Nicolette is the daughter of an innkeeper who retired from a life of adventuring to live a simple life and raise a family. It was as a little girl she would listen to his teachings and learned the sword, along with all her siblings, but really it never interested her. Mostly, she often would help with the training of the animals and the selling of them to the local populace through their stables. She also provided care for them while patrons stayed the night in the thorp they lived in on the outskirts of Khorvosa. That was her passion.
Despite her father’s accumulated wealth from adventuring, there was too little profit on the outskirts of Khorvosa, and too many mouths to feed as their family grew. Life got hard for her parents and being the second eldest, she needed to live elsewhere if they were going to all survive. Her older brother had already gone to join the military, but her parents needed to do something about her. She was too young to leave and they had few options. By chance, a young wealthy magician had recently purchased a run down tower in the wilderness near their inn and was fixing it up as a base of his own operations and experiments. Although his profession was not trusted, he seemed fine, and her parent’s sought him out. They desired that she could aid him and the money they received could help supplement their living. Against her will she went but saw her duty to her family as more important than her own desires.
At first, it was a challenge, as the mage treated her like a child or a stranger who was an affront to him. Everything she did seemed to offend him and so he made her sleep with the animals he experimented on instead of being able to stay in the room she had been assigned when she first arrived. After a while, whether it was her sprouting as a young woman and becoming increasingly attractive, or learning the method to his madness, she was more favored as time went on.
He would say things at times that made her wonder at where his mentality stood. Was he insane? She couldn’t place him, but as she grew older, a certain fondness seemed to represent itself toward her all the more from him in strange ways. Perhaps it was his loneliness, but the mage began to make advances toward her. She would never accept him, which frustrated him greatly but he still treated her kinder than at the onset.
One day, that changed. She was rubbing oil into the wood of his workshop door when he came back home from an excursion to find supplies in the nearby woods. Upon seeing her there by the door, he yelled at her and beat her with a rope chord. It was such a powerful response that she couldn’t even say anything and just cowered in fear. After that episode was over though, he seemed to calm and warned her not to go inside his workshop, that it wasn’t safe.
The event made her realize that he seemed to have an increasingly troubled mind and she kept her distance, simply working on potions for him and doing cleaning chores around the house. Every once in a while, he again would manifest that confusing behavior and stare at her suspiciously that would make her wonder about his mentality. He would speak to himself in deep contemplation and even seem to get angry at nothing at all.
Eventually that seemed to manifest itself and come to a head one day when she was cleaning and spilled a massive vial of expensive carbonized chitin fluid all over his stone walkway. The particularly sticky goop flooded across the room rapidly before she could do anything and dripped under his workroom door. She knew the substance and surely it would harden in the next hour leaving her master unable to return to his studies. Upon that realization, she knew that she was never permitted inside, but fearing his recent heightened emotions, she considered what he’d do to her if he found the mess. She decided to risk it and opened the door. Nothing happened. It was just a hallway with some gates further down the way. As she quickly moved to cleaned the mess, in the distance down the hallway, she thought she could hear the sound of crying from a woman. The mage had gone out to the local market for food, but was due back momentarily.
At the sound of Nicolette working to clean the mess quickly in the hall, whoever was crying heard her and began to beg “please, please, let me go”. Again and again the mysterious woman cried in a soft and mournful way. Naturally, being a protector, Nicolette went to aid the person having grown distrustful of her master over the recent years. There she found a woman of near identical appearance to her that had been imprisoned there, was beaten, and looked to have been taken advantage of for many weeks if not longer. It all began to make sense. The mage’s pent up desires for her had caused him to kidnap someone like her. The sick man! At that moment, the stranger with her last bit of energy rushed the gate and shook it upon seeing Nicolette; begging of Nicolette to help her as if she was previously vainly crying out to the mage and now realized someone actually might help her. At the end of the hall Nicolette found the keys and unlocked the door.
She quickly found herself set upon by the woman who clawed and pulled at her hair, shoving Nicolette to the ground instead of thanking her. Frighteningly, the woman shifted to her true form and it turned out not to be a woman at all but rather a demon in disguise. In pure wicked delight, it began to tear into her flesh with blackened blood-covered disease dripping arms. Not used to fighting at this time, she was quickly overpowered and thrown into the cage to die there, and die she did.
When the mage came home to find his prize gone and the door ajar, he saw what had transpired and came to Nicolette’s side. Not by his own doing, suddenly her blackened blood covered flesh that had been ripped apart mended itself. Her sores and pustules from the wicked touch of the demon seemed to fade, and blackened scales of pooled blood fell from her disturbingly open eyes. What once were vivid denim blue eyes he so cherished, now held a milky color to them.
Life returned to her and she gasped in fear as she regained consciousness. Part of him was angry and part of him had just witnessed a miracle of the gods. The mage helped Nicolette up and explained that she had let a demon go free. That demon was conspiring to wreak havoc on the realm and the reason he had been so violent in his warning to her so that such an event wouldn’t happen. He could no longer trust her or have her there, and so feeling sick and rejected, she returned home afraid to be a burden once more. In doing so, she found the consequences of her actions.
Strewn wall to wall, ghastly scenes of horror and terror were displayed as their patrons were all dead. Her four siblings but one (the eldest) lay dead at her feet and her mother and father were left alive to watch. For the next few years, she worked to setting her family right and returning their mental health, but never did she explain what she had done to them. Once the time of their horrific trauma had passed them all, she was now twenty-five and troubles began to arise in the region. It was at that time she picked up her grandfather’s greatsword, a family heirloom and recalled the lessons of her youth. She set out to seek vengeance on the demon that did this.
