Crucible:Horus

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Horus

Real Name	Harold "Harry" Piffle
Identity	Public
Former Identities	Wonderos, Magicker
Affiliation	Watchstar
Former Affiliations	Supernova Squadron, Corsairs
Base of Operations	New York City
Place of Origin	Pacific City
Era	Bronze Age / Modern Age
Status	Active
First Appearance	HERO HIGH #1 (as Harry Piffle); WATCHSTAR #297 (as Horus)
Creator	Steve Mancuso

“Magic is not mysterious because it has no rules. It is mysterious because there are far too many of them.”
— Horus

Horus is the current heroic identity of Harold "Harry" Piffle, a powerful sorcerer, scholar of the occult, and member of Watchstar. One of the few heroes to have been active since adolescence under several different identities, Harry has spent much of his life trying to understand magical forces that seemed determined to involve themselves with him long before he understood why.

As the teenage Wonderos, Harry was one of the young heroes of Pacific City and a member of the Supernova Squadron. Later, under the name Magicker, he served for a time with the controversial national strike force known as the Corsairs. His eventual emergence as Horus marked both a new level of magical ability and a more mature understanding of what kind of hero he intended to become.

Background

Magical forces have swirled around Harry Piffle his entire life.

So has trouble.

Harry grew up in Pacific City, where there was initially little to distinguish him from any number of clever, awkward children who preferred books to sports and libraries to school dances. He was intelligent, intensely curious, physically unimposing, and painfully aware of all three facts.

At Nathaniel Nova High School, he was an easy target. Harry was bookish, nervous, socially awkward, and possessed of the unfortunate surname "Piffle," which provided his classmates with more ammunition than adolescent tormentors reasonably required.

He retreated into books.

History came first. Mythology followed. Then folklore, dead languages, comparative religion, ceremonial magic, alchemy, and every disreputable volume of occult speculation he could obtain.

Most teenagers reading books about magic discover that magic does not exist.

Harry discovered the opposite.

Wonderos, Teenage Wizard

Harry's earliest magical experiences were small and difficult to distinguish from coincidence. Objects moved when he was frightened. Strange symbols appeared in dreams and later turned up in books he had never seen. Words spoken aloud produced effects they should not have produced.

Eventually, coincidence became an untenable explanation.

Harry began experimenting.

His first spells were clumsy, improvised affairs assembled from scraps of folklore, mistranslated manuscripts, half-understood rituals, and an extraordinary instinct for recognizing which portions were actually important.

They worked far more often than they should have.

As Wonderos, Teenage Wizard, Harry discovered a version of himself that his classmates had never seen. Behind the elaborate costume, theatrical name, and supernatural fireworks, he became confident, resourceful, and remarkably brave.

File:Wonderos (teen).jpg

Harry in his teenaged Wonderos identity.

Wonderos soon fell in with other young Pacific City heroes and became one of the founding generation associated with the Supernova Squadron.

For Harry, the Squadron was transformative.

It was the first place in his life where being unusual was not merely tolerated but expected. His teammates did not care that he was awkward or that he could recite passages from obscure medieval grimoires from memory. When a demon appeared in the chemistry laboratory or an ancient curse crawled out of a museum exhibit, those qualities became useful very quickly.

The distinction between Harry Piffle and Wonderos gradually began to fade.

The confidence was his.

It always had been.

The Student of Magic

Harry's early career also taught him a dangerous lesson: magical talent was not the same thing as magical knowledge.

Wonderos possessed extraordinary raw ability, but his education was haphazard. He could produce effects that experienced magicians considered difficult while remaining ignorant of principles that any competent occultist regarded as elementary.

That combination nearly killed him more than once.

As he grew older, Harry became increasingly serious about magical scholarship. He traveled widely, studied forgotten languages, corresponded with occult authorities, investigated supernatural sites, and accumulated a formidable personal library.

He came to regard magic less as a collection of spells than as an enormous body of knowledge whose internal logic extended far beyond any single tradition.

Harry sometimes describes magical scholarship as possessing "all the books and no card catalog."

The universe contains rules.

The difficulty is discovering which rules apply today.

Magicker and the Corsairs

As a young adult, Harry abandoned the Wonderos identity and adopted the somewhat more restrained name Magicker.

It was during this period that he joined the Corsairs, a national superhero strike force whose membership also included his former Supernova Squadron teammate Banzai.

On paper, the Corsairs seemed like a natural progression. Harry was no longer a teenage hero, and the team offered access to resources, intelligence, transportation, and threats on a scale far beyond anything the Supernova Squadron had routinely encountered.

In practice, the relationship was brief.

Harry increasingly disliked the Corsairs' methods, particularly their willingness to treat overwhelming force as a substitute for judgment. Magical threats rarely responded well to such thinking. A creature that appeared monstrous might be bound rather than evil. A cursed artifact might be dangerous precisely because someone tried to destroy it. An enemy defeated physically could sometimes return in a considerably worse form.

Harry argued.

The Corsairs acted.

Eventually, he left.

It was one of the most important decisions of his career.

Becoming Horus

Harry spent the following years largely as an independent hero and occult investigator.

During this period, he acquired the Falcon Staff, the magical focus that would become inseparable from his later identity. The circumstances surrounding the staff's origins remain deliberately obscure, and Harry has given different answers at different times regarding exactly how it came into his possession.

What is known is that the staff vastly increased his ability to channel, organize, and control magical forces.

Harry eventually adopted the name Horus.

Unlike "Wonderos" or "Magicker," the name was not intended simply as a superhero alias. It reflected his increasingly sophisticated engagement with ancient magical traditions and the symbolic importance of the falcon as a mediator between earth and the heavens.

It also marked the point at which Harry ceased thinking of himself as an amateur magician who happened to possess extraordinary power.

He had become a sorcerer.

Watchstar

Horus first became closely involved with Watchstar during the team's pursuit of Madam Winter.

The pursuit eventually led to Pacific City, where a supernatural incursion unleashed demonic marauders into Harry's hometown. For Horus, the crisis immediately became personal.

He knew the streets.

He knew the city.

More importantly, he understood what was happening.

While Watchstar's heavy hitters could fight the creatures directly, Horus recognized the magical architecture behind the invasion and became essential to stopping it at its source.

The battle demonstrated something Watchstar had occasionally lacked: a dedicated sorcerer capable not merely of throwing magical force at supernatural problems, but of understanding them.

Horus was offered full membership.

He accepted.

Role in Watchstar

Within Watchstar, Horus serves as both supernatural specialist and frontline combatant.

When a problem involves possession, dimensional breaches, curses, artifacts, mystical entities, altered reality, or phenomena that violate conventional physics, Harry is often the person everyone else turns toward.

Sometimes he has an answer.

Sometimes he has seven possible answers, three of which contradict one another.

His teammates have learned that this is not necessarily reassuring.

Horus is particularly valuable because he does not assume that every supernatural phenomenon should be attacked. His first instinct is generally to identify what something is, what rules govern it, and what might happen if those rules are violated.

That caution has prevented more than one catastrophe.

When caution fails, he also possesses enough raw magical power to make himself extremely difficult to ignore.

Powers

Horus is widely regarded as one of the most powerful practicing sorcerers on Earth.

His magic is unusually flexible. Rather than possessing a narrow collection of predetermined effects, Harry can manipulate magical energy to produce an enormous variety of results, limited primarily by his knowledge, concentration, available power, and understanding of the forces involved.

Among his demonstrated abilities are:

• Energy Projection – Magical bolts, beams, bursts, and other offensive effects
• Protective Wards – Shields against physical, magical, psychic, and extradimensional threats
• Flight – Personal levitation and sustained magical flight
• Teleportation – Movement across short or considerable distances under appropriate conditions
• Dimensional Manipulation – Opening, sealing, or stabilizing passages between planes
• Binding and Banishing – Containing or expelling supernatural entities
• Illusion – Creating convincing visual and sensory phenomena
• Transformation – Temporarily altering objects, environments, and occasionally living beings
• Divination – Detecting magical forces, tracing supernatural events, and acquiring information through occult means
• Countermagic – Disrupting spells, breaking enchantments, and dismantling mystical constructs
• Summoning – Calling entities, objects, or forces under carefully controlled circumstances

The breadth of Horus's abilities is considerable, but magic is not omnipotence.

Every effect has conditions.

Every spell has consequences.

The dangerous part is discovering them.

The Falcon Staff

The Falcon Staff is Horus's principal magical focus and one of the most recognizable artifacts associated with him.

The staff does not create Harry's magical abilities. He remains an extraordinarily powerful sorcerer without it.

What it provides is control.

Magic can involve the simultaneous manipulation of symbolic relationships, spoken formulae, visualization, dimensional geometry, and raw will. The Falcon Staff allows Horus to channel those elements through a single physical focus, greatly increasing the speed and reliability with which he can perform complex workings.

In practical terms, it allows Harry to do in seconds what might otherwise require minutes—or a ritual circle, three candles, an iron bowl, and a considerable amount of shouting.

The staff also appears capable of storing or channeling magical energies independent of Harry himself, though its full properties have never been completely documented.

Harry prefers it that way.

Limitations

Horus's greatest limitation is not a lack of power.

It is complexity.

Magic is contextual. A spell that succeeds against one supernatural being may prove useless against another apparently identical creature. Names matter. Places matter. Time matters. Intent frequently matters.

Occasionally pronunciation matters.

Harry's enormous knowledge allows him to navigate these problems better than almost anyone alive, but he is not immune to error.

Some magical effects also require preparation, components, specific environmental conditions, or knowledge Harry does not possess.

There are things even Horus cannot simply improvise his way around.

He finds this irritating.

Skills

Harry's mundane expertise is nearly as valuable as his magical abilities.

• Expert scholar of occult history and magical traditions
• Extensive knowledge of mythology, folklore, comparative religion, and ritual practice
• Fluent or literate in numerous modern and ancient languages
• Skilled researcher and archivist
• Experienced investigator of supernatural phenomena
• Considerable knowledge of archaeology and ancient history
• Familiar with magical artifacts and methods of identifying them
• Experienced superhero with decades of field work

Harry is particularly adept at recognizing obscure connections between apparently unrelated events.

This has occasionally made conversations with him difficult to follow.

Personality

Harry Piffle never entirely stopped being the awkward boy from Nathaniel Nova High School.

The difference is that he eventually stopped apologizing for it.

He remains scholarly, enthusiastic, occasionally absent-minded, and prone to explaining obscure subjects well past the point when everyone else has stopped listening. His sense of humor tends toward dry understatement, particularly when confronted with supernatural horrors that leave his teammates considerably less amused.

He is also far more confident than the nervous teenager who first became Wonderos.

Years of experience have given Harry a quiet certainty about his abilities, though not an inflated opinion of his own knowledge. If anything, studying magic has made him increasingly aware of how much he does not know.

He has little patience for occultists who claim absolute understanding of supernatural forces.

Harry has met too many things that were supposed to be impossible.

The Scholar and the Sorcerer

There is a persistent misconception that Horus's power comes primarily from the Falcon Staff.

Harry rarely bothers correcting it.

Those who know him understand that his real strength is the enormous body of knowledge accumulated over a lifetime.

Other magicians may know more about individual traditions. Some supernatural beings possess greater raw power. Ancient entities may command forces Harry can barely comprehend.

But very few people combine his breadth of scholarship, improvisational ability, field experience, and sheer magical aptitude.

Horus does not simply cast spells.

He solves supernatural problems.

Sometimes with spectacular collateral effects.

Reputation

Among ordinary heroes, Horus is regarded as one of the people to call when the impossible becomes inexplicable.

Among serious occultists, his reputation is considerably more complicated.

Some regard him as a brilliant scholar.

Some consider him reckless.

Some consider him dangerously eclectic, mixing magical traditions that wiser practitioners keep carefully separated.

A few regard Harold Piffle as one of the most dangerous human sorcerers alive.

Harry is aware of all these opinions.

He has books to read.

Legacy

Harry Piffle's career spans several generations of superhero history.

He began as Wonderos, an awkward teenager who discovered that magic gave him the confidence he lacked in ordinary life. He became Magicker, a young hero trying to determine where he belonged in the larger superhero community. As Horus, he finally became something neither of those identities quite anticipated: one of Earth's foremost defenders against supernatural threats.

The names changed.

The essential Harry did not.

He is still the curious boy who opened a book because he desperately wanted to know what was inside.

The only difference is that now, occasionally, something inside opens the book back.

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