𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄
mackenzie leontes stausse.

𝐀𝐆𝐄
twenty-two.

𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐄
the right hand of eldur.

𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑
male.

𝐀𝐏𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄
david mazouz.

𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘
mackenzie is stone. his calm demeanour is rather unnerving, his aloofness to all that goes on around him. he's rather laid back, and is not often seen in disarray or disorder. mackenzie is, rather, ever calm and observant, his expression quite often remaining stone cold. he finds it easier to fake it until you make it; if he pretends not to care, he eventually will. he's lived by that principle for his entire short life, and it has worked magnificently.
it's rather obvious that he has little to no care for others, and has even less empathy than he has care. he's tricky, though, and has no problem faking the eyes or lips of concern, if beneficial. many people tend to forget that mackenzie is an actor. he's degan's right hand man now, yes, but he is a magnificent actor, and for many years of his adolescent life pretended to be whatever people needed out of him. a lay, a shoulder to cry on, a partner in crime, you name it. he's played many a role, and has put on many a face.
anybody could agree that he has a dark, secretive aura about him, and one might even say the boy has a perpetually melancholic look to him. his brokenness isn't difficult to spot, but yet he's whole. he's a walking paradox, a walking contradiction. his stares are hurting and hurtful, his silence holds a certain assertiveness to it.
oh, his silence. mack's eyes talk for him, much of the time. he uses silence like a journalist would to get their awkward interviewee to spout more information. mack has noticed something, over the years: far too many people fear silence.
mackenzie is a man whose past haunts him. rather literally too, at times. he's most definitely one to keep his problems to himself, but has always been haunted by a few of the ghosts of his past. he catches their faces behind him in mirrors, he spots them out in the villages as he travels by, he sees their faces in portrait paintings in the royal castle. he's not completely sane, and has no way of dealing with the ghosts of his past other than to simply ignore them.
dealing with his sanity, mack is most definitely not a sane person. having grown up in a household where 'good' was never part of his vocabulary nor his lifestyle, and then working for a king who pushed him further down the hole of his own sins, he knows that he's no nice person. he's many things - a cannibal, a serial killer, etc. - but he is not a good person. he doesn't believe he can be a good person, and he wasn't sure that goodness even existed in people until he met one madam odelle. when he stops caring about his regular facade, his 'mackenzie' act, is when things get messy. he can be ruthless, and comes to find that he and violence tend to go hand in hand. some part of him doesn't know how to face it, for fear of losing leighton, but he knows that he doesn't want to be the good guy. he's come too far on his own morally grey standards to give up now. he desperately wants to try, for her sake, but he knows that he simply cannot. not yet, at least.
his unwavering loyalty to degan is his fatal flaw, and he's perfectly aware of it. he doesn't love the man, but he's viewed him as a parental figure for many years. elinor as well; nobody else could have given him the archery skills that it took to rip an arrow through somebody's throat from a hundred and fifty metres back. but yet, he doesn't see either of them as lifelines. he's somewhat beyond degan's teachings, and since the eldur takeover of valka, has made his own name for himself.

𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐘𝐀 𝐁𝐄𝐄𝐍
after leighton and the others all left eldur with the marriages having been completed, mackenzie went back to some of his usual work. he was changed, though, and changed in a somewhat... better way. he seemed to be holding onto something, something that caused him to smile sometimes, even. he swore he loved her, and he would wait a century for her if he really had to. if it took another life, he would deal with it. he was a bit softer, a bit less stony and cold. degan didn't really like it, but up until the sudden deaths of the elurrans and his daughter and all of the chaos that came with the next few months, there wasn't anything he could do. after this moment, however, there was.
when eldur took over elurra, decided they much liked their newfound land, and got greedy for more, degan sent mackenzie to lead a "loyalty effort" throughout valka.
mackenzie lost himself in it, quite honestly. the same monster that had crushed ben's knee and killed an innocent guard to preserve his own life hadn't left for long, and slowly regained his body. it was rather bloody, and rather gross. going through and asking the war-torn villages of valka to either pledge their allegiance or die hadn't been easy, and he sure as hell created a name for himself in the process.
"THE TAKER OF THREE."
the story has it that the man who had coined the nickname had been killed by him before ever finishing. nobody knows if the number was intended to be three, three hundred, three thousand, or even three hundred thousand, but it surely must have been more than three. from then on, and throughout the last few weeks of their bloody expedition, it stuck. it made it's way around the land, and sure enough many valkan villages met the face to match it on his crusade.
when he came back, degan surely must have been thrilled. it was as if the last year had never occurred. he was back to a cold, soldier-esque mindset, if not slightly haunted my his own self. not too much, though. the most haunting part was not his actions, but the fact that he felt no remorse where he should have.
not only degan must have been pleased, but mackenzie was surely somewhat pleased with himself. he was ashamed, although he felt powerful again and that has surely overpowered whatever shame he holds in his chest. he felt like himself again, finally, and it was comforting. he hadn't even had to act civilized, he hadn't even had to contain himself. it was a horrifyingly beautiful experience. he's evidently fallen back into numbness, and while he's re-contained himself since his return to eldur, one might notice he's a bit more brazen, more confident in his darkness.
surely, he's become darker. while morally grey at one point, he's slowly transitioned into more morally black, and he's finally come to decide that if people wish to call him a villain, he ought to live up to their expectations.

𝐋𝐎𝐘𝐀𝐋𝐓𝐈𝐄𝐒
— it's no surprise that your favourite former guard is fiercely loyal to degan and to the kingdom of eldur. he serves the crown, and he lives by the crown, no matter how warped it may be. from an outside perspective, one would call his unwavering loyalty a weakness - and it surely is a weakness of his - but there's far more than meets the eye to mack and degan's relationship. though both have too much pride to admit it, mackenzie sees degan as a fatherly figure in his life. he doesn't know what degan sees of him, but if he's in the will then clearly he sees him as more than just a work buddy. degan has seen him mature over the years, much more than mackie's real father ever saw. mackenzie owes much of his success to degan, and his life even. still, their relationship is based almost solely on each other's needs. if you break down what they've done for each other, in most cases there is some ulterior motive or reward for one or both parties.

— one might also observe leighton as one of his loyalties. sure, he hasn't been loyal, but he wants to be. so far, since the whole persephone incident, he has been quite loyal. mentally, at least. he is loyal to her now in his mind, and proves his loyalty with constant thoughts about her, constant internal questions of "how is she?", "where and what is she doing right now?", and the one that shoots through his head most often: "is she happy?". he hopes she is. maybe she's moved on, in a certain sense he knows that she will, but despite it all he still tries to picture her as happy, to imagine her having fun with her friends. as time has passed, his inner loyalty to her has changed somewhat. during the crusade in valka, he stopped thinking about her for a little while. it was hard to think about her happy when he knew that if she found out what he was doing, she would be made very sad. so he tried to ignore the thoughts of her, and for a little while there ignored thoughts about anything in general.
now that he's recently returned to eldur, he thinks of her, but it's different questions that he ponders. in fact, they aren't even questions at all, but more often than not, answers. "she's probably heard, she probably despises me", "she's happy in elurra", and "she's happy without me".
he no longer thinks she would want to be with him; he definitely didn't deserve her before and he surely doesn't now. still, he knows that he could never love anybody but her. his heart is forever loyal to her, no matter how broken it is. the taker of three is bound to be the lover of none, but in his head sometimes he still fantasizes about a life with her.

𝐀𝐑𝐂 𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐒
here are just some random ideas for you, they don't all have to happen but these are some things i could come up with!!

— hmm, i think he an ica need to have some conversations together. they never did in the first one and i think it'll end up being important when degan dies lmfao. { @-toxiccatalyst- }
— king mack maybe 😳😳
— it would be REALLY epic if he got to fake his own death at some point and come back all "i look pretty good for a dead bitch" kinda thing, i've never gotten to do it with an oc lmfao.
— he and perce talking it out and maybe becoming friends or allies or sumn eventually. { @angelic-whore }
— let him be murder boy again please i beg of you 🥺
— him and leigh re-uniting scene lolol it's been a long year for this guy. he needs to begin to question himself again pleaseeee.
— a lighthearted conversation right before degan dies/ when he's dying that's kind of sweet.

𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐃𝐎𝐌 𝐃𝐖𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐍
mackenzie currently resides in eldur. i'm not sure of the exact timeline, but he recently spent a few months touring valka and leading a loyalty effort, getting people to pledge allegiance to eldur.
he's basically just come back to eldur and is living in his little room in the castle again.

LYSSCULT