Mozgus

As a man, Mozgus cuts a gaunt, severe figure, bald and hard-faced, his features nearly flattened by ten years of hurling himself to the ground in prayer. Those devotions have wrecked his knees so badly that walking is a struggle and running impossible. He is rarely seen apart from the heavy scripture tome he carries as both symbol and bludgeon, its cover stamped with four breaking wheels.

After the demonic Egg remakes him into a pseudo-apostle, he swells into a towering monster sheathed in stone-hard scales that no blade can pierce, the Dragon Slayer included. Vast white wings unfold from his back, letting him fly and folding out into a second pair of arms, and he can belch fire from his throat. The guidebook records him at forty-two, standing over two meters as a human and larger still once transformed.

Faith rules Mozgus utterly, spilling past devotion into fanaticism, and he laces religion through his every act. Anyone he labels a heretic he loathes, and he has broken hundreds under torture, reading even a single mole as proof of witchcraft, which has won him a great many enemies. He guards God's will so jealously that he once beats a man to death merely for warning that God would punish his cruelty. Yet guilt never touches him; he holds that spilled blood buys true devotion, a point he drives into Farnese with a grim parable of a holy woman and a dying man.

Beneath the brutality lies a softer thread. He seeks out the deformed and the discarded, folds them into his band of torturers, and tells them their strange shapes and hate-filled hearts are exactly what God requires. When those disciples die, he grieves without shame. Death holds no terror for him; meeting his own end, he feels only gladness at the thought of standing at last before God.

Before Albion, Mozgus gathers a band of deformed outcasts, assuring them no scripture damns them and that both their looks and their bitterness are wanted by God. Sent to Albion under the guard of the Holy Iron Chain Knights, his party is waylaid by villagers avenging kin he had massacred. When one rebel swears God will punish him, Mozgus loses control and caves in the man's skull with his scripture book, proclaiming that only the Holy See speaks for God, then has the survivors broken on the wheel and rides on.

In Albion he invites beggars into the Tower of Conviction and walks a mother and her ailing child to a doctor, hinting darkly that the price for such kindness will fall due later. He herds Farnese and the others into a torture chamber and orders her to watch, insisting she accept it as part of the Holy See. He performs his nightly rite of prostration, a thousand bows kept up for ten years, and tells Farnese the story of Gaiseric and a jailed sage. After a pagan cult is exposed, he examines the captured Casca, declares her Brand of Sacrifice the sign of a witch, and seals her in an iron maiden, which the spirits within blow open, drenching him and his men in blood. Carried to the tower's chapel as the blood floods in, Mozgus and his disciples are pierced by the Perfect World's Egg and reborn as pseudo-apostles.

Convinced the change is God's gift, Mozgus seizes Casca and vows to burn her at the stake, sure her death will end Albion's torment. When Guts comes, the disciple called the Bird urges him to leave the swordsman to the others. As animated corpses erupt from the earth, Mozgus climbs into the sky spitting flame and hailing his wings as a miracle to the panicked refugees. Guts runs him through, but the tome pressed to his chest soaks up the worst of it, letting him live and fully transform. In the fight his scaled hide turns aside Guts' blows while he presses hard, bidding the swordsman heed the crowd praying as one for salvation. Guts refuses. As Mozgus builds his fire for a killing blast, he unknowingly lights the explosives Guts had earlier packed into a chest wound, splitting the crack wide enough to sink the Dragon Slayer home. Devoured by his own flames, he grabs Guts in a final bid to kill him, only for Guts to use his bulk to pitch him off Albion's wall to his death. Fittingly, the blaze of his charred body lets a few refugees survive the swarming dead. Long after, he lingers only as a scrap of Farnese's memory during her passage through Casca's mind, his conjured head aiding her against the horrors there.