Myths, Legends and Other Creatures
| Character | First appearance | Last appearance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Death of the Endless | The Books of Magic Book Four: The Road to Nowhere | Hunter: The Age of Magic | A cheerful goth girl who is also the personification of death. She first meets Tim at the end of the universe, saving him from Mister E and sending him home. She meets him again as he lies dying from the Manticore venom, and tries to get him to think clearly about what difference finding his true parents would make to him. She makes infrequent appearances, usually trying to help Tim learn something important, such as how to let go of his friend Jimmy and let him move on. |
| The unicorn | The Books of Magic #2: "A Book of Leaves" | The Books of Magic #21: "Heavy Petting" | Tim first encountered the unicorn as a stuffed exhibition in the home of the Manticore, having been destroyed by the creature's unique form of magic: the Manticore managed to convince magicians and magical creatures that magic did not exist, literally reducing the unicorn itself to a moth-eaten stuffed horse with a horn badly sewn to its forehead. Tim's magic restores the unicorn, and it gores the Manticore before escaping its prison. It reappears later when Tim, Molly and Marya are being threatened by Daniel, and allows Marya to ride it to safety. It forms a bond with the young girl, and returns to protect her whenever she is threatened - goring Daniel, for example, to save her. Marya says that the unicorn comes when she calls "Apples", but she doesn't think that is actually its name. |
| Leah | The Books of Magic #6: "Sacrifices: Part 1 - Instruments" | The Books of Magic #75: "The Closing: Inner Child" | A young American girl who moves to Tim's school with her "father" Martyn: in truth he is a magician and the last surviving member of the Cult of the Cold Flame, and she is a succubus under his reluctant control. Alleatha (known as Leah) lives in a small wooden box most of the time, eating white doves and killing men at her master's command. He instructs her to seduce Tim, but she relents because his feelings for Molly stop him from responding - although she does consider the possibility that the boy was just too scared. When Martyn is killed, she tries to make Tim her new master but instead he sets her free: she travels to America where she becomes a model and is "hungry all the time" because she has given up eating living creatures. She meets Tim there when he is trying to reach Zatanna, and travels with him for a while, attempting to seduce him disguised as Molly before Tim admits that she didn't need the disguise to sleep with him. She is kidnapped by a dying mermaid and forced to become her replacement in another world to save Tim. Annoyed that Tim carries on his travels without even trying to look for her, she returns and forces him to live out a pseudo-lifetime trapped in her wooden box in the hope that he would learn something about himself and his connection to magic and the world. |
| Happy | The Books of Magic #8: "Sacrifices: Part 3 - Alters" | The Books of Magic #75: "The Closing: Inner Child" | A golem used by Martyn to protect his inner sanctum, "Happy" was rechristened by Tim when it grabbed him by the arm and wouldn't let go. Only Martyn should have been able to instruct it to release Tim, but as he was dead Tim had no choice but to use his magic to carve a smiley face on the golem and recreate it as his. Tim left Happy in Martyn's empty house, but took him as back-up when he and Tanger had to visit Hell to rescue Molly and Crimple. While they were there, Happy let Tanger sink his roots into its clay to prevent him from dying due to being "out of place". |
| Barbatos | The Books of Magic #5: "The Hidden School" | The Books of Magic #75: "The Closing: Inner Child" | A blue-skinned, baby-like demon who is fascinated by all the soul destroying things like advertising and junk food that humanity has created without any demonic intervention. He is intent on bringing these new inventions to the attention of Hell, and after gaining and selling a large number of Christian souls escaped from Hell, he has the finances to buy himself a Dukedom in Hell and the Ambassadorship to Earth. This brings him into contact with Tim's Other, whose raw power immediately makes the demon want to enslave him. However, when Barbatos meets Cyril, he learns the truth about the Other and the true Tim, and steals the magic that Thomas Currie hid: Barbatos steals it, and when Tim comes to reclaim it, the demon manipulates the Opener into selling him a memory in exchange for help defeating the Other. The memory Barbatos takes is the memory of the creation of the Other, returning him and all the other Tims from the thousands of alternate worlds back to the original. Whole for the first time in his life, Tim has no time to enjoy it, as his soul is forfeit to Barbatos. The demon uses the boy for his own ends for forty years, tricking him into believing that he is the master who lives in the lap of luxury when in truth he is a homeless slave to Barbatos. But Barbatos has to come back to the past from 2012 when he realises that a younger Tim is the last boy in the multiverse who could grow up to be the boy who sold him his memory. Unfortunately, when he faces up to Tim, he is defeated and trapped in an outskirt of the Dreaming. He manages to escape for a while when he finds a new master, a frog who he turns into a giant and promises a great pond to whilst enslaving the population of Faerie and selling them as dolls on Earth. Unfortunately, this time he crosses swords with Molly, and is trapped back in the Dreaming when she convinces his "master" to become just a frog again. After forty years, he is eventually released and discovers that Tim Hunter had tricked him all along: when the boy sold the memory to the demon, he hid his soul inside it leaving the body that Barbatos enslaved a soulless automaton. Tim's soul slowly takes control of Barbatos' body, eventually exorcising the demon from it completely and reshaping it to look like Tim as a fourteen-year-old. |
| Mister Vasuki | The Books of Magic #14: "What Fire Leaves Us" | The Books of Magic #48: "Slave of Heavens: Inconvenience, Be Not Proud" | Vasuki is a demon who poses as a doctor to magically cure Tim's father when he is badly burned. Later, when the demons go to war against the angels, he uses the power this gives him over William to transform him again into a ravenous beast. He attempts to blackmail Tim and Araquel into joining his side or watching Tim's father devour a nun, before being trapped along with the other demons and angels in Awn the Blink's angel and demon trapper. |
| Araquel | The Books of Magic #5: "The Hidden School" | The Books of Magic #49: "Slave of Heavens: When All Else Fails" | Araquel is Tim's guardian angel but he is fallen, chained between Heaven and Hell because he had a child with a Chaldean temple dancer. However, he is tricked into breaking his chains by Barbatos, who gives him several unimportant errands to do to keep him away from Tim whilst the demon tries to enslave him. Although he is again fallen, instead of returning to his prison, he lives with his daughter and Khara for a while, content to ignore Tim and let him fend for himself. He is forced to intervene, however, when Tim releases his magic into the world and the angels and the demons both threaten Araquel's family to force him to join the war to claim the magic on one side or the other. Ultimately, Araquel joins neither, and instead finds Tim to help him set things right. Sadly, this leads to Araquel's death at the hands of the beatified Cyril, who has him transformed into chocolate by one of his minions. |
| Nikki | The Books of Magic #5: "The Hidden School" | The Books of Magic #42: "The Bridge" | Nikki is Araquel and Khara's daughter, a half-angel little girl. She is looked after by Khara, until her father comes home to live with them both. |
| Khara | The Books of Magic #5: "The Hidden School" | The Books of Magic #42: "The Bridge" | Khara is the woman Araquel fell from grace for, and Nikki's mother, looking after the child whilst her father is chained. She often arrives to help Tim, and in particular helps him to remove the moth tattoo that contributed to him losing Molly. However, when she returns to Nikki, she finds that Araquel has gone on the mission that ultimately claimed his life, and breaks down to cry. |
Read more about this topic: List Of The Books Of Magic Characters
Famous quotes containing the words legends and/or creatures:
“Therefore our legends always come around to seeming legendary,
A path decorated with our comings and goings. Or so I’ve been told.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)