Gifted, but l'm not your savior. Don't mistake my light for favor. I walk with shadows, rites, and gods. Your wars are yours, I sever the cords, and cast you back to heaven's frauds.

The Vulture of Despair Four Horsemen AU (Hazbin Hotel)

“Starve anything long enough… and even a saint’s virtue will rot.”

Moros is the Horsemen of Famine. He fully embodies the desperation of starvation, but not just hunger of the physical body.

He wants to see deprivation in all its forms: love, hope, safety, comfort, morality.

Moros doesn’t cause suffering for fun. He like watching what people become when something essential is taken from them. And he finds it fascinating.

🦴 Appearance

Moros is impossibly, like over 10 feet tall, thin and skeletal! He is the tallest of the horsemen. I designed him thinking of things like SCPs, Darkar from Winx and Skeksis. I wanted him to look disturbing, monstrous and the most animalistic of the horsemen. This is intentional as he wants to bring out raw animal or i guess primal instincts out of humanity and his design reflects this.

Vulture are known for being scavengers and in symbolism are often use to represent rebirth, purification, spiritual guidance among other things. But obviously they are kind of seen in many western cultures as harbingers of death and represent visually starvation. This is why his main bird association is a Vulture.

His head is composed of a bleached vulture skull fused to a short neck, with glowing red eyes. He partially has a humanoid face with just his mouth visible. This is so he can speak easily to humans.

Vulture feet!! I actually studied so many references of vulture feet...

Patchy, molting black feathers like a rotting carcass. I wanted him to look disgusting and similar to a wendigo.

Exposed ribs and spine, based off real human skeletons. And his limbs are stretched far beyond human proportions. He was always meant to be uncanny valley like, so close to being human yet too monstrous.

Long, claw-like fingers... He often pierces things with his talons… I don’t like it.

A trailing rat tail, his other animal association is rats. This was inspired by a few things, the rats being representative of survival and intelligence. And I was watching fruits basket when I was drawing these characters and the talk of how the rat manipulated the cat made me think of Moros and how that’s exactly what he would do.

His loin cloth is a modesty thing…

When he moves it is slow, with unnatural pivots like an abandoned animatronic waking up. His bones often creak and crack… and he likes to snap his vulture beak. Moros often loves being up high, preferring to be on roofs, or up in the corners of rooms…he like being creepy.

🧠 Personality

Moros is very calm, brilliant yet disturbingly analytical. He has this demeanor of a doctor whose curiosity has gone too far. I always imagined he would hold his hands behind his back and speak to someone like they are lower than himself. He truly thinks that he is a perfect creature…

He studies “suffering”

He speaks out loud his observations and they often feel uncomfortably personal

He can “smell” lies, desperation, longing, and grief

He nurtures the broken minds of humans in a twisted way encouraging survival, even when it turns cruel

In fact he loves when someone breaks and goes against their morale

Death feels distant in his presence, like a reward being withheld. He will often chase away reapers (soul collectors) to extend the suffering of his victims

To Moros, starvation reveals the truth of humanity. When love, warmth, and safety are stripped away, something honest crawls out. He revels in it as it makes him feel justified in his actions and thoughts.

HE IS NOT A GOOD PERSON!! Nearly all the horsemen are not good morally, they embody their dominion and revel in it, which I wanted as a sort of juxtaposition to how the seven deadly sins are not actively causing the full horror of their sins but seem to be at their core good people.

📚 Name origin

Moros comes from Greek myth! It's after the primordial god of doom, misery, and inevitable fate. Which felt… fitting for this piece of shit.

⚖️ What's his role and influence?

Within the Four:

Moros often steers philosophical and moral discussions, he will be the one paying attention to meeting's and observing. Nothing gets by him. His contributions are really loved by others though. On Earth his job is to inflict famine in all its varieties.

Bellum (War) leads physical action within the horsemen, and is the most influenctial with humans! He often with politicians and tyrants encouraging warfare.

Serox (Pestilence) handles diplomacy, he actaully despises (they are germs) everyone in heaven but his fellow horsemen yet he is suprisingly good at talking to other angels. In Hell and Earth he is in charge of the spread of disease and pollution.

Azrael (Death) is their "leader", even more so the final authority. She is the oldests and rarely speaks, but none of them ever cross her. She is the ferrymen of the dead and uses reapers to collect the dead and bring them to purgatory.

Moros often bickers with Bellum and Serox like real siblings, he gets along with Bellum the best. While he treats Serox like an annoying younger sibling. Azrael he tends to poke a bit, verbally that is. Often trying to get a rise out of her but is not very successful.

(This passage is repeated in every post about the horsemen if you have read it on the others just skip!)

The Horsemen actually almost never work together.

When they do, it causes events on the scale of the Plagues of Egypt sooo mass suffering, collapse, and irreversible damage. Historically, Heaven avoids letting them act as a unit for that reason.

Most of the time, the Horsemen are on Earth, working individually. They influence humans, decisions, systems, and events. One Horseman is manageable when they work independently, four at the same time on the same project…yeah no.

However they do return to Heaven occasionally, mainly to rest, to see their siblings, and to be reunited with their horses. Those moments are rare and tightly controlled.

🔥 Connection to Hazbin Hotel Universe

In this AU, Sera calls all four back to Heaven at once. Not to unleash them but to deliberate.

They are among the most powerful beings Heaven has, capable of creating disasters on a mass scale. Sera’s plan is to use that power to devastate Hell before the war escalates further.

And the problem isn’t whether the Horsemen can do it. It’s whether bringing them together at all is already a mistake.

Moros has seen humanity starve on Earth. But souls starving in Hell?

That’s new.

He views Hell as a living study! A new garden of deprivation, where every sinner is shaped by what they lack: love, power, hope, morality. And best of all he doesn’t have to make them suffer with the fear of death…

How… curious.

🗣️ Voice & Vibe

Moros speaks like a doctor giving a diagnosis. Yet he is weirdly upbeat and always smiling. And surprisingly intimate in a way that makes your skin crawl. He’ll put a hand on you and make you look into his red eyes and tell you how to survive is to something like eat your pet dog.

Very similar to Doctor Sawyer (Poppy Playtime). But I imagine Ed Helms voices him...

“Fascinating, isn’t it… how trauma reshapes the mind? How morals wilt the moment survival becomes the only meal?”

🐎 Voracity - Moros’ Stallion!!

Voracity is Moros’ mount and he is just as unsettling.

Massive, emaciated black stallion! Standing at 20 feet tall from clawed foot to head.

He doesn’t have fur, rather it’s a dark greyish skin barely concealing bone. His joints jutting in all the wrong places

Pure white, glowing eyes

Short mohawk mane

Inspired by thestrals and wyverns! I wanted him to be terrifying to look at.

Voracity is sly and malicious. If this horse could speak, he’d use archaic language thy, thou, nay while tripping others. Moros has to rides him like a racehorse jockey, crouched low but not on him as the bones sticking out from Voracity are very uncomfortable to sit on.

I also see Voracity hanging from the ceiling like a bat.

Moros theme song and this is my headcanon voice for him!

MASTERPOST

FAMINE - MOROS (YOU ARE HERE)

DEATH - AZRAEL

PESTILENCE - SEROX

famous last words

No fx/close-up/speed paint and proof: