Theodosia Ecsominate's page

The Escominate family first immigrated to the great city of Korvosa from their native Ustalav when little Theodosia was just old enough to know what leaving a homeland behind meant. Ustalav had become an unkind place, or so her parents told her. The scourges of the undead and the constant threat from unbelievable monsters made the nation an insular place and its people paranoid and violent. So the Escominates, the mother, father, uncle, grandmother and four children set out for neighboring Varisia and south to Korvosa. Theodosia, second youngest of the children in this family of the race colloquially known as the “Catfolk,” though a rather disingenuous term lending their feline qualities the stigma of a common house-cat, could hardly remember the place where she grew up. What she did remember she was all too ready to forget.

The tendency of most immigrant families has been most often to settle into ghettos of the racially and culturally similar. This proved true for the Escominates as they moved into a subsection of Korvosa’s cityscape, into the Catfolk ghetto derisively called elsewhere in the city as “the mousetrap.” Their apartment was small and the social circles among Catfolk even smaller. Theodosia’s father and uncle found work as teamsters, but made little and spent all they had in supporting their large family.

Her uncle was a drunken sod, a whiner and, as her father called him, “a bleeding parasite of a worm.” Theodosia’s grandfather, whom she called great-pa, injured in a war he would always refuse to talk about, taught Theodosia of Catfolk culture, Catfolk history and Catfolk beliefs. Theodosia’s mother was nervous in her new surroundings. Outside the district of her people, the alien sights, the sounds of languages she could neither speak nor write and the fashionable and energetic people evoked a powerful feeling of dread in her. She stayed at home most days, keeping her family locked away in their cramped apartment except for community events, in which she was happy to participate.

The Catfolk were a naturally ethnocentric group. The community was led de facto by what many people called, “the chief,” who was universally male and often led the group until his death or until he unceremoniously passed off his chieftainship to a protégé of some kind. Her father, a naturally cunning man in the ways of mercantile business, worked his way out of his miserable position and eventually came to own an emporium in one of the wealthier parts of the city. The Escominates became wealthy, and with the providence of wealth came the promise of power. Theodosia’s father was a natural contender for chieftainship and after the death of the previous one, her father assumed the position.

Theodosia, throughout most of her young adult years, began to feel she was being consumed by her small pocket of society. Beyond everything, she wished to get out of the ghetto, to see beyond into the parts of the city she could only dream of. It seemed, however, like her mother never slept. When she tried to sneak downstairs and out the front door, her mother was there knitting on the couch. She finally got her chance to escape at the age of 13, when she managed to evade her mother’s omnipotent gaze during a community dance and wander blindly into the city proper.

She was mesmerized by what she saw there, towers and buildings taller than any in her ghetto. Shops and stalls selling goods and services from far off places like “Tian Xia” and “Katapesh.” It wasn’t too long before she had become hopelessly lost. Finding herself in a dark alley, she was set upon by three savage looking muggers. She was saved only by the intervention of a group of youthful-looking swordsmen and women, driving the thieves to the walls of the alley and violently murdering themselves. Theodosia was knocked out by a wayward strike during the fight and only awoke to the sight of a dozen or so lounging youths. The first of the youth to speak to Theodosia introduced herself as “Coraline.” They were a group of “like-minded individuals from all walks of life,” as Coraline called them, but elsewhere in the city they were known on broadsheet headlines as the “Dearly Departed.” Some were the sons and daughters of wealthy nobles or merchants. Some were street rats from ghettos like Theodosia’s, but what they all had in common, as Coraline described, was a willingness to “stop worrying about what the other stooges think. We do what we like, how we like it. There’s only one thing that can stop us, and that’s us.”

Theodosia liked them immediately. So she started tagging along on their escapades. Sometimes the group would knick wares from the unaware cart vendors. Sometimes they’d beat down a bunch of low-lives or even Korvosan guardsmen who went too far or thought to mess with them. Once in a while they’d commit to “big jobs,” casing, a high value target, then stealing or infiltrating areas to steal valuables artifacts or, more importantly valuable information. Theodosia, for her part, watched and learned. She’d sneak out at night, not caring for her mother’s wrath. Eventually, Theodosia was allowed to participate in some of the groups bigger jobs, and what’s more, she learned she was quite good at it. Theodosia was quite good at scaling a wall, remaining unseen by guards and making out with the goods. She became a deft hand with sword and pistol and by her seventeenth birthday could outmatch even the best swords in the departed. She had one more special talent, however, and that was her tongue. Theodosia excelled at infiltrating noble banquets and balls, posing as some up jumped human merchant heiress thanks to liberal potions of disguise self. Information soon became her trade.

Theodosia was having the time of her life. She began experimenting in drugs, gaining a certain liking for harlot sweets and even trying a little bit of pesh on occasion. She loved her knew family, spending less and less time with her old. She hardly even minded when Coraline told her the group had been gathering all these political secrets and all this wealth to find a magical means towards becoming intelligent undead. “Here’s a big secret that everyone seems to know and nobody seems to want to say,” she told Theodosia one day. “The upper crusts, they’re the ones really dabbling in it, and doing more than dabbling. How many do you think prance about at night sucking blood from the living like they do normally in the day? They’re evil, all of them. If they want to live forever, the parasites, why shouldn’t we. We’re better than all of them. Think about what we can do, Theodosia.”

Theodosia had learned enough from her time with the aristocracy to know what Coraline said was mostly true. Thoughts of her past nagged at her, though, memories of the witch-hunts and the angry mobs in Ustalav. She remembered one family, neighbors, who woke up one night to find their youngest daughter, a sweet thing, eyes closed and pale with two bite marks gouged in her throat.

Theodora’s activities hadn’t gone unnoticed by her parents. She spent hardly any time at home and what time she did spend was unconscious in bed, hung over or elsewise exhausted after a major heist. She could feel her heart ice over when she was told she was to be married. “A nice boy they said, “very respectable.” It was all the motive Theodora needed to join the departed.

The preparations and research took months more. The Departed’s resident wizard, a handsome devil of a half-elf who called himself Rake, sent Theodora and the rest on missions of subterfuge and espionage, all in the name of obtaining undead immortality. The months passed in a drug-saturated blur. It was only at the end of all these preparations that Theodora began to wake up. The group she had once known had become decadent and hedonistic. They were a name known throughout the city, a den of murderers, thieves and debaucherous villains. They wanted to keep the orgy of pleasure going unbroken forever, and they now had the means to do it.

They finished preparations on the night before the new year. Theodosia was 17 now. For four years she had prepared for a night like this, unknowingly at first but willingly soon after. But that night, the apprehension began creeping back. It was only when they brought the human sacrifices in, the few men and woman aristocrats who would be feasted upon once the transformation had been completed that Theodosia knew she had made a mistake. She first tried reasoning with them, but they were completely absorbed by the idea of immortality. She began arguing, yelling at them and trying to show what they’d become, but it was too late for them. It was Coraline who ordered the rest to kill her.

Tears in her eyes, Theodosia drew her sword and fought the rest of them. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight with Theodosia by herself, but most of the Departed had already begun the ritual. Theodosia fought them, killing four of their original twelve, but was fought back to the ends of her ropes and forced to retreat. She ran, but in her head all she could hear were the screams of the men and woman sacrificed to the departed’s bloodlust. She vowed she’d find them all and, failing at reasoning with them, that she would personally kill each and every one.

Theodosia was now a known member of the Departed’s cabal. She was sought like any other high-profile criminal and now had to watch her back for the inevitable knives of the remaining Departed members in the dark. For more than a year she has been on the run, scrounging to live day to day and not daring to return to her family. Yet, somehow, Theodosia knew what Coraline had said was true. “The only thing that can stop us is us.”