The Violet Carver who remakes Darrow into a Gold over months, proud of his masterpiece yet increasingly afraid of it.
Mickey performs the impossible over months, carving Darrow from Red into Gold — grafting new Sigils, seating a datachip, rebuilding his bones and muscle, replacing his eyes, teeth, and hair — and calling the boy his darling, his art, "my boy." On the worst nights he sits telling of his own childhood in the Grove, a circus-culture that drugged its children into ceaseless fever-dreams, saying he dreamed of Darrow once, a nightmare of a man from hell, a lover of fire. He debates with Darrow whether a comforting lie is kinder than the truth of slavery, brings him a wood-soundboard zither, and finds unexpected peace in the songs of Lykos. But as his creation takes fuller shape he grows sallow, distant, and plainly afraid of what he has made — a fear Darrow confirms when he seizes the Carver's wrists in an unbreakable grip and warns him to give Evey a plush life or lose his hands.
A slim, scalpel-like man with a crooked smile and oily black hair down one side of his poreless face; an amethyst-mask Violet Sigil around his left eye, violet symbols on his hands, twelve long thin fingers. Now sallow and dark-ringed from the long work.
The Violet Carver who forges Darrow into a Gold and comes to dread his own creation.