Pathfinder – Catelyn the Sniper
Pathfinder – Catelyn the Sniper
The first and last thing she remembers is her father dying at her feet, an arrow embedded in his skull and his arms draped in a thousand blood ridden contracts. Scroll upon scroll of infernal contract wrapped about his person, he looked more like a deranged multi-limbed monstrosity than anything discernibly human. Catelyn supposes his appearance wasn’t too far from the truth.
Baptized in blood, the blood of her mother, Catelyn came into this world kicking and screaming, her mother’s gore shimmering in the candlelight, covering her from head to foot, well that was as far as she knew. It was always difficult to wring the truth out of the courtesans of the Calistrian whore house in Deveryn in which she grew up. Her father was a nobleman of some supposed repute and her mother died in childbirth, discovered later as the thrall of some Devil or another. She lost her life and her father abandoned her, ordering his manservant to, quote, “get that vile atrocity out of my sight, and see that nobody knows about it.” Luckily for Catelyn, this servant had enough dignity left in him to offer her to an orphanarium instead of simply dumping her in the sea.
Growing up abandoned and alone, distant even from the other orphans who would always taunt her and grab her horned head. At the age of her flowering she had blossomed into an attractive young woman and was noticed by a cleric of Calistria, who reckoned the Enchanted Rose could do well with some exotic spice to add to their retinue. In turn they got far more than they bargained for in a girl of sixteen filled with righteous indignation and spiteful to a family and society that spurned her.
After scaring off her third client in a row the ladies of the Enchanted Rose realized they had had enough of Catelyn and let her out into the streets with nothing but the close on her back and a small, many thorned rose to mark her passing. Struggling to survive each and every day in the backstreats of Deveryn, Catelyn fell in with many an unrighteous sort, earning her calling in a gang where she soon learned her unnatural prowess with the bow, and using said prowess to her advantage when the leader of the gang tried to have their way with her. Said man soon found his heart split in twain, both at her spurning and with the arrow shaft puncturing his chest.
Her experience in the cold unforgiving world of Deveryn’s undercity taught her one important lesson that survival at all costs outweighed all sense of morality, that honor and battle were the notions of either the foolish or the dead, and that both groups were not mutually exclusive. Eking out each day, feathering the few people that threatened her, she lived a small yet secure life.
Yet there was a hole deep inside her, small as a pinhole, undetectable at first, but expanding with each passing day. There was a longing deep inside her for the family she knew she never had.
She began to notice the ever widening crater in her heart soon enough, and later began her investigation as to who her father truly is or was, whether he was still alive, and what happened to her mother. She tracked down the servant who first delivered her to the orphanage, and with a little coercion at the edge of a knife, she quickly learned what actually transpired on the night of her birth. Her father was an astute nobleman, for sure, but it was not his mother who had entered into communion with a devil, selling the soul of his child still in the womb in return for the security of his rapidly failing estate. He went back on his word however, and as his wife lay in her birthing bed after her final push his father ended her, and sent his ever loyal manservant to deposit his little girl in the bottoms of the sea.
Since his defiance of the devil, he still lived, but sat secluded in his estate, surrounded on all sides by his loyally devil influenced household guardsmen. “He sits there to this day,” the man said, “and I am sure he has not rested nor spoken nor moved since that day. I hope you can find mercy in your heart for him for he is as much a prisoner inside his own soul as he is in his household.”
Catelyn showed him just what kind of mercy she still had left in her heart, and after depositing that body in the sea she began her preparations for her final meeting with her father.
Atop the rooftop of a great cathedral Catelyn could see all of the estate, the gardens and the tower in which her father resided. At the stroke of midnight she began hitting them, one after the other, dropping like flies as the arrows struck one after another of the guardsmen. None knew where she hid, and none knew where to look for cover. They were, all of them, small, beedy ducks, ripe for the plucking. When she was secure that no guardsmen would be able to keep her from her prize she made her way down the cathedral and began her arduous clambering up the side of her father’s tower. She was covered with sweat and tears and each of her muscles ached to the point of seizing when she finally reached the window at the top, but one look at her father pushed all of the pain out of her mind.
What she saw surprised her. Her father, or what were rather the vestigial remains of him, pulsed and slowly undulated with his shallow breathing. The myriad documents and scrolls that covered him pulsating like animated tendrils at his every faint movement. He looked at her with dead, grey eyes and let out a whisper from his mouth.
She broke through the window with her boot and walked over to her father, placing her dagger at the nape of his neck.
“Speak if you may, but nothing you can or will say will save you.”
Her father let out an airy whisper that clouded the cold, damp air around him.
“I figured you might want to die, father,” Catelyn said, “but I’m going to make these final moments of your sad pathetic life a living nightmare you cannot even imagine. It will make these years since I was born feel like a vacation.” She lived up to her word.
That night changed her in ways she could never imagine. She was passionless now, soulless, dead. She felt no longer dread, fear, anger, joy or passion. She felt cold, utterly, and completely numbed. The only thing left, the only thing that seemed to be of any importance, was survival.
And for the next five years, that was all she did. She took on contract killings, and, unsurprisingly, she grew highly adept at her work. She was requisitioned often and grew favor with numerous clients for her ability to take any work, no matter how evil or despicable, no matter who the target. She would stand atop the high buildings of the Deveryn skyline and kill the targets as they layed in bed, as they entered their favored whorehouse and every once in a while, in the middle of a crowded street where shock value was necessitated.
She felt naught for the men and women she killed, remorseless and unrepentant, she forwent her faith to Calistria, knowing that a passionless existence worked against the tenants of the Savored Sting.
She remained in this state, movingly listlessly from one job to another when a certain contract caught her eye. It was from an anonymous lordling with a bounty high enough to put food on her plate for the next few years. It was the requisitioned assassination of the pregnant wife of a publicly favored lord, petitioning for a seat on the High Council. She accepted it with nary a thought.
She executed it flawlessly.
But that was not the end for this situation. The lord, instead of falling into despair like her client suggested grew vengeful for the murder of his beloved wife and threw down his titles and holdings, gave up everything in order to begin the hunt for those responsible for her death.
Catelyn recognized the threat, foolish as the man was, watching him bumble around the streets of Deveryn as she watched from the rooftops, gesturing to everyone who would listen to him, showing an ill-drawn facsimile of Catelyn’s face, begging for information so that he might find the woman responsible for his wife’s murder. She had her bow drawn, arrow pressed close to her ear in anticipation for the clean shot that would end his life. Yet, when the moment came, she could not release. Her breath caught in her throat and her arms seized still ‘til the moment passed and the opportunity was gone.
Every instinct in her body screamed at her, burning through the wall of ice that had governed her life up until now. She knew he would be after her. She knew that he would not rest and yet she could not kill him.
So she ran. She ran across Talingarde, hoping to lose him and see her one failure gone from her life. Yet, wherever she went he was soon to follow, and as the years passed he became wiser, more skilled and more determined. She knew there was only one choice – kill or be killed, survive or act the fool and surrender herself to death. The time came again where she had her bow drawn, arrow pointed square at his heart, and again her arms seized and she withdrew herself.
It was at this point she knew there was only one option. She would not allow herself to die, so she found asylum in the only place that would ever take her, prison. Killing one man, some upstart city guardsman or another, it really didn’t matter, and letting herself get caught, she was thrown in prison, a life sentence they said. Catelyn knew of no other kind.
They Sent her to Branderscar. It was at that point Catelyn realized that this "life sentence" would be far, far shorter than she had previously imagined.
It was in this prison that Catelyn spent the last five years of her life. She watched as her highly taught dexterous arms withered in their chains and felt the bruises and cuts pile up at her daily beatings. Things seemed as if they would remain this way forever.
