Old Neil — Lord of the Mysteries

Old Neil is the Tingen Nighthawks' armory keeper, resident Mystery Pryer, and Klein Moretti's first systematic teacher of mysticism. His humor, thrift, ritual expertise, and practical ethics make the supernatural world survivable for a new Beyonder, while his maxim—“Do as you wish, but do no harm”—helps Klein recognize the acting method. The same pathway that gives Neil access to hidden knowledge also exposes him to the Hidden Sage. Exploiting his grief for Celeste, the woman he failed to save when young, that influence supplies a false resurrection method until Neil loses control and becomes the kind of monster he spent decades helping the Nighthawks contain.

Biography

Life in Klein's Era

By the time Klein joins Blackthorn, Old Neil is already an elderly, long-serving support specialist who rarely takes field missions because of his age and frailty. He staffs the armory outside Chanis Gate, issues weapons and ammunition, studies damaged historical records, and uses the Nighthawks' relative quiet to investigate copied pages of Roselle's undeciphered diary. He presents himself as both scholar and cheerful opportunist: hand-ground coffee, reimbursements, food, and small savings matter greatly to him, but so do confidentiality and the discipline needed to approach dangerous knowledge. His warning that coffee after three might let him hear unknown murmurs sounds comic on first meeting and later becomes evidence that he understood his pathway's danger without being able to escape it. (Chapters 20–22)

Old Neil concocts Klein's Seer potion and guides him through the immediate seepage of power, teaching him to focus, enter Cogitation, and draw uncontrolled spirituality inward. He then provides the conceptual foundation of Klein's early practice: Spirit Body, Astral Projection, Body of Heart and Mind, Ether Body, aura colors, Spirit Vision, and the symbolic nature of the spirit world. His lessons are practical rather than grandiose. He makes Klein repeat procedures, limits the duration of Spirit Vision, explains that rest must follow excessive spiritual expenditure, and distinguishes what a potion enables from knowledge that still has to be learned. This turns Klein's accidental occult survival into a craft he can practice under supervision. (Chapters 31–40)

Ritual magic becomes the center of their bond. Old Neil teaches altar construction, symbolic numbers, candles, herbs, essential oils, Hermes incantation structure, spirituality walls, and the dangers of praying toward an unknown or unfriendly existence. His demonstration for settling a thirty-pound debt is humorous but morally revealing. The ritual leads them to a lost wallet containing far more than Neil owes; he returns it intact and accepts only the owner's thirty-pound reward, explaining that greed and lack of temperance are fatal habits for a Mystery Pryer. The maxim “Do as you wish, but do no harm” therefore governs both his mysticism and ordinary conduct. He is willing to bend expense rules and enjoy a reward, but not steal under the excuse of divine favor. (Chapters 45–53)

Although usually kept in a support role, Neil remains an experienced Nighthawk. He examines occult scenes, helps treat teammates through ritual methods, prepares and recharges charms, and joins Klein when Swain needs assistance against a Mandated Punisher who has lost control. Age leaves him winded and too slow to avoid every fragment of debris, but he can stand within meters of the charging monster, activate a Slumber Charm, and trust the team to exploit the opening. Afterward, he emphasizes that a Nighthawk survives by trusting partners as well as personal skill. His calm performance gives Klein a model of courage that does not depend on youth, raw physical strength, or a combat-oriented Sequence. (Chapters 46–48, 78–81, and 126–130)

Klein's discovery of the acting method reaches Neil too late to change his life cleanly. Neil had inferred that obeying the Mystery Pryer maxim lowered the chance of losing control, and Daly's rapid progress had suggested another route, but he never fully connected those observations to acting until Klein explains his own digestion. By then Neil is old, the Church does not provide him with a known Sequence 8 formula, and age and declining health make another advancement especially dangerous. He openly regrets the decades lost to incomplete knowledge, then tries to accept that he at least survived as a Sequence 9. This disappointment is real, but the corpus does not establish it as the sole cause of his corruption: the Hidden Sage's influence had already appeared as lashless eyes behind him when Klein first learned Spirit Vision. (Chapters 32–33 and 149–155)

The decisive lure is older grief. Neil had once hoped to marry Celeste, but when she became terminally ill, his inexperienced healing ritual failed. Decades later the Hidden Sage supplies knowledge of Alchemical Life and a supposed method for joining Celeste's spirit to a manufactured immortal body. The influence alters Neil's perceptions and memories: he acquires a piano that seems to play by itself and tells Klein that his deceased wife loved music, even though Neil never married and coworkers had seen no piano months earlier. He accumulates his own blood rather than take it from victims and continues insisting that he has never harmed anyone, showing that his ethical restraint persists even as the project, hidden voices, and bodily transformation exceed his control. (Chapters 162–165)

When Klein detects the contradiction, Dunn Smith, Royale, and Klein go to Neil's house intending to stabilize him. Neil first pleads for time, then reveals a head suspended in bloody, hair-filled liquid with four additional lashless eyes. Dunn's attempted dream control briefly restores Neil's awareness; Neil recognizes the Hidden Sage as his source and realizes that he has already become a monster. He still begs to live and tries to attack when escape is denied. The Peaceful Hair Strands suppress the transformed body's desires, but his survival instinct breaks through long enough for him to invoke the teammates he once helped. Klein cannot fire. Dunn and Royale shoot him, and the body collapses into rotten flesh and two pained crystalline eyes. Neil is buried with the line, “If I cannot save her, then I shall accompany her.” His death makes loss of control personal for Klein and turns caution, emotional regulation, and immediate action against corruption into lasting parts of Klein's conduct. (Chapters 163–171, 213, 564, and 985)

Appearance and personality

Old Neil is a hoary, white-haired man who wears a classical black robe and often a black hat. Deep wrinkles surround his eyes and mouth, and his dark-red pupils are slightly turbid. Age has made him frail and easily winded, but not wholly sedentary; when duty demands it he can run, board a ship, handle a revolver or charm, and tolerate a minor wound without panic. His usual setting—coffee tin, newspapers, old documents, weapons ledgers, and a locked armory door—visually joins the ordinary routines and occult responsibilities of his life. (Chapters 20–21, 42–47, 126–130, and 165)

His loss-of-control form is explicitly different from that ordinary body. Neil's head hangs from the ceiling through a thick bloody fluid containing hair, four cold lashless eyes appear on his forehead and cheeks in addition to his own eyes, and the same substance coats the house while operating the piano. When the Peaceful Hair Strands suppress the transformation, the extra eyes vanish and the familiar white-haired face briefly returns. After he is shot, the body decays into flesh around two crimson crystalline eyes. These changes result from the Hidden Sage's corruption and loss of control, not a normal Mystery Pryer form or a safe pathway technique. (Chapters 163–165 and 170)

Neil is humorous, talkative, curious, and shrewd about money. He teases Klein during potion preparation, requests reimbursement for unpleasant work, uses mysticism to resolve an IOU, and devotes real attention to good coffee and food. The comedy never entirely cancels his seriousness. He returns wealth that is not his, warns against greed, protects church secrets, and risks himself beside former comrades. His maxim allows ordinary desire rather than demanding sterile self-denial; what matters is temperance and refusing to make another person pay for one's wishes. (Chapters 20–21, 32, 45–53, and 126–130)

Beneath that social warmth, Neil is lonely and carries unresolved guilt over Celeste. He lives alone, cannot safely employ ordinary household servants around his experiments, and compensates with routine, teaching, and jokes. The Hidden Sage's deception succeeds because it offers not abstract power but a chance to correct his oldest failure. Even while transformed, Neil stresses that he has drawn his own blood and has not betrayed or intentionally harmed the Nighthawks. That remnant conscience makes his end more tragic, but it does not mean he remains safe: once corrupted power acts through him, good intentions cannot prevent attack or restore control. (Chapters 51–52, 155, and 163–165)

Pathways and abilities

Old Neil remains a Sequence 9 Mystery Pryer throughout the corpus. The pathway provides enhanced spirituality, access to Spirit Vision and hidden phenomena, and the foundation for learning broadly across magic, witchcraft, astrology, symbolism, and ritual. It does not implant complete expertise or a large set of instant combat spells. Neil's effective breadth comes from decades of study, Church materials, repeated practice, prepared tools, and work with other pathways. His later Alchemical Life knowledge is an unsolicited injection from the Hidden Sage and part of his corruption, not a legitimate advancement or a safely mastered Sequence 9 ability. (Chapters 22, 28–33, 51–53, and 163–169)

Mystery Prying and dangerous knowledge

Mystery Pryers can perceive existences concealed within or behind ordinary matter and are unusually receptive to mystical information. This makes the pathway valuable for detecting spirits, interpreting occult traces, learning correspondences, and supporting rituals, but the perception is not fully voluntary or safe. Old Neil hears unknown murmurs under unfavorable conditions and is followed by the cold, lashless eyes that Klein sees through Spirit Vision. He initially disguises them as a ritual phenomenon. Later evidence identifies the eyes and injected knowledge with the Hidden Sage, an embodiment of knowledge that pursues Mystery Pryer-pathway Beyonders rather than waiting to be sought. (Chapters 20, 28, 32–33, 163–169, and 564)

Receiving information is not the same as understanding or controlling it. A Mystery Pryer may resist, lower defenses and accept modification, or become overwhelmed and lose control when more knowledge is injected than the mind can digest. Neil verifies part of the resurrection method, which makes the rest seem credible, but cannot safely authenticate its source or recognize how far his perceptions have already been rewritten. His experience demonstrates the pathway's core limit: caution, morality, and scholarship reduce reckless exposure, yet a high-level source on the same pathway can force contact and tailor knowledge to an unresolved desire. (Chapters 163–169 and 564)

Cogitation, Spirit Vision, and mystical theory

Neil's practice centers on directing Cogitation toward the Spirit Body. By focusing first on a simple real object and then on an imagined construct, a Beyonder can quiet scattered thoughts, draw in leaking potion power, and allow the Astral Projection to approach the symbolic spirit world. Neil uses this method to stabilize Klein immediately after potion consumption and teaches it as both basic control and the foundation of Mystic Experience. Cogitation does not digest a potion by itself, erase emotion, or guarantee immunity to ravings; it organizes the mind and spirituality so they can be used without uncontrolled seepage. (Chapters 31–33)

Spirit Vision then reads nonphysical layers. Aura colors around the Ether Body reveal the vigor or illness of corresponding body regions, while Astral Projection colors reflect prevailing emotions and deeper tendencies. It can also reveal ghosts, specters, and entities that ordinary sight misses. Neil teaches Klein the standard finger-focus activation, the color correspondences for health, and the need to deactivate the vision before spiritual drain becomes excessive. Seers and Mystery Pryers can reach greater detail than Sleepless-pathway colleagues, but low Sequence does not confer unlimited sight: concealed or high-level beings can evade observation, dangerous entities can be perceived without being understood, and seeing them may create the very connection that places the observer at risk. (Chapters 32–34, 127, and 149)

His theoretical knowledge extends to the relationship among Spirit Body, Astral Projection, Body of Heart and Mind, Ether Body, divination, and magic. That framework lets him diagnose what kind of method a situation requires and teach others, but Neil is candid that much of his grasp remains rudimentary. He studies historical texts and Roselle's diary because knowledge must be assembled from incomplete records. The potion creates aptitude and perception; it does not translate unknown scripts, automatically supply every correspondence, or make an interpretation correct. (Chapters 20–21, 28–34, and 126–127)

Ritual magic and borrowed power

Ritual magic works by requesting power from a deity or another qualified existence rather than producing every effect from the caster alone. Neil teaches Klein to identify the target through honorific titles, select symbols and materials that correspond to the desired authority, place deity-representing and self-representing candles, enter Cogitation, sanctify a silver knife, and create a wall of spirituality around a clean altar. Hermes is direct and effective because of its relation to nature, but that directness offers little protection if an invocation points toward something hostile. The caster must therefore know whom the words reach, maintain respect, and close the ritual in the correct order. (Chapters 47–52)

The debt ritual demonstrates both flexibility and uncertainty. Neil marks an IOU as controlled and canceled, prays to Evernight through night and crimson correspondences, burns the document, and trusts the answer to arrive through a reasonable event. The returned wallet and exactly sufficient reward fulfill the request without transferring ownership of the lost money to him. This shows that ritual results may work through causal circumstances rather than a visible supernatural discharge, but Neil admits he cannot predict the precise route. A request must still fit the invoked existence, available spirituality, wording, materials, and acceptable scope; disrespect, greed, interruption, or a misdirected target can distort the outcome or attract danger. (Chapters 51–52)

Neil also applies rituals to investigation, healing, warding, and the maintenance of Church equipment. These techniques take preparation, a controlled environment, correct media, and spiritual expenditure, making them poor substitutes for an instant attack. His attempted treatment of Celeste failed when he was an inexperienced practitioner, and the later resurrection design demands rare materials, an artificial body, a summoned spirit, large quantities of blood, and divine intervention. The Hidden Sage's instructions make the theory feel executable, but no completed resurrection proves it sound; the only demonstrated consequence is Neil's corruption and transformation. (Chapters 46–53, 78–81, and 163–165)

Charms and operational support

Neil creates, stores, recharges, and teaches the use of charms aligned with the Evernight domain. Slumber Charms induce sleep, Requiem Charms soothe or suppress spirits and undead, and Dream Charms permit dream entry. Each is a prepared piece of silver carrying symbols, Path Numbers, magical characteristics, and Hermes text. Activation requires speaking the correct Ancient Hermes word, injecting spirituality, waiting for the effect to prime, and usually throwing the charm. They are consumable external tools, not permanent personal spells of the Mystery Pryer potion. (Chapters 78–81, 127, and 129)

During the harbor fight, Neil calmly activates a Slumber Charm within meters of a rampaging monster, slowing it so Swain and Klein can continue the attack. He also lends Klein a second charm and explains the timing. The scene shows the value and limits of his support style: preparation lets a low-Sequence scholar influence a physically superior target, but the effect is temporary, teammates must exploit it, and Neil remains vulnerable to debris and exhaustion. A charm can fail against sufficient resistance, affect an unintended person, or arrive too late if its activation sequence is interrupted. (Chapters 126–130)

Acting, restraint, and loss of control

The Mystery Pryer maxim “Do as you wish, but do no harm” teaches controlled curiosity and desire. Neil observes that members who live by it have a lower rate of losing control, and Klein uses the clue to infer that embodying a potion's name and principles accelerates digestion. Neil, however, did not fully formulate the acting method in time. Merely following a moral maxim for decades does not prove complete digestion, and the Church's missing follow-up formula plus Neil's age make an immediate advance unsafe even after the insight arrives. The maxim is a risk-reduction practice, not invulnerability. (Chapters 28, 52–53, and 149–169)

His final corruption combines forced knowledge, grief, secrecy, altered memories, and a desperate project. Early physical auras appear healthy because ordinary Spirit Vision does not expose every mental or high-level influence. By the time colleagues see the additional eyes and transformed house, loss of control is already established; ritual stabilization and Nightmare guidance cannot restore an ordinary body. The Peaceful Hair Strands can suppress desire long enough to stop him, but not cure the corruption. Neil's case therefore teaches Klein that loss of control can develop behind normal behavior and benevolent intentions, and that prompt containment may be necessary even when the afflicted person sincerely intends no harm. (Chapters 127, 149, 162–171, and 985)

Relationships

Klein Moretti: Neil concocts Klein's first potion and teaches him Cogitation, Spirit Vision, ritual magic, charms, and Mystery Pryer ethics. His corruption and death make the risk of losing control immediate and permanently shape Klein's caution toward voices and suspicious knowledge.
Dunn Smith: A teammate of roughly fifteen years who once relied on Neil in dangerous missions. Dunn approaches the final confrontation hoping to help, but must use the Peaceful Hair Strands and fire when Neil's transformed body attacks.
Rozanne: A Blackthorn colleague fond of Neil despite complaining about his stinginess and claims. Her accurate memory that he had never married exposes the false wife-and-piano narrative produced during his corruption.
Royale Reideen: A fellow Nighthawk whom Neil had previously helped protect and compensate after danger reached her family. She accompanies Dunn and Klein to Neil's house and fires the second fatal shot.
Daly Simone: Her rapid advancement and desire to be a “real Spirit Medium” help Neil glimpse the logic of acting. The insight arrives after he believes age and missing formulas have closed his own path forward.
The Hidden Sage: The high-level source that injects knowledge and watches through lashless eyes. It exploits Neil's desire to resurrect Celeste, and the resulting connection corrupts rather than safely teaching him.

Items

Alchemy and ritual kit: Pots, cups, candles, herbs, essential oils, a silver ritual knife, salt, water, a cauldron marked with the Dark Sacred Emblem, and writing materials support Neil's potion and ritual work. Their function depends on preparation, symbolism, incantations, and spirituality; none independently grants his Mystery Pryer perception. (Chapters 31–33 and 47–52)
Evernight charms: Neil prepares and maintains Slumber, Requiem, and Dream Charms for the Tingen team. He carries Slumber Charms into the harbor operation and lends one to Klein, treating them as consumable team equipment rather than irreplaceable personal possessions. (Chapters 127–130)
Roselle diary copies: Undeciphered copied pages kept for historical and occult research. Neil identifies some symbols as numbers but cannot read the Chinese text; Klein's ability to understand it makes the pages a major source of early pathway knowledge. (Chapters 20–21)
Hand-ground coffee tin: An ordinary comfort shared in the armory and classroom. Neil's refusal to drink coffee after mid-afternoon reflects his fear that disrupted sleep will make unknown murmurs easier to hear. (Chapters 20–21 and 126–127)
Piano and resurrection notes: The piano appears at Neil's house during the period of altered memory, while handwritten notes record the Alchemical Life method and his intention to use his own blood. Both are evidence of the Hidden Sage's manipulation and Neil's Celeste project, not proof that Celeste was restored or that Neil had once lived with a wife. (Chapters 162–165)