Morris Ferrel

> "This isn't a story, boy. It's life. It hasn't changed. You have. Welcome to the abyss."
>
> Morris Ferrel to Tristan

**Morris Ferrel**, commonly referred to solely by his surname, is a semi-retired former member of the Wulfe Agency and the Fallen Angels' Gang. He is the protagonist of *Truths of Bad Intent*, *Thalassophobia*, and *First Meetings*, makes appearances in *The State of Broken Things,* and is a major side character and the main antagonist of *Whistler.*

### Aliases

Runty, Old Tomcat, The Butcher's Assistant, The Whistler, Otto Dalcm, Abe Thusscaint, Rhil West, Agent 43(assigned number), Wilhelmine Delagnis

### Relatives

Unknown Parents. Ernestine Crowle(lover), Tristan Ferrel(son)

### Affiliation

Wulfe Agency(former), Fallen Angels' Gang(former)

### Occupation

Detective/undercover agent(former), Gang member(former), Serial Killer(unnofficial), Consultant for the Criminally Insane(current)

## Biographical information

### Marital status

Unmarried, but formerly in a relationship

## Appearances

### Appears in

"Whistler", "Truths of Bad Intent", "Thalassophobia", "First Meetings", "The State of Broken Things"

## Description:

Morris Ferrel is tall, with pale skin, shoulder length dark brown hair that looks nearly black and is streaked with gray throughout, and dark blue-gray eyes. He typically can be seen wearing dark browns, grays, or blacks, and most of his clothes are patchy and threadbare with ragged edges, indicating a lack of care regarding his appearance. Ferrel has a faded tattoo of a howling wolf that is half-flayed of it's skin on the underside of his left forearm. He typically has a dark, though slightly patchy, five o'clock shadow on his jawline. Ferrel wears a worn, roughed up brown fedora, and has numerous scars, most of which are hidden. The most noticeable of Ferrel's scars, however, is the pair slashed jaggedly across the bridge of his nose, and his mangled, claw-like left hand, which looks like it had been alternately trampled on or mangled in some sort of machine, and has several misaligned bones. Ferrel's hand often trembles visibly if he's not actively focused on it. Ferrel has a gravelly, hoarse voice with a slight lilt to it.

## Personality:

Ferrel is temperamental, stubborn, and headstrong, which often leads to clashes happening between himself, his colleagues, or his superiors, whether due to differences of opinion, or simply because Ferrel often refuses to follow orders. Ferrel is prickly, distant, and standoffish, dislikes stupidity, hates repetition, and has a low opinion of people in general, causing him to avoid others as often as he can. He often comes off as rude, callous, or sardonic, even if his intention was to be nice. He has a host of (undiagnosed) mental issues, including PTSD, unresolved grief, anger management problems, and trauma from his career as an undercover agent. Ferrel is thalassophobic(has a fear of deep water/drowning), and mildly aquaphobic(has a fear of water). As a result of his having chronic pain, he is easily irritated, bitter, and oftentimes sarcastic or snippy to those around him, much to their consternation.

Ferrel enjoys being alone, but has a soft spot for a select few that he genuinely cares about, and while affection from him is rare, he is capable of it.

## Biography:

#### Pre-Series

Ferrel is born around January 11th, 1848 AKD to unknown parents somewhere in the Western Plains, who were likely part of one of the *Ebruth'Unin* clans, the native nomadic groups of the region. He is kidnapped by traffickers at some point around the age of 5, who take him east to West Hundsted, and then pawn him off through the underground trading networks between various individuals until he eventually winds up in North Hundsted, where he's bought by the Fallen Angels' Gang after the Butcher sees how well he fights(nearly biting someone's ear off while trying to escape), and given the nickname "Runty".

#### Truths of Bad Intent

Ferrel sends the Butcher a letter asking him to meet Ferrel in order to finally settle their differences once and for all. The Butcher agrees, and they meet at the site of the gang's old headquarters. They fight, with Ferrel taking several bullets before he finally collapses to his knees, but not before slashing the Butcher brutally across the face with a hunting knife that he'd brought. The Butcher, tells Ferrel that he wanted a monster - someone who would follow orders with no qualms or conscience getting in the way of what the Butcher wanted them to do - and then stomps on Ferrel's left hand, breaking it, before crushing it further by slowly and painfully twisting it into an extremely unnatural position. He sarcastically (though without any real sympathy whatsoever) apologizes for the death of Ferrel's lover and son, and then shoots Ferrel in the chest with a nonexplosive cannonball, breaking several of his ribs and causing Ferrel to pass out from the sudden pain.

Ferrel briefly wakes up to the feeling of someone grabbing his arm and pulling on it, which irritates his ribs enough for him to let out a noise somewhere between a choked wheeze and a scream before passing out again. He is later fished out of the harbor by a passing crew of fishermen onboard *The Helmsley*, who bring him onboard and hand him over to their resident doctor, named Mutt, who treats his wounds as best he can. The crew of *The Helmsley* sails to Elnes, Anykkis, where they drop Ferrel off in the Faulkensund District and leave him to his own devices. Desperate to forget his losses and the pain he's in, Ferrel finds himself in a bar after inadvertently getting pressured into a fight against two dock workers who thought he'd make easy prey. He buys himself a few bottles of whiskey, drinks most of them, and walks out significantly drunker than when he walked in. As he walks away, Ferrel is cornered by a would-be mugger who doesn't look much older than a teenager. The mugger demands that Ferrel hand over anything of value that he has on his person, to which Ferrel attempts to get out of the situation without using violence, and calmly responded that he wouldn't be doing that today. Annoyed by Ferrel's refusal, the mugger threatens Ferrel with a knife, and when Ferrel continues to refuse, the mugger drags Ferrel into an alley and throws him into the wall, then proceeds to try and beat him into submission. This doesn't go well, as Ferrel fights back, only for the mugger to pin him and stab him in his broken hand with the knife. Ferrel shrieks from the pain, then forces himself through it and yanks the blade out, then turns and brutally stabs the mugger to death on a combination of instinct and blind rage.

When Ferrel comes back to himself, he realizes, with no small amount of horror, that he'd murdered someone who was only a kid, and in doing so, also broken Gavin's cardinal rule. In shock, Ferrel attempts to hide in the shadows of the alley, but doesn't leave the scene, and numbly starts whistling a few bars of *Scarborough Fair* in an effort to take his mind off of the situation. He tears off a piece of his shirt, pours the remaining half a bottle of whiskey over the wound in his hand, and wraps the scrap of fabric around it shakily before curling up in a fetal position as much as he can, given his injuries. He is found by a group of prostitutes who comfort him as much as they can, and then bring him to the nearest hospital they can find, where he in taken in for emergency surgery. Unfortunately for Ferrel, the doctors keep miscalculating the dosage of anesthetic needed to properly keep him under for the entire time they're working, and he wakes up numerous times, leading to the doctors having to hold him down each time while he's thrashing and screaming bloody murder from sheer agony before they can knock him out again.

The doctors end up having to put him on a ventilator due to his having a bruised and punctured lung, not to mention a bad case of flail chest and a sternum that was nearly broken in half. At one point, he briefly wakes up and tries to take out everything that the doctors have put down his throat. He doesn't get far before the doctors see him and stop him, but because of how combative and agitated he is, they end up sedating him for a longer length of time and tying his wrists and ankles to the side of the bed with restraints so that he doesn't accidentally hurt himself or anyone else in any way. Ferrel ends up developing a fever as a result of the toll his injuries have taken on him, and at it's peak of 106, hallucinates that he's walking around in sleet and snow with no shoes on (this is because the doctors are forced to use an ice bath in order to bring his temperature down).

He wakes up days later, asks the doctor what happened, and the doctor explains before leaving him to get some rest. After months of bed rest and Physical and Occupational Therapy, Ferrel finally recovers enough to be released from the hospital, and is taken in by the prostitutes who brought him to the hospital in the first place, seeing as he has little to no money, and nowhere else to go. He receives a letter from Theophilus Cranmer, detailing that Gavin Wulfe has suffered what is believed to be a stroke, and asked Ferrel to come if he could. Numbly, Ferrel collapses onto the floor and curls in on himself beside the chair he was previously sitting in, clawing at the gang's tattoo on his arm and staring at nothing in particular. One of the prostitutes, named Jenny Sapping, comes upstairs after hearing the commotion, and finds him. She attempts to comfort him as he jerks away, his bad hand shaking. He tells her to leave him alone, and she does, but not before asking if he needed anything. He asks her to bring up any bottles of whiskey that they have, and she does. Ferrel then proceeds to get extremely drunk, and a few days later, solicits the prostitutes' services. They agree, and he notes that while they're having sex, they don't seem to care about his drunkenness or that he was rough with them.

When they're finished, he lets them go, and spends the next several hours stuck in his head and clawing at his tattoo, watching his arm bleed lightly and considering the ramifications of sacrifice, briefly wondering about whether he'd be absolved if he shed enough blood. He laughs at the thought, noting that no one ever seemed to think him worthy of any form of forgiveness, and decided that he would be perfectly happy to let himself become the monster that most seemed to see him as. Jenny interrupts him in order to ask what he's doing up at such a late hour, to which he briefly responds that he was a bit hungry, but that he didn't know what he wanted. Jenny made him a toast sandwich, and chided him for staying up too late, telling him that he was liable to be cranky in the morning if he didn't. Once Jenny left, Ferrel picked up the knife, incidentally the same one he'd been stabbed in the hand with, and slipped it into his pocket before finishing off his sandwich and setting the empty plate on the counter. Then he walked outside, shutting the door behind him, and whistling softly as he picked his way down the street, resolving to kill "a few songbirds", or random targets from among the local population.

#### Thalassophobia

At some point after Ferrel's return to North Hundsted, presumably shortly after he obtains his position as Consultant on the Criminally Insane in Sowyer Asylum, he is shown having an intense PTSD episode that turned into a severe panic attack from the memory of being waterboarded during his time with the Fallen Angels' Gang, remembering the incident and how helpless he'd felt, how he couldn't breathe or do anything to stop it from happening. He hallucinates that he can hear water dripping from the ceiling and crashing against the door, and at one point, vomits into his trash can before curling into the corner of his room behind his desk and digging his fingers through his hair as he wonders if he's finally losing his mind.

#### The State of Broken Things

##### I: Theophilus Cranmer

Ferrel is shown meeting Cranmer while the latter is imprisoned during the events of *Whistler*. He enters into a brief verbal diatribe with Cranmer before revealing part of his plan to Cranmer-kill him, take charge of the Wulfe Agency, and eventually let Tristan find out everything, Cranmer protests, but Ferrel doesn't listen, and instead quietly strangles him to death.

##### II: Johnathan Breackly

Ferrel is mentioned by a few of the other Wulfe Agents, and shortly after, responds to a note sent to him by Breackly, asking him if he wants to have a few drinks with him. Ferrel responds in the affirmative. He is shown knocking on the door of Breackly's office, and asking about whether or not their appointment is still available, before grinning at him in a way that seems half insane. They banter back and forth for a few minutes before Breackly invites Ferrel to come back with him for drinks, and Ferrel follows. Breackly asks about what he has been up to for the past year or so, seeing as he's been gone for a while, and Ferrel gives him a rundown on what happened to him. He seems briefly regretful about accidentally killing a child in self-defense after the child attempted to rob him, and then tried to beat him up when he refused. Ferrel briefly threatens to shoot Breackly after he implies that Ferrel has always been prone to reacting emotionally to situations, while talking about Gavin Wulfe's passing, which Ferrel doesn't appreciate. He tells Breackly that he didn't care one bit about what anyone else thought, because he was finally too fed up to do so. Breackly tells him that he should, and Ferrel responds by laughing harshly in his face and grinning in that half-insane way from before. Ferrel tells Breackly that he's done with it all - Gavin, the Agency, with the Butcher, with going undercover, all of it, and states that he can't go on pretending that the Agency is in the right when he knows that neither side is right, and that in fact, both of them are wrong. He goes on for a moment about the inherent hypocrisy of the Agency's actions, in that they have done things that are just as bad as the gangs and criminals they fight, while pretending that they are better than those individuals or groups. Ferrel then snarls in Breackly's face that he knows nothing about what Ferrel has done or been made to do, and slouches against the wall to finish off the dregs of his whiskey in an attempt to forget, as Breackly joins him silently.

#### III: James the Wall-Walker

Ferrel, unnamed and referred to as "The Other Who Had Seen The Sky", appears briefly as James (one of the inmates of Sowyer Asylum) remembers the few times they met, and describes Ferrel as having "a dark feeling, a wrongness...that writhed and twisted beneath the angry sadness and the scent of smoky wood bitterness like shifting shadows", and that he "radiated something like a long-lingering sadness". He also noted that Ferrel was often angry, and that he tended to smell "like an odd mix of smoky wood with an undertone of bitterness"(referring to Ferrel's habit of drinking whiskey). On the few times they met, James got the feeling that Ferrel had violence in his eyes that seemed to show in flashes of a "wolf-like snarl of madness" before Ferrel would abruptly slam his mental doors shut and become unreadable to James, seeming almost like stone in his expression.

## Relationships:

#### The Butcher

Ferrel feared the Butcher to some extent, being extremely wary of him and watching what he said and did in order to avoid tipping him off as to Ferrel's double life, and also tried to avoid making him mad. However, Ferrel also hated him, and by extension, the majority of the Fallen Angels' Gang.

#### Gavin Wulfe

Ferrel held some admiration for Gavin Wulfe and his ideas, even if he didn't always listen to orders. He reluctantly saw Gavin as a father figure of sorts, and overall, had a pretty good relationship with him.

#### Theophilus Cranmer

Ferrel disliked Cranmer intensely, and barely regretted killing him when he did. Furthermore, Ferrel found Cranmer to be immensely annoying and quite lacking in common sense.

#### Johnathan Breackly

Ferrel begrudgingly became friends with Breackly if only to prevent him from pestering him. He did find Breackly fascinating, however, and regretted nearly beating Breackly to death in order to keep up appearances with the Butcher. He later helped Breackly get his position as the Agency's resident librarian, and thinks him a good drinking buddy.

#### Freefall

Ferrel was fond of Freefall, and, contrary to his relationship with the other members of the Fallen Angels' Gang, actually got along with Freefall quite well. Freefall was the one who gave Ferrel the tattoo he has on his left arm, and was also the one to take care of him after the gang finished torturing him, so Ferrel feels that he owes Freefall a minor debt in a sense for keeping him alive.

#### Shredder and Grater

Ferrel hated them and, privately to himself, nicknamed them the "Agony Twins". His hatred for them only increased after they took near sadistic pleasure in personally torturing him for months.

#### Ernestine Crowle

Ferrel genuinely loved Ernestine, and was crushed by her betrayal and nearly broken after he learned of her supposed death.

#### Tristan

Ferrel was overjoyed at the idea of being a father, and was horrified when he learned of his son's supposed death. When he learned that Tristan was still alive, he was still happy, but it was muted by almost 14 years of accumulated grief, guilt, and self-hatred. As Tristan's mentor, he had a very begrudging relationship with his son, and was reluctant to be close with him due to be afraid of losing him again, though they did eventually grow closer. Ferrel was, however, willing to manipulate and lie to Tristan in order to fulfill his own ends, and had barely any qualms about doing so.

## Trivia:

* Ferrel's last name is a pun - "Ferrel" being a play-on of the word "Feral", and thus pointing towards the character's oftentimes contrarian and antisocial nature.
* Ferrel's voice claim is Arthur Gordon Pym from *The Fall of the House of Usher* on Netflix.
* Ferrel is agnostic.
* Ferrel's Theme Song is *Promiseland* by Mika