Sarah Hayes

**Sarah Hayes**' parents are dead. Not that she ever knew them. Her mentor, Rose Hayes, had replaced them for her from nearly the first day of her life. But now Rose is dead too. Very dead. Rose's friend, Valdemar Michaelis, who helped Sarah learn more about her, is dead as well. And Sarah has no friends; not a single friend in the entire world, though she might have if she hadn't been so very, very dumb.

Anyway!

Sarah "Redemption" Hayes is a Centurion by birth, and probably by fate, but not by training or self-identification. Born to a black slave in Zanzibar, she was raised from a very early age by Rose Hayes, a British Centurion who, disillusioned and embittered with their work, retired to become a wandering protector and healer in Africa. For the first twelve years of her existance in this world, that was the only life Sarah would know; travelling from city to city, from tribe to tribe, living off the land, protecting the defenseless, feeding the hungry, and healing the weak and weary, all in service to an altruism she strove to imitate and a guilt she could not understand (or likely notice). Both Rose and Sarah were hunters and healers; but where Rose was a superlative huntress, her healing gift was relatively minor. Sarah's, however, was much the greater, and it would be some time until she would be brought to understand that not only is having powers of that sort uncommon (after all, some African witch doctors could do uncanny things as well), but the force of the sort and on the scale she was imbued with was something entirely extraordinary, nearly unique. For a time, however, all she did was follow Rose's example in all things, and use this power to heal.

This existance was full of physical challenges and hardships, of course, but in other ways was simple and straightforward: Rose made all the hard and weighty decisions, and the tribesfolk mixed gratitude with reverence towards the legendary White Lady and her black daughter. Consequently, Sarah was not at all prepared for independence, or for the greater, rougher world beyond, the one Rose ran away from and wanted to forget. But the inevitable happened, and happened sooner than Rose could have expected. She could not heal the disease without dying; and so she died, and then was dead. But before she quite died, she instructed Sarah to travel with a Century Club member, one Richard Belfry to Britain and bring a letter (its contents unknown to Sarah but later revealed to be an urgent warning) to a man named John Spencer. The girl was the only one she could have trusted with it... not that she had that great of a choice in any case. The journey there (after Rose had died) was peaceful enough, filling Sarah with hope and wonder, especially as she grew interested in joining the Century Club herself. But once she arrived everything started to go wrong.

It began with the chaotic first night she spent in John Spencer's mansion, as it was infiltrated by spies and attacked by John's pet plant monsters gone wild; among others, Mr. Belfry was badly hurt, and she found that for all her magic there was nothing she could do to cure him from his strange injury. She lost track of him later, knowing only that he remained in very poor health. Later John Spencer had arrived with a group of other young Centurions; he received her letter, but refused to tell her what was in it, while the group was not quite as hospitable and friendly as she had expected. All that was nothing next to what was soon to come.

Despite being in no way obliged to do so, Sarah did as her Centurion nature required of her, accompanying the group of young Centurions when they were asked by Merlin to help him stop Dr. Methuselah, whose eerie minions have occupied Merlin's cave. Sarah's first taste of real combat against human-like opponents was not so much sobering as traumatising; as she could not bear to either kill them or be hurt herself, leading her, on one occasion, to run away while others were still fighting. Her cowardice and incompetence shamed her and vexed her allies. They might perhaps have been even less at ease with her had they seen the way Methuselah looked at her towards the end of the battle and what the Millenial had told her, about how well she will serve him. But an even more ominious and traumatic event occurred after this adventure, when Sarah, still lost and bereft about the death of her mentor, had ignorantly requested that Merlin bring her back to life as his boon, undeterred even by his previous unease with her and the revelation that Rose had in some way restricted her development. Enraged, the mad wizard reached into Sarah's mind and gave her a glimpse of her future, which was too terrible for her mind to keep; she forgot all about the actual revelation, but remembered the pain, shock and fear. This started her on a path to madness, to hatred of Merlin and also to reaching her full magical potential, as the restriction Rose had placed on her for her own safety was destroyed.

For a short time after that incident, Sarah was mute and listless. She gained a temporary reprieve when the Faerie Knight kindly bought this horrible memory from her, and was in a state to press on with her comrades towards Saint Haven... only to be hit again twice as hard in the Citadel, when she ran afoul of a magical fear-construct Madam Czarna made with the fairy's help and with her terror as material. Progressively more unstable, Sarah was found by some of Masque's men and brought before their leader, who she was told was the Centurions' main enemy in Saint Haven. Athough that was of course true, once encountered he appeared to be different from the evil villain she had imagined, and like her mentor before her she could not help but feel a certain sympathy for him and his goals - especially once he had revealed his old connection with Rose (in the process shocking her by revealing her mentor's past as an assassin). Although Juan Juarez, who had fought alongside the Centurions back in the cave, arrived in time to dissuade her from going over to Masque's side entirely, when her fellow Centurions arrived to stop him with lethal force Sarah first tried to save him and then had another mental breakdown, imagining herself to be Rose. It took both Juan and Jacob London, the latter applying his skills as a hypnotist, to put an end to this psychotic episode.

Although this was the nadir, after the battle was done and the dust had settled Sarah remained emotionally and mentally unstable, lashing out at allies, expecting betrayal and seeing Merlin's hand behind everything, filling her with obsessive hatred. Though some, like Manfred von Richthofen, had made an effort to be understanding, more of the Centurions either did not care or have had enough of her behaviour. After yet another such clash, Sarah simply ran away and was not seen in Britain since... though not before she received from Lin Tsao the rose quartz necklace that her mentor once gave to Masque.

As it happened, when Sarah ran away she was transported by some ineffable force into French Congo. Still deranged, she mistook a local priest for Merlin. After the attempted murder let to her being chased around by soldiers, Sarah escaped into the jungle, where she was haunted by prophetic dreams and nightmares concerning the Great War, the rise of the Black Sun (or was that Moon) and a strange, gray figure insisting that she needed to help it if she wished to see Rose Hayes again. While awake, however, she eventually (after weeks of wandering and occasionally interacting with the odd native tribe) encountered a miserable, insane old hermit who could not even give her his name, and was caught in a trap. After deciding, hesitantly, that he was probably not Merlin, she freed him and tried to help him and heal him. Shortly after, the ones who placed the trap had arrived: Captain Richard Kessler and his men, who soon explained to her that the man she just freed and helped evade them was a dangerous criminal known as the White Scorpion. Not quite convinced, she nevertheless promised to help them find him again and clear the matter up. As it happened, he found her first. Somewhat more healthy and sane now, he explained that he had known Rose... and was strongly affected when he learned that she had died. He revealed then that he had remembered his name, though with some difficulty: he was Henry Maurice Allard. Rose was his relative, and friend, and had left him there to die, or maybe just to starve and go insane. But now he was free, free to resume his life of crime - and Sarah was not going to stop him from doing what he willed.

Shocked and appalled, both at what she had done and at the man's horrible words, Sarah decided to hunt him down herself. But the old man was wily, and knew the jungle much better than even she did, ably exploiting this to avoid her again and again. Once more Sarah decided to emulate Rose - this time Rose the merciless bounty hunter, more imagined than actually known to her. She pursued obsessively and recklessly, not bothering to either coordinate with would-be allies like Kessler or gather more information on her quarry and destination. Sarah was skillful enough to survive her own monomaniacal stupidity, but it brought her no closer to Allard. Instead it was Allard who took the initiative, taunting and attacking her in her own dreams, only stopped by the intervention of what she would later recognise as Methuselah.

As her chase brought her into German East Africa, Sarah encountered an anarchist-affiliated tribe led by "Masque", who turned out to be a man named Junius Tendaji, one of Valdemar's sometimes lieutenants. He and his people took the news of Valdemar's demise bitterly yet calmly. While with them, Sarah both learned more about the circumstances of her adoption... and something else: the existance of Julius Michaelis, her twin brother raised by the original Masque, as well as other children he took in and brought to safety. Even then, however, she kept her eyes on the prize, requesting Tendaji's assistance in stopping Allard. The anarchist chieftain agreed, on the condition of her help in healing one of his subordinates, Hakim, who had been injured by a strange weapon in Egypt. His wound emanated an energy not unlike the Black Sun in her dreams, and it was beyond her ability to fix; but once more she was assisted by Michaelis, and so with great effort managed to save him. In gratitude, Tendaji put her in touch with a British Centurion, Horace Wailor, who revealed that Allard had already turned himself in at Zanzibar.

Certain, for once correctly, that this was some kind of trick, Sarah insisted on seeing him, annoying Horace and his intelligence unit in the process with her sadistic suggestions and pushy attitude. Nevertheless they obliged her, bringing her to the secret dungeon of the Sultan of Zanzibar, now repurposed as a secret British military prison. There, she found Allard, who was relaxed and riled her up easily, without revealing his plans. The beginning of a sudden Indian Army mutiny aboveground made Sarah and Wailor decide to quickly move Allard to the more remote Prison Island, fearing that he might be responsible for the uprising through his dream-invading talents. Along the way through the underground passage, they were attacked by traps and rampant magical guardians, convincing Sarah to try and go up to stop the mutiny and allow for a safer route. When this failed completely, she came back to find that the little prison convoy had been scattered or slaughtered, magical constructs were rampant, and Allard was on the loose again, aided by some of the guards. Her sanity starting to slip again in this chaos, Sarah chased after Allard one last time, narrowly avoiding death - with the help of a mysterious archer. It was during the final confrontation that this archer finally showed up in person, stunning both Sarah and Allard. She revealed herself to be none other than Rose Hayes - only, as it turned out, from the past. Her part having been done and Allard having been stopped, she was removed again and replaced by Methuselah, who took Allard into custody and patiently explained to Sarah what he had done.

Then he made her an offer. If she worked for him, let him study her power, and helped him in a few matters that would not go against her own code, he would bring Rose Hayes back to life when he had the power to do so, and also lock away Allard in the safest place of all. Sarah immediately accepted.

And took another step on the road foreseen by Merlin.