PyritePirate

'I asked a merchant for the date earlier today, and apparently I turned twenty several weeks ago. Happy birthday to me, I suppose.

I'm spending my young adulthood traipsing through ghost-infested ruins, trying to confuse Vulpes and I's trail by hiding among other Mists-adjacent entities. Ashford is probably the best option for throwing the guardian off my trail long enough to give my bad idea a slim chance of working---plenty of ghosts, plenty of Legion presence. She obviously hasn't given up the pursuit, but I think I've put enough distance between us to breathe a little.'

‘The trip through Ashford has been unsettling, though. I continue to find myself disturbed by the restless ghosts, wailing as they relive their final, harrowing hours of life over and over and over. Some of them talk to each other, the same conversations on eternal repeat. I am reminded of the farm in Kessex, how it felt when I went back after the accident. Adelaide. Adelburn. Maybe Ascalonians should stop picking names with 'Adel' in them. It's not helpful to compare disasters, but I can't keep the thoughts from intruding in my head.'

'It's more than likely I'm not savvy enough to make my bad idea work, but I need to need to know who I'm dealing with, and that means getting information on this guardian by any means necessary. (Maybe not any means. I guess I could go up and ask her, but approaching someone covered in plate armor and twice my height while she's actively invested in fighting me is not smart. Her hand is probably the size of my torso- This is not a productive tangent. Moving on.)

What I know right now is that she's wearing an altered Whispers brigantine---specifically altered to replace the crest with the Tyrian Alliance, which makes me think she's either badly undercover or (more likely) a contractor with the Pact. She also doesn't seem very old; her horns are much smoother than the Legion soldiers I've encountered on the road and her coat is short and glossy like marble. If I had to estimate, I wouldn't say she's much older than I am. That strikes me as pretty young to be voluntarily hunting demons (don't look at me like that, Vulpes), especially for someone Pact-adjacent. Maybe it's because Legion charr train to fight at a younger age? But then why is she avoiding the Legions? I'm thinking in circles here.'

'In any event, my bad idea involves making some clothing dye, and to do that I need privacy from my pursuer so she doesn't catch on to what I'm planning, and also access to cooking tools.

Ashford Forum supplies all of that in abundance, plus all of the red plants I could ever ask for as materials.

I can’t actually dye my armor just yet—if I do it too soon, someone might catch on to my plan before I have a chance to execute it. I need to set things up in advance so I can time this exactly right. If I’m not immediately caught, the idea is to take out two moas with one sword: I’ll be able to access records that might have information on the guardian, and I’ll pull a disappearing act under the cover provided by the Black Citadel.’

'For now, I need to come up with a good cover story and maybe five-to-six contingency plans.

It's not going to be easy to infiltrate a Whispers safehouse.'

'The trip through the Fields of Ruin went faster than I expected - maybe because my close-call in Blazeridge had me picking up the pace significantly. I know from my limited research what malicious possession can do to a person; I know why the Priory reached out to an external resource to hunt down me and Vulpes. But my demon isn't hurting anyone (mostly) and I still want answers about Ma's past.'

'I've tested my theory that the guardian won't show her face around Legion outposts. So with peace talks still (still) ongoing in the region, the Fields of Ruin are as safe a place as any. What I don't understand is why that is. If she's being contracted by/from the Tyrian Alliance, wouldn't the Legions be her allies by proxy? Maybe this is purely Pact jurisdiction and they're just using Alliance status for legitimacy? I don't know. It feels strange to me, but I can't exactly ask the guardian for her reasoning.'

'I wonder if I was supposed to inherit that lockbox from Ma when she died, and it was only buried with her by mistake. She left the brooch so I could find my mother Corrine's family in Lion's Arch, and the scribbled address in her old prayerbook led me here, to the city I can only assume she grew up in. If I'd known I had relatives still out there somewhere...would I have left the farm before the accident? Would everyone still be alive But I didn't know, and I can't change that now.

All I can do is find out what she wanted me to know, and go from there. If the other side of my family is here, what are they like? Will they recognize me? Did they want to take me in when Ma passed, or did they not know I existed, like Corrine's side?'

'As nervous as I am, I'm also glad to have a roof over my head for a few nights. I haven't made proper camp since Blazeridge, and I'm tired. But before I rest, I need to find this address.

The house is referred to as the Efren residence on the paper slip (a family name, maybe?) and it's near the back outskirts of the city. I find myself less cowed by Ebonhawke than Divinity's Reach, though perhaps that's because now I'm a little less afraid of. . .well, everything. This place feels older and more complicated; a place still struggling to define itself after constant siege and war. I walk the streets and can see how I would have grown up differently here than in the Kessex farmlands. There are more walls in Ebonhawke. It's hard to see outside.'

'When I finally found the address, the family living there did not have the surname Efren, and they did not seem to recognize the names Tess or Therese. They did invite me in to talk, though, and I accepted.

I spoke to the young couple for a long time, until their grandfather came downstairs to see what the noise was about. When I asked him if he recognized the name Efren, he told me that they were the family he'd bought the house from, some years back. He didn't know much more about them, only that their youngest son had been eager to get rid of the place and move to Kryta with his new partner - not a common sentiment for Ascalonians, according to the old man. I thanked them, then started knocking on nearby doors.'

'Ebonhawke is an old, strange place. Many people are eager to put the region's violent past behind them, while others can't seem to get the sieges out of their minds. These people want peace, but are still at war with themselves over what that should look like. I had more than a few doors shut on my face while I interrogated the Efren family's former neighbors for more information on them.

Some of the ones I did manage to talk to were politely confused, while others seemed reluctant to tell me more than rumors. After a while, I managed to pull some teeth (not literally) and put together that the family had lived in the city for a very long time, and were so proud of their heritage that the older generations couldn't stomach the peace talks with the Legions. The oldest son of the family had joined the Seperatists almost immediately, consumed by spite, but was quickly killed by the Ebon Vanguard in a failed attack on one of their delegation camps. Mortified and disgraced, his younger brother had sold the house, taken his partner and the family fortune, and fled to Kryta. Their father had passed from illness before the ceasefire, but their mother refused to leave with the younger brother, walked out of the city to somehow find his deceased older brother, and was never seen again.

The rest of the extended family scattered. None of the neighbors mentioned anyone named Tess/Therese. I still don't know why Ma left this address to me, but I have one more resource here to consult.'

'A local locksmith actually found a match for Ma's little silver key, and the local priesthood of Grenth took me more seriously when I showed it to them. After I explained how I'd gotten my hands on a key to the local morgue, they let me look through their records. I went through everyone who had ever joined their numbers in Ebonhawke, and finally, in the early hours of morning, I found something in an entry from over twenty years ago:

"Therese Efren, priestess in training."

I rushed up from the archive basement and showed the entry to their recordkeeper. She read the name and nodded, then brought me to another priestess who'd been in training around that time, and I listened carefully to the last piece of the puzzle, which I have recorded here for both my own reference, and for Ma's sake:

Therese Efren was born during the sieges, the middle child to her two brothers. A gifted necromancer, she cultivated her ability to commune with spirits so that she could join the priesthood of Grenth and help fallen soldiers find peace. But so much time spent with the restless, often horrifically mangled souls took its toll on her. For months, she would wander listlessly beyond the walls to bury the dead in contested territory, scaring both her family and fellow trainees. One day, the priestess I spoke to recalled her returning with such a wild fury on her face that even the Vanguard patrol sent to bring her back seemed nervous.

What she'd seen on the battlefields, the other priestess could only guess at, but from that day on, Therese Efren was utterly radicalized against the war in Ascalon. Her depression was replaced with an iron-clad belief that what war did to the souls of the living and dead was an unforgivable crime, and anyone who supported that violence's continuation was complicit - including her family. She would proceed to spend the next few years painting and making woodcut posters to counter the propaganda covering the stronghold's walls (this was how she became an artist!), escaping beyond the wall again and again to soothe the dead (charr, humans, pack bulls, the scraps of anything unlucky enough to be hit with shrapnel), and generally making herself into a walking scandal for her family.'

'Soon after, her parents and older brother made it clear she was no longer welcome in their home. Eventually, Therese managed to get clear of the wall one last time, and never came back. The family assumed she had died, and selfishly began pretending she'd never existed to save face.

As her daughter, I know better.

I went to visit the grave the priesthood made for her, beside her father and then later her older brother and mother. I don't know how she felt about them as Therese Efren, but personally, I'm glad she's really buried in Kessex as Tess Montaine---bandit graverobbers and all. I wish I'd gotten the chance to know her better as the person she was, not just as my mother.

The closure I found here isn't as satisfying as I'd hoped; even if the Efren's had still been here, I don't think they would have wanted anything to do with me, and I definitely wouldn't have wanted anything to do with them. But I understand why Ma wanted me to learn her story anyway. I may not know exactly what I want, but I do know I don't want to end up like my uncle---dead and disgraced because he chose to lash out at the world rather than to learn and be better. I do know I want to learn from Ma's example; I want to use my magic to help people. (Maybe wandering adventurers are onto something, hah.)

For now, though, I've got a demon hunter to do some research on.'