Evelyn

Evelyn was born to a noble house whose banners fell during a brutal war, losing her family when their castle was put to siege and forcing her to flee alone into a world without mercy. Captured by bandits and later freed by chance when a mercenary company destroyed the caravan, she was raised among sellswords, learning discipline, restraint, and how to survive through skill rather than hope, eventually becoming a formidable warrior known for precision and silence. During a later contract, she crossed paths with a drow witch devoted to the Spider Goddess, who branded her with a living curse—a skull crowned with spider-like limbs etched into her throat—binding her voice to dark divine power so that words spoken in anger or malice could bring harm, a mark meant to claim her soul. Fearful of her own speech, Evelyn withdrew into near silence, yet over years of grim endurance she learned to channel the curse rather than succumb to it, drawing shadow-bound abilities through the mark: summoning spider-like shades, manifesting blackened armor and a pact-forged blade, scaling sheer surfaces with unnatural ease, and wielding a corrosive blue flame born of abyssal influence, each use causing the mark to spread and threatening to pull her closer to something monstrous. Refusing to serve the goddess while unable to sever the connection, Evelyn walks a narrow path between resistance and darkness, living and working alone as a feared witch-knight and hexblade warlock, known as much for her beauty as for the quiet danger surrounding her, until her isolation is disrupted by an unexpected encounter with a traveling scholar and artificer from the East whom she rescues from cultists tied to her past; initially accepting his coin only to pursue answers about her curse, she finds her carefully built walls slowly worn down by his curiosity, warmth, and lack of fear, discovering in his steadfast admiration an unfamiliar and perilous reason to keep fighting the curse.