Character · The Baku-verse

Oxivius Soulforge

A thousand years old. The last Knight Templar. He eats the dead.

Who is Oxivius?

Oxivius is the necromancer at the centre of the Baku-verse. He is the last Knight Templar. He is about a thousand years old. He eats the flesh of the dead.

The souls he takes do not leave. They surface as faces in the living tattoos on his arms. They move.

He started out as a supporting character. Readers kept asking where he came from. So I wrote three books to answer them.

Soulstealer or Soulforge?

Both. History knew him as Oxivius Soulstealer. By the time he walks into Portland, Maine, he answers to Soulforge. The Soulstealer Trilogy covers how one became the other.

Where he came from

1303. The crusade is being lost, and a unit of Knights Templar goes into the Matra mountains after a weapon that might turn it. What they dig out was buried with ghuls. It has been down there a long time, and it is awake.

Sir Marcus Le’heroux is the only one who treats it like a man.

Two ways in

Start with The Infernal Games and meet him the way Xlina does, as a mystery with a body count. Or start with Soulstealer: Origins and walk the thousand years forward. The reading order explains both.