Felipe is an amnesiac giant of the Invisible Cities whose baptism is a seal that keeps a very dark creature, tied to his forgotten past, away from the world.
| Type | Character (giant) |
| Region | The Gobi; Urga |
| Spanish entry | Felipe, el gigante de las sombras |
Distinct from the apostle Saint Philip of the Templars cycle.
History
No giants of his kind have been seen for a long time. He introduces himself with dignity — “my name is Felipe, like the baptizer’s” — and recalls the Queen of Sheba’s messenger who carried incense and ebony root. He came to the Gobi region twenty-five years earlier; on his return he was seized, declared a demon and enslaved with beatings in a pit. There a Christian converted and baptized him and at once teleported away — an echo of the apostle Philip and the Ethiopian. Since that strange water he remembers nothing earlier. Resentful of “candle-suckers”, he wants only to know what he did and who he was. “People reject me for what they don’t want to see.”
The seal
In the cathedral of Urga he asked to be unbaptized to recover his memory, and the Prester could do it. Auro sensed the trap: if the seal were lifted, the dark creature would manifest — “he wants to be free, but his instinct wants to have power again and be what he was.” The seal was left untouched. Auro offered another way: “let’s build a new memory; let’s walk together, and when you no longer want to stop being who you are, then you’ll be able to see who you were.” His first recovered memory is arriving at Dorotea when the city was still beautiful and its three rulers were just three puppet bards playing the clarinet. He confided in Armagedón, the aasimar of the Apocalypse.