Mallory was born somewhere, somewhen, to somebody, raised in some kind of way, and eventually died.

Mallory woke up in a new body assuming his first life was a fractured dream, and went about returning to a life that felt unfamiliar in a body he didn't recognize. He died painfully a few years later.

Mallory woke up sharply, gasping, still feeling the pain of his demise echoing through new limbs. Another life he didn't know, another face that looked like a stranger. This time he lived only a handful of months before death found him again.

Mallory woke up for the third time and despaired. He took his own life the same evening.

Mallory woke up again.

For as long as he can remember, through as many lives as he cares to count, Mallory has lived, died, and lived again, remembering every fresh face and every new agony - with the key exception of that first life, his original life. He has not lived chronologically; some lives he wakes and walks through 20th Century New York, only to die and be reborn in 1500's Europe. He has seen humanity's growth in non-chronological order, and died to most of its worst atrocities and accidents. With every death, he feels a little more disconnected, and with every new life, a little more cavalier. His name isn't even Mallory - he's not sure he's ever woken up as a Mallory - but somewhere along the way it became the name he took for himself, the single solitary anchor for any kind of personal identity.

Recently, the unthinkable has happened to Mallory: he's woken up in the same place, in the same body, in the same time period, more than once. Something is clawing at him through the pale, dragging him back to Calder City, determined to make him stay there. He just needs to figure out what. Maybe that's the key to his entire lives.

Doomed Reincarnation
Mallory didn't actually realize he had 'powers', not that he refers to his condition as such, until his second death. His first life, as far as he is aware - the two or three fleeting, banal glimpses he has - was as normal as anyone else's: he was born, he grew, he eventually shuffled off the mortal coil...and then he woke up as someone new. He wrote off those glimpses as fragments of a forgotten dream, getting on with his new life, as unfamiliar as it felt - until he met a grisly end, and woke up once more. This time, he remembered his previous life, and his previous death, and took those fuzzy memories of the life before that one a little more seriously.

Since then, Mallory has spent uncountable lives over uncountable years waking up as someone new, being delivered unto an unpleasant death, and waking up again to do it all over. He remembers every life except for his first, and every death equally, the pain of it seared as scars across his consciousness even as he meets new, pristine bodies. He doesn't know why, but he knows, or believes, he's cursed - and so far, he hasn't been able to break it.

Through his many lives and deaths, Mallory has developed a distinctly aloof, laissez-faire attitude toward daily life, spending freely and hedonistically while awaiting his inevitable doom, knowing that whatever he has he won’t be able to hold onto; he keeps enough to carry on living, but never plans ahead further than the next week. At the same time, he’s become incredible world-weary, having watched humanity crush and rebuild itself for thousands of years, and while he has seen some of the wondrous achievements of Man, his fated death also means he’s experienced first-hand most of society’s greatest failures and deepest atrocities. While full of life experience, wisdom, and compounded knowledge, Mallory keeps others at a deliberate distance, knowing that at best he will simply invite needless grief into people’s lives, or at worst take them down with him when his doom arrives once more.

Mallory is ready to die. Which is to say, Mallory is ready to age with grace and slip away peacefully at the end of a calm and generally-unremarkable life, and not wake up again on the other side of the globe in another unfamiliar body. He is aware, or at least completely set in his belief, that some long-forgotten sin from that elusive first life has burdened him with this heinous curse; his only goal now is to either atone for it, redeem himself through other grand magnanimous acts, or break the curse through any means necessary.