Jack Crowley

In his youth Crowley kept his hair cropped short and dressed plainly in a white shirt and dark trousers. After binding himself into a golem and rebuilding a human form, he grew his hair out, marked his chest with a ram tattoo, and took to a long dark leather coat over dark slacks. His golem shape is broad and muscular, flying on wings of red energy, though slipping into it strips away most of his capacity for reason.

Crowley is a man hollowed out by loss. The death of the woman he loved unmoored him completely, and every act that follows bends toward a single, consuming purpose: getting her back. That fixation curdles into ruthlessness, leaving him indifferent to the lives he spends and to the schemes of the allies he arms, so long as they serve his own end. The deeper he sinks into his golem body, the more his reason erodes, until little remains but the obsession itself.

Once a State Alchemist known as the Silver Bullet Alchemist, Crowley lost his certification decades before the game's events. When his beloved Elma succumbed to a mysterious illness, he tried human transmutation to save her; the attempt failed but left him able to transmute without a circle, and he turned to the craft of golem creation, hoping to build a flawless new vessel for her soul. Hunting for the lost golem-city of Lebis, he befriended an archaeologist named Arlen, and by pooling their knowledge he managed to house Elma's soul in a golem body. Again and again the resurrection failed, Elma crumbling back into earth after months each time, until she secretly pleaded with Arlen to stop him and their friendship collapsed.

Crowley then found the Crimson Stone, which swells in power as it consumes lives, but prolonged contact ate away at his health until he was forced to bind his own soul into a golem to survive. The homunculi struck a bargain with him, trading fragments of the Crimson for help feeding it, and he freely supplied stones to the likes of Cornello and Tucker without care for their aims. Bent on harvesting the people of Resembool, he dispatched Elma in her deranged Phantom form and later drained the residents of Arlen's own village. His work is undone in stages: the Elrics destroy his dragon golem, force him back into his golem shape in the ruins of Lebis he had rebuilt, and finally, while Mustang, Hawkeye, and Armstrong hold off the shapeless remnant of him, they shatter the Crimson Stone. Freed at last from his obsession, his soul departs to join Elma, and in a closing moment Edward seems to glimpse the pair together as ghosts at a train station.