King of Xerxes

History remembers him as an aged monarch, distinguished by a long golden beard and the royal jewelry befitting his station. His robes carried enough grandeur that Father would later adopt one of them as his own signature garment.

For most of his reign he governed well and was genuinely beloved by contented subjects, a good and stable ruler into old age. That character eroded as death drew near. Dread of his own mortality, sharpened by the apparent absence of a fit heir, warped his judgment until ambition eclipsed conscience, and he proved willing to trade the lives of the people who loved him for the promise of living forever.

When one of Xerxes' leading alchemists produced an artificial being versed in rituals no ordinary person understood, the King summoned the creature, the Dwarf in the Flask, to learn the secret of immortality. It instructed him to inscribe a vast transmutation circle as a trench ringing the whole country, promising that once activated it would drain the lives of every citizen to grant the King and his court eternal life, sparing only those gathered at the palace at the circle's heart. He agreed, and set about the long work of building it, knowingly offering up his loving subjects to his own ambition.

On the appointed day the deception surfaced. The Dwarf had quietly reset the design so that it alone, together with its caretaker Van Hohenheim, stood at the true center, so those two received the souls of all Xerxes, the royal court included, and with them immortality. Four centuries later, on the Promised Day, the King is briefly conjured back when Father expels a crowd of humans from within himself to make a point to Hohenheim. Returned to a body at last, he mistakes his rebirth for the immortality he had craved. In the manga his imitation flesh, like that of the other revived citizens, decays fast, and he is finally erased when Father looses a colossal surge of alchemical energy meant to wipe out the five human sacrifices.