Caligast Murk

Doctor Caligast Murk is a man of pale fingers and darker reputation—an Oleander scholar of medicine who walks the fine line between physician and defiler. He wears the scent of formaldehyde like a second skin, his long black coat always stained at the cuffs with ink, blood, or worse. A graduate of the Royal Anatomical Society of Galvarran, he earned renown for his brilliance in the study of the body—how it breaks, how it festers, how it dies. But where other doctors turned to divine aid or alchemical panacea, Murk refused the comforts of magic. “Understanding begins with the knife,” he once famously said. “Not with prayer.”   That understanding came at a price. Unable to legally acquire the cadavers he needed, Murk turned to darker sources. He paid grave robbers by the sackful. He frequented gallows and plague-pits. Whispers follow him even now—of prisoners found too late, of sickhouses with one too few patients in the morning. He calls it "clinical necessity." His detractors call it murder by scalpel. Still, his knowledge is unparalleled: he can tell how a man died by the shape of his collarbone; he can stitch back nerves so finely that even the dead twitch in response.   The Court of Carrion and Decomposition took notice. Unlike the Blight, which spreads through verdant death, the Carrion Court honors rot for its utility. The honest stench of entropy. The sacred duty of worms. Murk's obsession with the anatomical truth of decay, his reverence for the body's decline, made him a fitting disciple. They offered him insight—flesh that whispered its secrets, bone that remembered disease. He never made a pact. He simply kept digging.   Yet even Murk’s brilliance is corroded by dependence. His hands, once steady, now tremble when denied his daily tincture of poppy. Morphine is both sedative and saboteur. He says it quiets the screams of the dying—real or remembered. Some claim he injects it while operating. Others say it’s the only thing that keeps the ghosts of his subjects from clawing their way out of his dreams. Still, in the candlelit crypts where he works, the Doctor continues his research, surrounded by the half-dissected and the wholly forgotten.   To many, Doctor Caligast Murk is a ghoul masquerading as a scholar. But to a select few—those desperate enough to risk him—he is salvation in blood-stained gloves. A man who understands death not as an ending, but as the final textbook, waiting to be read.