Constance Ashton

## Overview

*"Curs'd are we who wander and weep so unravell'd from the threads of life."*

***U***nbecoming and puzzlingly reserved, Constance hails from the bracken-curtained morass of westernmost Alenthyl; Wealdmire, a rarely-travelled swamp that makes up part of the coast of Westershire, and both her appearance and upbringing are testament to an oft-forgotten wisdom: books should not be judged by their covers. Her meager beginnings made way for a life of willing servitude to the wealthy elite of the country, having managed multiple noble estates in her time within the Empire before she departed its shores and charted her course for Deurlyth in order to find more unclaimed territory for her housekeeping abilities.

Not limited, however, to just cleaning and management, Constance bears an intrinsic tether to the forces of life and death themselves and a corresponding interest in them. This is explicable by any within Novania who read the 'anonymous' propaganda spread about its streets by one Kathrin Ziegler, which ousted quiet Constance for her true nature: a necromancer of one of the highest degrees.

## Appearance

Verily meek and non-threatening in her form, one glance at Constance makes it quite clear to the onlooker how ill-fashioned she is for physical endeavors of any sort or labors beyond the most menial. Bearing a full figure for a woman of her exceedingly average height of sixty-six inches, she is describably *soft* and *dainty* in appearance, oft having her maid confidants dress her in gowns and garments that favor form over function. In fact, one could ascertain she'd never fought a battle or come close to danger in her life rather easily: and they would not be entirely wrong. Most telling, however, of her physical ineptitudes is her obvious *blindness*.

Her eyes (if left without her usual dark lace blindfold, a somewhat amusing display of her aesthetic tastes) are a cloudy and vacant grey. Gazing within them is comparable to fruitlessly staring into an expanse of fog during a dreary morning on the open ocean, and they leave her just as sightless. She inherited the condition from her family's own bad blood: her grandmother and her own grandmother both suffered from cataracts starting in their early adulthood, an ailment their lineage always has believed to be a part of their necromantic heritage.

Her hair is ironically simple in cut: a clean mahogany brown, it is kept neatly-trimmed at chin height and usually held up a bit higher than that by an ornate barrette in her hair. Her complexion is clear, fair, and delicate, a credit to her pampered and reserved lifestyle.

If one were to ever get a look at the bare flesh of her arms and back, they'd get a rare opportunity to gaze upon an arrangement of bizarre and otherworldly inscriptions tattooed into her skin with pale green ink. Upon her arms are two matching sets of runes and geometric patterns, and on her back is what can only be described as something of a holy text scrawled in a foreign and primitive-looking alphabet.

## Background

*"My life is dreadfully ironic."*

Born and raised both in and outside of a secluded cottage in the heart of boggy Wealdmire, Constance was the second child to enter her family; her brother Renault preceded her by eight years. Her parents were Beckham and Lillian Ashton, a simple couple known to their neighbors (though it should be said the nearest homestead was five miles out) as reclusive, but content. Not a single trouble (or much of anything) came from them, and they quite liked it that way.

The family's living came from the plentiful fishing near to their home on the morass. Daily, Beckham and young Renault would cast their nets and haul the morning's catch down the coast some in order to sell it at one of Westershire's dockside markets: Crabs and catfish have a robust, meaty flavor favored by the inlanders. And while the men of the household shipped off downriver, as a young girl, Constance and her mother would weave nets from hemp and the abundant brush of their surroundings so that they may go to market the very next day. Yet when night fell and all sorts of darkness descended upon the marsh and it became too dangerous to go outside, Constance would play her fiddle.

It was a beautiful thing: carved from ashwood and polished to a cleanly luster, its surface only marked by the numerous intricate engravings and pictographs that the youthful violinist spent so much of her childhood trying to decipher. It was a gift from her parents on the day that marked her sixth year: “This was your grandmother’s and then mine, Constance.” her mother Lillian said as she opened the aged and battered case. “You’ll practice it, just like I did, and make splendid music.” From then on her evenings were consumed by her rehearsals; not a single night went by that she did not bring bow to string and creak out her amateurish notes, each session bringing another few hours’ worth of expertise. Her seemingly intrinsic adeptness with the instrument was only eminent of her later mastery of the violin, something Constance would years later credit to her absolute obsession with the simple fiddle. Life in Wealdmire had been horribly boring up until that birthday, and to her the violin became a tool of creation: just as any god might sculpt man from earth and water, so did Constance sculpt resplendent music from wood and string in the coming years.

It is, however, not without truth that most associate the violin’s baleful weeping with preceding tragedy: its sound a sort of omen, a single crow coming before the flock. So too was Constance’s the sign of a coming melancholy, as when she was only eight years of age her dearest older brother Renault succumbed to the choking water and grime of the glades’ depths. Her father, upon returning that morning quite early without his son, could hardly recount a sentence of the grisly tale without his voice buckling with his own anguish. He eventually managed to speak: Young Renault had carelessly allowed his foot to be caught in the loop of a net, and when cast into the bog it had taken him with it. Tangled in weave and the twisting, gnarled roots of the mangrove trees, he had been unable to bring his head above the water and his father could not dislodge him. He had taken his last breaths with his hand clawing above the water, desperate for some divine providence that might save him from his imminent fate, because his father could not.

The death only spurred the girl onward; she spent less and less time with her parents, most evenings skipping supper and locking herself within her bedroom to play her violin until her fingers became too sluggish with the tightening clutch of slumber for her to play any longer. This continued for years, and she ignored every single one of her parents’ protests until the eve of her twelfth birthday. She, in her melancholy, went striding through the morass: blackened by night, she brought only her lantern, her violin, and her waning spirit along the pathway leading to the fishing dock. She sat upon it, under the moon, and began to play a composition she had been crafting for the last four years: a morose tribute to her lost brother, a sonata dedicated to the pain, sadness, and solitude his death had brought upon her. It would be there, upon the dock, under the moon, where she saw Renault once more; a spectral figure, shimmering and fading in perpetuity, a spirit barely hanging on to the threads of the material world. He spoke not, and neither did she: she simply continued to play, and he danced, and after the song was gone so was he. Fear was beyond her at this point: she calmly told her parents what happened, and they calmly took her away from Wealdmire and on a journey inland to meet her uncle.

Edward Renfield was her mother’s brother. The two had been close as children, but grew distant when she left the family home in order to pursue a musician’s life on the road and eventually met Beckham and started a family in quiet Wealdmire. Edward, however, had remained in the Renfield’s manor: a large and imposing estate in northwest Westershire, its best years were quite clearly behind it. The gardens were overgrown and long reclaimed by the the plantlife, the pond was dry, the windows were dirty, but it was all so new and wonderful to Constance despite the house’s scars. When they arrived, Edward greeted them and took them inside. She was ushered to explore the upper floors of the manor while her parents had a particularly urgent and hushed conversation with her uncle. There wasn’t much of particular note: she did, however, find her mother’s old bedroom. The bed was still neatly made and quilted, and in the center of the room was an empty music stand. Eventually the adults finished speaking, but by then it had nearly struck midnight and her birthday was just about over. Her mother and father said their good nights and ascended the stair to their bedroom, but just before she climbed her uncle Edward bid her come over to the cellar door. He slipped a wrought iron key within the lock, gave it a firm turn, and led her down the old stair by the dim glow of his candle. It would be there, within that cellar, that her life would be given new orchestration: and she would readily take part in the symphony.