Sir Edvard Hawley
For the past thirteen years, Madchapel—a borough of impoverished slums mostly inhabited by destitute immigrants—has been the site of a series of brutal murders that are believed to have occult significance due to the ritualistic nature of the slayings. Sir Edvard Hawley, a fraudulent “gentleman surgeon” with an interest in black magic, was suspected by the Rooks as being the Madchapel Slasher, but those conjectures ended with Hawley’s death five years ago.
The truth is that Edvard Hawley was the killer all along and continues to stalk the residents of Madchapel after death as a murderous wraith. He prowls by night, sometimes driven in a spectral black coach lit by baleful green lanterns, to hunt for victims. Anyone slain by Sir Edvard Hawley’s ghostly postmortem knife rises from the grave as an unquiet spirit under his control.
• Appearance: Edvard Hawley appears as a grinning spectral man wearing a long overcoat and a top hat.
• Personality: He does not even attempt to repress his murderous impulses.
• Motive: He plans on branching out from Madchapel, adding unfortunate souls to his army of ghosts, until all of Krevborna is a spectral empire under his rule.
• Flaw: Sir Edvard Hawley relishes the thought of possessing a body to continue his murders in the flesh.
Ghostly Jack the Ripper is forever a solid Gothic villain concept - though one must admit that I would be inclined to tweak his title a bit to be more ‘Continental’ and patrician, rather than knightly (‘The Honourable Edvard Hawley’ perhaps?).
ReplyDeleteI tend to think of Krevborna as being not untouched by the Cult of Chivalry, but regarding it as fairly outlandish.
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One also gets the rather sad mental image of ‘Madchapel’ having originally been something like ‘Maidchapel’ (Named for a noted Sanctuary established by a lady who is said to have not merely driven out, but actually cured demons and later consecrated to her Blessed Memory) only for the name and it’s associations to have suffered a slip comparable to the Bethlem/Bedlam transition.