azan demands a solo duel and nearly overpowers him, his staff so swift it catches even the seasoned swordsman off guard, until Guts vaults over him off that very staff and Serpico drops him from hiding. Azan then shields the beaten Guts from vengeful troops and steadies his rattled commander. At the Tower of Conviction his men are swallowed by the restless dead; the staff keeps him from being crushed, yet he is left ashamed at failing to save them. Joining forces with Guts against the Kushan just long enough to lead Farnese, Serpico, and the others clear, he carries his final report to the Holy See at Vritannis and is cast out for his trouble.

Adrift after his excommunication, he takes up on a docked boat and is dragged into a quarrel with Bonebeard before boarding Roderick's Seahorse bound for Elfhelm, trading practice blows with Isidro while keeping his face hidden behind the helm. Come the Fantasia era he battles the Sea God's tentacles, then surfaces again in the Kushan capital under the name Black Mustache Knight, standing with Puck and Isidro against a sudden swarm of trolls.