Scar's brother

He is most often pictured as a bookish figure buried in texts and notes, an Ishvalan man of scholarly bearing rather than a warrior's build. In the 2003 continuity he is also seen in flashback before his experiments, standing beside the woman he loved, a gentler image of the person he was prior to the tragedy that consumed him.

Gentle and endlessly curious, he was a gifted scholar who could rarely be found without a book in hand, diligent and precise in his work. His brilliance let him detect the unnatural current of alchemy running through Amestris and design a reversing circle to correct it, a remarkable feat for a man who had never set foot in the country nor learned of the homunculi. His notes proved so cryptic that even Dr. Marcoh struggled to unravel them.

Though he kept his people's faith, he was far less rigid than many of his brethren, believing that alchemy could serve the population and that a changing world called for new teachings. Despite living amid war, he held no blanket resentment toward Amestrians, acknowledging that they permitted Ishval its worship. A realist and likely a pacifist, he openly conceded he stood little chance of surviving compared to his warrior-monk sibling, and his devotion to that brother shows in his final acts of protection and sacrifice.

In the manga and 2009 anime he researches Amestrian and Xingese techniques hoping to help his people, even as others expect the work to be turned against enemy alchemists. He is first to sense that something is wrong with the nation's alchemy, tracing it to the existence of a countrywide transmutation circle. Judging a scheme of that scale impossible to halt, he theorizes an alternative use for the circle and conceals the details within his notes, while tattooing both arms with a blend of alkahestry and alchemy, the left for reconstruction and the right for deconstruction. Before Solf J. Kimblee arrives, he hands the research to his brother for safekeeping, shields him from the resulting blast, grafts his own right arm onto the dying man, and perishes. Those hidden notes later reveal the modified circle and its reversal to the protagonists.

The 2003 anime tells a darker origin. There he attempts human transmutation to revive the woman he and his brother both loved, and the failure gives rise to the homunculus Lust. Exiled for practicing the forbidden art, he returns during the civil war to offer his knowledge of the Philosopher's Stone, then marks his body to absorb living souls and becomes a living Stone himself, taking in those killed in the massacre. Pursued by Kimblee, he strips the alchemist of his enhancing Red Stone, fuses his own arm onto Scar, and dies.