Percival Murnau was a wight and the second-in-command of their forces. He was also the founder of the Department of Obfuscation, presumably before he joined Caul.
History[]
Murnau was part of the experiment that created the hollowgasts and eventually consumed enough peculiar souls to become a wight. He soon became the second-in-command of their forces, but after Caul’s defeat he was arrested. Since Caul was the first one to become a wight and was therefore their king, Percival most likely was the second which might be why he is the second in command. Along with being the main architect of loop raids, he and three other wights alone were responsible for at least half the destruction and mayhem inflicted on the peculiar world in recent years. The day of the Library of Souls's collapse, he was caught and jailed.
The Conference of the Birds[]
He and a group of wights kill their guard and escape through the Panloopticon with the hollow powering it. They steal Bentham's list of ingredients for escaping a collapsed loop and begin their search for the ingredients, starting with death beetles that they stole from Bentham's collection. He finds most of the other ingredients and, despite the interference of the ymbryne’s forces, managed to get the alphaskull. He uses a fake postcard to bring Noor Pradesh and Jacob Portman to the loop of Velyana to find the ymbryne. When he finds her, he shoots her and takes her heart, before handcuffing Noor and Jacob to the front porch of V’s house and leaving them to experience loop collapse.
The Desolations of Devil's Acre[]
At some point, he took a peculiar soul from the Library of Souls and became "an amalgamation of steaming tar in a roughly human form." He is one of two high-ranking wights who take down Miss Egret's loop. Later on, he makes his way into the seven prophesied peculiars' meeting place, Miss Tern's collapsed loop, in order to kill Jacob and the others peculiars. During the chase, Murnau kills Miss Petrel, and then gets caught in gunfire, his body appearing to disintegrate. He survives and gets out of the loop, but ultimately fails to catch up to the train Jacob and his friends are riding.
In the Devil's Acre battle, Murnau is the second-last surviving giant wight. He is attacked by Jacob's hollows, who tear him limb from limb. The other wight spews a stream of acid at the hollows, but this melts Murnau's head in the process, killing him.
Description[]
Appearance[]
Jacob describes him as looking like a brawler. Murnau has a thick nose and neck, wiry hair, and freckles. In his mugshot, he has fake pupils aimed upward to the left, giving him an unsettling air of total ease. When he first appears, he is dressed in unremarkable business casual clothes, with a leather bag strapped across his back.
His new form in The Desolations of Devil's Acre is a twenty foot tall slime creature, his bottom half a formless mass of shifting black slime and his top half melted and supersized.
Personality[]
Like other wights, he is a master of trickery and disguise, founding the Department of Obfuscation and being the main architect of peculiar loop raids. Bronwyn describes him as a nasty man who will eat anything that crawls into his jail cell, such as rats and bugs. Even other wights do not go near him.