Headless Horseman

Percival James “Percy” Morgan, better known as the Headless Horseman, was a merciless Edenian mercenary—both in life and in death. A favorite of Queen Mercy Graves, the mere sight of Morgan riding into town on the back of his hellhorse was enough to bring any Realmish settlement in line. And yet, the one time he failed the Queen—the time he could not kill her “wicked” stepdaughter—she turned on him almost immediately.

The beheading of Percy Morgan in The City of Hearts should have been the end of it. But then a vengeful goddess got involved, raised him from the dead, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Appearance & Personality

Percy Morgan was, at his core, a cold-blooded killer. And yet, he was not an unkind man. He did not kill out of malice or spite. He killed for money, for food, and for shelter. But he did not hoard those things. He never kept more money than he needed for basic necessities, never ate more than it took to get him to his next meal, and never stayed in any place longer than he was wanted. Everything extra, he gave away.

He was a well-built, muscular man who kept his head shaved but wore a mustache and mutton chops upon his face.

Morgan was almost never seen in public without his black hooded cloak, and his blood-red vest and gloves.

In death, as the Horseman, he looked pretty much the same—only without a head.

Biography

Warning: Here there be spoilers.

Early Days

Morgan was born in the year 1906 of the Earth-666 iteration of reality (108 Edenian). Arriving in Eden as a six-year-old refugee, he eventually made his home in the Nalkénean village of Sleepy Hollow. And yet, despite the fact that he was taken in by a well-off family by the name of van Tassel, the instincts he’d sharpened as an orphan in turn-of-the-century New York City stuck with him. He was a rough kid, but only because he’d always had to be.

Life as The Huntsman

Eventually, those roughneck tendencies led to a prosperous career as a sword-for-hire in the Edenian South. He took jobs wherever he could get them, though after barely escaping with his life during the hunt for the Watersmeet yeti, he opted to do most of his business east of the Novoya Volga.

It was in The City of Hearts, as mentioned above, that Morgan found his most steady and lucrative patron. Mercy Graves, Queen Regent of The Realm since the death of her first husband, was an unpopular figure and had made her fair share of enemies—some of whom she sought desperately to silence. And as her stepdaughter, Sadie, drew closer and closer to adulthood—and to the crown which would come with that milestone—Queen Mercy grew more and more desperate to keep hold of her power.

And the more desperate she got, the more money she paid.

It was Mercy’s plea to kill Sadie which earned Percy Morgan his biggest payday of all. And yet, he had to hoodwink the evil queen in order to collect the purse. “Why?” you may ask. Well, it wasn’t because he had a change of heart. Don’t believe every fairy tale you read, kid. No, he presented a boar’s heart to Queen Mercy as if it were the heart of Sadie Winters not because he’d spared her, but because Sadie had fended off his attack and spared him.  

Sadie, unbeknownst to Queen Mercy and her huntsman, had been training with the court magician since she was a wee thing. The kid could defend herself, and defend herself she did. But instead of killing the huntsman, Sadie spared him and cursed him. She cursed him to be forever loyal to her and her bloodline, then she sent him on his way.

The subterfuge of Percy Morgan went undetected for two years. For two years, as Sadie hid with her seven dwarves in some far-off forest, Queen Mercy believed she’d finally done it. She believed she had finally secured power for herself, but then her own son came of age and the people of The Realm clamored for him to take the throne. And so, with no choice but to step aside—she would murder a stepchild, yes, but not her own flesh and blood—she turned The Realm over to the young man who would become Malik I.

Twice widowed and stripped of her power, Mercy made plans to use her still ravishing good looks to make her way in the world. But when she consulted a magic mirror to reassure herself that she was “the fairest one of all,” she learned that her stepdaughter was still alive and that her most trusted ally, Percy Morgan, had betrayed her.

Mercy played on her son’s sympathies and had the huntsman arrested on trumped-up charges. And it was soon thereafter that Percy Morgan’s head was cut from his body on the steps of the Crimson Keep. The head was deposited on the shelves inside Noggin Hall and the body was sent back to Sleepy Hollow in a box.

Afterlife as The Horseman

Later that year, the goddess Athena—in need of a very particular kind of assassin—raised Percy Morgan from the dead. Sans head, of course. And all she asked of him, in exchange for her gift of a second life, were the deaths of three witches and one seventeen-year-old witch-in-training.

Why did Athena need a headless assassin? Well, because the three witches in question were the gorgons Medusa and her sisters. And thanks to Athena’s curse, they would turn anyone who looked upon them to stone. But if you didn’t have a head, then you didn’t have eyes, and if you didn’t have eyes then you couldn’t “look upon them” now, could you?

But while the killings of Medusa and her sisters were easy enough to pull off, the murder of Medusa’s daughter Daisy proved far more difficult. Upon waking to the screams of her mother and aunts, the latent potential within seventeen-year-old Daisy ignited and the Headless Horseman found himself being squeezed back toward death by Daisy’s powerful prehensile hair.

With a little help from Athena, the Horseman was able to subdue the girl and lock her in a tower. After that, Athena agreed that their deal was done and set the Horseman on his way.

Unsure at first what to do with himself, the Horseman got into a bit of mischief over in Promiseland, dressing up in green for a spell and tormenting the knight Gawain. But after that, he thought of the curse set upon him by Sadie Winters and decided that the best use of his time and his skills was to kill those who would seek to do harm to Sadie and her descendants. And so, he set about patrolling the South and keeping an eye on the Winters bloodline.

This eventually, hundreds of years later, led to him becoming the official executioner for the very first Queen of Hearts, Frieda Jacobs—a woman whose fondness for beheadings would grow and grow over the years of her long reign.

Late in the Second Age, after Queen Frieda undid the curse her ancestor had cast so many years before, the Horseman retired to Sleepy Hollow. It was there that he dedicated the rest of his afterlife to the protection of the family who had taken him in as a boy: the van Tassels. And it was there, in Sleepy Hollow, that he partook in the adventure for which he is most famous amongst we real-worlders today: his tormenting of the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane.

It is there, near the Old Cemetery, where legend says that Percy Morgan still lingers to this day.