the beauty of the house is immeasurable;

I'll expand on that in a second, but I must also say that the narrative told by the family about why she was "created" varies a lot depending on who's doing the telling. The canonical version, featured in most of Niro's recountings of the situation, is that the family was directed by Bhaal to unite their divine bloodline with a second wellspring of Bhaal's divinity. The actual reason is the decision-making members of the family recognized after Ronanor and the twins had reached maturity that the family's linebreeding was not producing better offspring. They needed a new contributor to the family's genetic pool.

The family prayed to Bhaal for years to create another Bhaalspawn like Niro. They and their cult committed mass sacrifices unlike anything seen in the previous decades to empower and motivate the lord of their lord sufficiently to cast off another droplet of his divinity into the world. Neora, in one of the most gut-wrenching moments in her life, slew her favorite among the cultists, a childhood friend of Neora's named Ethina who had benefited enough from the favoritism that she had been granted agelessness by Niro so that she could serve as Neora's sometime-companion and concubine indefinitely.

As the light left Ethina's eyes some hundred years after the woman's natural lifespan should have taken her, Neora heard the voice of Bhaal for only the second time in her life. The deathly voice whispered to her, "My child crawls bloody and screaming into the world tonight. Go find it."

Neora fell to her knees and begged, "Where, Grandfather, where do I go?", to which she received no response but cold silence.

In the following weeks, the cult and its various outposts around Faerûn were notified of an urgent mission to be carried out with great piety. This new form of worship was simple: listen for reports of strange, violent children, and report back. It was a few years before anything plausible made its way back to the family compound in Neverwinter, naturally, as the newborn Bhaalspawn had to grow up enough to become dangerous. But soon credible hearsay started trickling in, and Neora set out on the road, covertly investigating each and every rumor, mile by mile, town by town.

She spent a lot of time alone that year; her schedule of travel was too demanding to ask of Aroen, and Aonira had to stay with Aroen, for her precious doll still needed a caretaker in her absence. Aside from the occasional rendezvous with Ronanor, Orienne, and Enneiro—traveling missionaries or wandering saints for whom a demanding schedule of travel was the norm—she worked alone, staying in cheap inns and in the homes of covert distant worshippers in league with local cult outposts.

It was seven years after Bhaal set his next creation loose on the world that Neora homed in on her, some thousand miles away from the family home. The rumors that brought Neora into town were like this: An older sibling killed in an accident. A child's corpse burned to the point of mutilation. A mother dead seven years ago. A child imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom in a manor home. A picturesque, well-to-do family afflicted by several unfortunate circumstances.

Neora watched the manor's high bedroom window from neighboring rooftops for a while before she caught sight of the child in it. Then came the voice again, for just the third time in her two centuries of life, Bhaal intoning merely "Her." Neora wept with rapturous gratitude, there on the rooftop, staring through the window at the child that would be hers.

Making this child hers, though, was a yearlong project. First, she sent for Aroen and Aonira, whom Ronanor and the twins escorted overland to where Neora was staying. They arrived several days later. In that time Neora watched the child through the window from neighboring rooftops from dusk til dawn, noticing how utterly neglected the young thing was, alone and left to her own devices in a once-sumptuous bedroom left to fall to dust and entropy.

Soon Neora began visiting the girl at her window. The child—Noelle—was deeply distrustful but agonizingly curious about the world outside her bedroom, a world Neora would soon find Noelle had been deprived of for the last 3 years. She gradually won Noelle's trust with gifts of books, particularly books with graphic illustrations of torture devices, bloody battles, and similar atrocities. Noelle had learned the hard way that she mustn't speak of certain things: the fire that lurked in her guts and spilled out when she wanted it to, the way flesh looked as it melted and bubbled, the funny way she felt when she hurt people. But those wants, needs, and interests threatened to spill out of her at every opportunity, and Neora nurtured Noelle's burgeoning urges, teaching her that she was a very special little girl indeed, that she deserved to do what she pleased with others.

Noelle's neglect made it easy for Neora to prey upon her. Soon Neora was spending every night seated on the floor against the wall in Noelle's bedroom, conversing with her about all manner of things, painting a picture of a life in the family compound that was hers for the taking. Neora convinced her that she did not deserve to be imprisoned, that she was different in a wonderful way, not in a wrong way. Neora convinced her she was too special to be treated the way her father had been treating her.

The night Noelle decided she was ready to leave, she walked hand in hand with Neora through the house and used the blessing given to her by her divine creator: the gift of flame. She used it on everything. She used it on everyone left in the house and every room and every animal and every tree and shrub in the courtyard. And then, having fully tired herself out, she allowed Neora to pick her up and carry her back to the inn in which Neora had been sleeping during the day, back to the suite shared with Aroen and Aonira, where Neora introduced her loves to the daughter Bhaal had given her.

Noelle was firmly attached to Neora, and soon to Aroen and Aonira too, but the integration into the rest of the family did not go without hitches. Arinoa's crudeness and overt sexuality disgusted and frightened the modest, timid child; in Niro she saw a dark mirror, a predator deterred from her only by certainty of her own dangerousness, and a terrifying distillation of the nature of the divinity from which she was created. Her years of solitude made her ill-prepared for a very close household full of complicated relationships. She acclimated in fits and starts, and she spent a lot of time alone. She killed in utter secrecy. Cultists disappeared in the night every once in a while; some time later, someone would find a body in the woods that had been reduced to charcoal.

Her innocence, the eager purity of her bloodlust, and her quiet depth drew Neora in over and over.

Noelle married Neora in her late teens.