Duncan Bessemer is a Renegade of the Artificer Guild who soulforges the hapless wraiths of celebrities and politicians.
History[]
The laws of Stygia state that only thralls, criminals and Spectres can be fed to the forges. Laws, as Duncan Bessemer knows very well, were made to be broken. Few Artificers are as feared, as hated or as fiercely hunted by both Hierarchy and Heretics.
Born in 1767 on the Isle of Skye, Bessemer worked as smith and later, as a foundry worker in a factory that made cannon for His Majesty King George. A handsome man, he became involved with a local beauty, the lovely Mrs. Eudora Wayland. Unfortunately, Mr. Wayland was the foreman of the foundry where Bessemer labored, and it didn't take long for him to uncover his wife's duplicity. Less than two weeks later, Wayland tipped both his wife and her lover into a vat of molten metal. Eudora's spirit fled to wherever the souls of the righteous go, but Duncan became a wraith.
Reaped by a bored Hierarchy functionary and scheduled for the forge, Bessemer was rescued at the last minute by the woman who had been scheduled to smelt him. Officially the staff smith for the 3rd Division of the Skeletal Legion, she was also a Journeyman Artificer with ambitions of climbing higher. She saw in Duncan a potential apprentice of unlimited gifts and malleable personality. Diverting him from the forge, she had him trained, initiated and turned loose in a position subordinate to hers with the same Legion.
With his natural aptitude for metalworking, Duncan quickly mastered the secrets of soulforging, and became no mean hand at Inhabit. He enjoyed his work at the forge - a little too much, some said - and achieved a rate of production unmatched since the days before Nhudri took apprentices. When his Mistress was shipped out with much of the rest of the Skeletal Legion to fight the Jade Empire, he remained and rapidly assumed his teacher's place in the councils of the Guild.
One of the perks of Guild status is being able to choose the souls you work with. Through use of this privilege, Bessemer was able to obtain for himself the Corpus of one Johnny Cope, a British general of ill repute in Scotland who had taken up with Renegades after his death. Bessemer, more a Scots patriot in death than in life, took his time working Cope and found himself enjoying every minute of the Englishman's agony. Six months later, once Cope had finally been hammered into a lovely representation of a hawthorn branch in bloom, Duncan went looking for a new victim.
Bessemer's obsession with torturing those who oppressed Scotland has turned into a more general fixation on "collecting" the souls of those who were famous in life and hammering them into works of art. Many of the living world's foremost citizens ended up decorating the homes of the leading citizens of Stygia. Eventually Bessemer's desire for raw materials out stripped the legal methods for getting them, and rather than curb his appetites, he sought other channels to sate them. It took decades for his sickness co be uncovered, and when the Legionnaires finally came for him, he easily avoided capture.
No one claims knowledge of Bessemer's whereabouts to day, though there is strong suspicion that the Guildmasters are hiding him for their own purposes. In the meantime, every celebrity and politician who comes into the Shadowlands learns to shudder at the name of Duncan Bessemer.
Trivia[]
- Despite being a victim of violence like those in the Grim Legion, he was traded to be a part of the same Legion as his Mistress in the Skeletal Legion.
References[]
- WTO: Guildbook: Artificers, p. 65, 66
