New Character Musings
The Blood Red Bride
Before she gave her soul to the Void, The Blood Red Bride was an accomplished midwife in a small village on the border of the desert mountains. She was well respected and kind to her women and loved bringing children into the world. She admired their innocence and the promise with every child that was born. She deeply longed for children of her own, but very early in life had given up hope that she would find someone who took enough interest in her to be patient with her flourishing business. She was wrong, for she was noticed by two males, although only one was alive. A mysterious bandit swooped The Bride off her feet and after only three months of courting, the midwife and the bandit began planning their wedding. It was never to happen. The bandit never told his fiance that he was on the run from the law, but the law caught up to him. The magistrate's troops attacked during the wedding, and it was a massacre. Although the bandit managed to escape again, The Bride was killed as she tried to follow him. As she lay, bleeding and crying for the man she believed loved her, a Deathknight of the Eye and Seven Despairs came to her. He offered her the chance to live again and give everyone the chance to have a new life. Terrified and heart broken, she agreed and became The Blood Red Bride.
She has only seen the Cold House once because, like all the loyal servants of Eye and Seven, she avoids the three betrayers that reside there as often as she can. She longs to enter it again next to her beloved master, but she is content to keep his work going in Creation. As a Midnight caste, she is utterly devoted to worshipping the dead and converting the living. She delights in releasing those who are suffering from heart ache or child lose to the cold embrace of death. More disturbing is that she has started to zero in on children, using their ghosts as her servants and choosing new names for them as if they are truly her own. These ghostly and zombie children follow her and seem to love her as if she is a mother to them. Because of her loathing for the bandit that betrayed her, she refuses to help men that are Wanted, and will happily watch them suffer in their deaths. Often she turns them over to the Daybreaks and asks to watch as they are tortured. Her worship rituals to the Malfeans, like her practice as a midwife, are always performed to perfection and she hears the whispers of the Malfeans strongly. She does not tolerate blasphemy against her master or his loyal deathknights around her by anyone.
The Bride could not be mistaken for anything but dead. Her face is pale and cold to the touch. Her eyes, once a bright, happy, blue but now a blood red, are no longer lit from within. Her hair is done up in the complicated curls she wore on her wedding day, and often look mussed and dirty. She wears a red lace veil held with black roses and a piece of jewelry she took from her first victim in her hair. She wears black or red, but never white and her clothing is usually torn. She always wears dresses, forsaking the usual garb of funeral shrouds. Despite this, she is still rather beautiful, looking like a forgotten doll when she is sitting still in meditation. She is not her master's most favored Deathknight, but she is extremly loyal and often hears her master's praises for her work in the slow decent of Creation into Oblivion.
(Thoughts? I actually came up with the character idea as I was playing with my doll maker. I'm sad right now that she has now game to be in, but I may stat her anyway in preperation for 2nd edition Abyssals and the inevitable games that will follow its release. She could be my new Sig. Abyssal.)