Eva's Story

"All are meat, nothing more." 

Her name was Eva. She was a courtesan in the city-state of Gilead, now one of the more fanatical of the Faithful Cities, located several miles to the south of the _Venifica_, or "Witch Mountain," the rocky peak where the adventuring party had their first audience with the Marchioness. Eva was ambitious. She craved wealth and status. She meddled with necromancy to obtain it.

Her arcane dabbling attracted the notice of Doresain, the Ghoul King, also called the Hunger, who came to her and fulfilled her desires. In exchange, Eva became his apostle. Eva married well, bore two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, and became the envy of the princely houses of Gilead.

Her husband killed her one night when he discovered her in the nursery feasting on her own offspring.

Eva’s body was piled onto a pauper’s cart to be taken to the Darkmanse, but it disappeared somewhere along the Pilgrim Road. Not long after that, children began to disappear in and around Gilead. The midwives told stories. They said Eva hunted when the moon was full. Indeed, upon her death, Doresain made her one of his own, infusing her with abyssal energy, transforming her into a powerful kind of ghoul known as a ghast.

The mausoleum where the adventuring party encountered and ultimately killed Eva memorializes her two children. The true manner of their deaths remains a matter of hushed rumor and speculation in Gilead.

The Ghoul King is a hated rival of the Marchioness, who used her newly formed party of would-be assassins to kill his favored disciple. She was also testing the mettle of the party to see if its members had it in them to carry out a more consequential killing—the killing of the Synarch.

In the mausoleum, the party found a magic object that the Marchioness said would aid them in their quest when the time came. The object in question was a silver locket on a chain—a memento mori belonging to the ghast from when she was mortal. When opened, the locket reveals two small paintings of Eva's children. The locket was a special gift by the Ghoul King to his beloved disciple.

"Without it, you cannot see," the Marchioness advised the adventurers.