Wyald

In the shape he wears through most of his appearances, Wyald is a hulking, ape-like brute, his features so bestial that both Barbo and Guts liken him to a monkey, crowned with a mane of black hair. This body is a mask, for before his pact he had been a small, frail old man, and it is to that withered form that his corpse reverts once he dies. When he unleashes his released state, he balloons into a towering apostle monstrosity capable of scattering armed ranks with a single torn-out tree.

Wyald lives by a creed of Excitement and Enjoyment, a debauched thrill-seeker who drinks in slaughter and carnality with equal glee. He grasps that commanding hardened men demands more than rank, and he rules his soldiers through raw power, magnetism, and terror by turns. Utterly void of conscience, he takes sadistic delight in atrocity, violating and mutilating women, burning children, and cutting down his own troops for sport, hurling them into the Band of the Falcon's traps and butchering them the moment their nerve breaks. He strips both Casca and Griffith bare before their comrades to shatter their spirit. Yet his bravado deserts him when death looms, and the swaggering apostle turns frantic, seizing Griffith as a hostage in a bid to call down the God Hand and save his own hide.

Almost nothing survives of Wyald's mortal life beyond the fact that he had been a feeble old man, and that he had already sealed his apostle pact by the time he landed in prison. His path to command opened when the King of Midland, five years before Griffith's jailbreak, conscripted every able-bodied criminal into a fighting unit. Wyald claimed the leadership as his by right of strength, and when a giant called Barbo the armor hacker contested him, the two dueled to the death; Wyald settled the matter by impaling his rival on a tower spike, cowing the rest into obedience. His convict army, the Black Dog Knights, grew so notorious for cruelty that the king exiled them to distant fronts to keep them from view.

When the Band of the Falcon spirits the freed Griffith out of Wyndham, the king unleashes the Black Dogs to run them down. Wyald balks at the errand until he learns Griffith is the quarry, then throws himself into the chase, razing a farmstead that had sheltered the fugitives along the way. The pursuit collapses into open battle as the Falcons' traps thin his ranks. Facing Guts at last, he boasts that Zodd had spoken of a lively fighter among the Falcons, trades blows, catches the swordsman's blade in his teeth, and voices his hunger for the coming Eclipse. Once his men are overwhelmed and he slaughters the rest for losing heart, Wyald sheds his human guise for his true apostle shape, a colossal form strong enough to break even the Dragon Slayer.

The brutal duel leaves Wyald gravely hurt for the first time in a century and seemingly dead, but he only feigns it, killing the scouts left to watch him before dragging himself to the Falcon camp and taking Griffith captive. Meaning to trigger the Eclipse early and spare his own life, he strips Griffith to expose his torture, then panics when he cannot find the beherit. Zodd runs him through on his horns to guarantee the relic returns to Griffith. As Wyald pleads that he only obeyed the God Hand's single commandment to do as he willed, Zodd tears open his belly, and the dying apostle screams that Griffith is not what they believe. His soul is hauled into the Abyss while his body shrinks back into the frail old man he once was.