| abstract | - The forested Dukedom of Parravon borders on the lands of the Fay, who steal away children gifted with magical talent. Madame Kalfon’s parents, seeing the dishes mysteriously leap into the air and then shatter when their baby daughter was in tears, sought to hide her and her obvious gift from the Fay by abandoning her in the mountains, their peasant heads full of nonsense fairytales about kindly hermits who took in foundlings. In a way, the fairytale came true.[1a] Heloise Kalfon was taken in and given her name by a band of Mutants living in the Grey Mountains. A peaceful group, they treated her well despite her lack of deformities and the strange things that happened whenever she threw a tantrum.[1a] Eventually, these Mutants came to the attention of the Necrarch Chigaru, who was investigating the ruins of an infamous castle from his base in the mountains. Chigaru took the outcasts in and provided shelter and food in return for loyal service. Seeing the potential in Heloise and believing her youth would make her easy to control, he made her his get, though she was only twelve years old. This did not do much for her sanity. Neither did watching as Chigaru used the techniques he had learned from a grimoire looted from the castle to further mutate her surrogate family into yet more twisted forms until their bodies broke from the strain. Heloise spitefully pushed her father-in-darkness from the tower for revenge, and the hated man fell onto a spike, impaling him so that he was trapped helpless until the first rays of the sun scoured his presence from existence.[1a] Taking the name “Madame Kalfon” to make her seem more grown-up, the diminutive Necrarch took over Chigaru’s tower and made its wondrous toys her own. Over the years, she has mastered the techniques of creating new life with a childlike glee, pulling beings apart and putting them back together in unusual combinations as she would with any doll. Chigaru’s tower is now full of the precocious girl’s playthings and friends.[1a] Madame Kalfon knows why her parents abandoned her and nurses a special grudge towards the Fay for stealing children like her away. Looking down from her tower towards the Wildwood at the eastern end of Athel Loren she saw a means of satiating her need for revenge and her constant curiosity. Madame Kalfon captured a swarm of the Fay nature spirits called Spites and began using them in her experiments.[1a] Although they were spirits, they were not Ghosts and could not be controlled by the usual necromantic techniques. The spirits had physical forms, but shortly after they died, these forms dissolved, making it impossible to reanimate them. She experimented obsessively until she struck the right combination of preserving chemicals and limb replacement to create something solid enough to be reanimated. And so another form of life was conquered and added to her mountaintop menagerie.[1a][1b]
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