Dante

Dante has no single face, because her survival has meant discarding one body for the next. Across the series she is glimpsed as an aged, white-haired woman, in the youthful frame of her pupil Lyra, and in earlier likenesses reaching back centuries. That constant theft carries a hidden price: her latest vessel is quietly rotting, the outward sign of a soul stretched too thin after so many transfers.

Cold, calculating, and intoxicated by her own importance, Dante treats the people around her as tools and the dead, in her words, as necessary martyrs. Centuries of parasitic existence hollowed out whatever tenderness she once possessed; where she had once rushed to save Hohenheim, she came to regard humanity as selfish and ignorant, unworthy of alchemy's secrets, all while leaning on those very secrets herself. Convinced she is shielding mankind from its own worst instincts, she ignites wars and spends countless lives without a flicker of guilt, ruling Amestris from the shadows through her homunculus Pride and bending the whole nation toward her single obsession.

Roughly four hundred years before the story, Dante and her lover Hohenheim reached alchemy's supposed pinnacle by forging a Philosopher's Stone, burning the condemned and the plague-stricken as fuel. When the transmutation nearly killed him, she instinctively used the fresh Stone to bind his soul to another man's body, and in that act the pair stumbled onto a grim form of immortality. Together they buried whole cities to hide their work, among them the one now lying beneath Central and the eastern settlement that had been Hohenheim's homeland. They had a son who died of mercury poisoning; the effort to revive him produced the homunculus later called Envy.

Hohenheim eventually saw what she had become and abandoned her, leaving only a sliver of the Stone that she soon exhausted. Cast aside, Dante was forced to survive on her own and turned the homunculi into her instruments, gathering them as they were born from failed human transmutations, feeding them red stones, and promising to make them human so they would serve her. Because she could not craft a new Stone alone, she engineered endless conflict, orchestrating the massacres at Ishbal and Lior in hopes that some desperate alchemist would build one for her to seize. Her circle-less command of alchemy let her clap transmutations into being, warp Gluttony into a mindless devourer, and split Hohenheim apart before casting him through the Gate.

Her boasted immortality proved a lie. Every transfer left a fragment of her soul behind, and by the present day her essence could barely hold a human shape, driving her to mark Rose Thomas as her next vessel using the Stone hidden inside Alphonse. She meant to seize control of Edward through Rose's affection and remake him into a stand-in for Hohenheim, but when he refused she banished him beyond the Gate. Alphonse then sacrificed himself to bring his brother back, destroying the Stone and dooming Envy. Cornered and stripped of her prize, Dante fled toward Pride, only to cross paths with the very Gluttony she had rendered monstrous, an encounter that most likely ended her long, stolen life.