Tonton Macoute

Tonton Macoute was a chef, and a member of Faction Paradox. He prepared food with a tracking-knife, cutting into histories and other possibilities. He also used it on himself, making cuts that let in parts of other versions of him and healed with alternate-scars.

Macoute was raised to believe in voodoo even before his induction; he would cook while the loa rode him and make the animals whose meat he consumed into part of him. As part of the Faction he understood the importance of subverting and transgressing boundaries better than any of them. That was why he had to kill an Unkindness: "Every believer should eat forbidden fruit at least once in their lives."

The Faction could not stand for that. They imprisoned Tonton Macoute inside Cyclone Tracy, in an oubliette time looped in Darwin, Australia on Christmas Eve, 1974. They took away his tongue and teeth, leaving him with only his shadow-tongue, which was unable to properly taste anything. He lived on chunks of his own flesh sliced from alternative realities. Every member of the Faction forgot that the oubliette even existed except for Cousin Andraiz, Macoute's protegé.

Cousin Andraiz came to see Macoute one Christmas. The House Military and the enemy, he said, were making time sick. He said they needed to make a cure-all and feed it to time. An offering for the spirits.

Tonton Macoute used himself as bait to attract his ingredients. Timeships, one of which he ate himself. A Faction agent, her body boiled away to leave only a shadow. The bones of House Military soldiers ground into paste. The reflection of an enemy corpse, dragged from a broken mirror. Two timeships were offered into the eyewall of the cyclone. Stitched under the skin of their bellies was the offering: the shadow, the bone paste, and the mirror image.

When the spirits came, it became obvious to Andraiz why Macoute had eaten one of the timeships. He gained their ability to transcend space, opening his mouth impossibly wide as he became the embodiment of appetite instead of simply a man. He ate the loa, and then he walked out of the cyclone. (PROSE: Tonton Macoute)

In the City of the Saved, Macoute's dietary options were limited. He did continue to increase his capabilities, and was ready the day the Civil War came and his voracious appetite was unleashed once more. (PROSE: A Hundred Words from a Civil War)