local cryptid to a small woodland town. he claims to be the gravekeeper of a tiny cemetery there and the locals have just kind of allowed him to have the space and set him up with the previous gravekeeper's little shack. it keeps him busy with his "job" which, in turn, keeps everyone safe from him - and in recent years everyone's started to regard him as a bit of a guardian, just one you have to respect and watch from a distance.

the story goes that if you see under what's under his rags you go blind, and that if you insist on telling people what he looked like in that split second before blindness hit, he'll come and take you (and everyone you told) away to parts unknown. certain versions of the tale say he also eats his victims, while others insist they wither away, while even others say they're alive and well in some other world. whether any parts of the stories are true... well, everyone local seems to know of some kids who definitely disappeared at his hand years and years and years ago, but nobody seems to have any details.

one of the local kids' games is to try to stay in the cemetery overnight, usually on Halloween. so far, no one in recent memory's made it the whole night - they're all alive and well, just extremely rattled as they run home.

everything aside, he's actually fairly amiable. he doesn't talk much, but when he does his voice is deep and gentle, and he's happy to have short conversations if caught in a rare talkative mood. to those he's spoken with, he's surprisingly human - just a little tired and more than a bit evasive. one of these conversations is where he revealed his name is Ajax - before that, he'd been known entirely as the Rag Man or the Scarecrow Man.

previously kept up a shaky truce with Rowan, who considers themself a guardian of the same forest that Ajax haunts. they'd basically agreed to respect each other at a distance as long as neither of them interfered with the other... but it's been thrown off by the appearance of a new, unnatural factor. Ajax's intended solution for this is currently unknown.