It was a quiet night. The city was asleep, the air was still, and even the animals seemed unnaturally silent. It was the worst possible night for Marianne. With nothing happening, there was nothing to distract her from her thoughts. What's wrong with me!? Why did I do that!? She was rapidly spiraling, and sensible thoughts were becoming less and less common. She was in despair as she believed she had ruined the best job she'd ever had.
Marianne was sat on the roof Tavanor manor, directly above the window to Verena's room. She had been there since nightfall. She didn't know what to do, and she was desperate for a distraction. Fortunately for her, such a distraction soon arrived.
The simple bracelet she wore on her upper arm began to emit a gentle warmth. She knew, immediately, what it was, and she could feel herself being drawn to a location on the other side of the city. She let out a long sigh as relief washed through her. Marianne was never very good with people. The only ones who she had ever really felt comfortable with were the vampires she had served for years.
This, however, was something she was very good at.
As she moved through the city, she felt the comfortable embrace of darkness. The familiar presence of her magic made the night into a welcome friend. With her shadows wrapped around her, she glided, silently, through the streets. She quickly fell into a familiar rhythm as her mind drifted back to simpler days. It's fine, Marianne. You lived this life for years. You can go back to it again. As she approached her destination, she took a glance at her stat sheet, reminding herself of powers she'd used only occasionally, in the past several years.
Name: Marianne Whispwind
Race: Human
Gender: Female
Age: 35
Titles(35): [Master Assassin], [Friend of the Darkness], [The Black Death], …
Class: Living Shadow
Level: 38
Strength: 18(11+7)
Dexterity: 99(51+48)
Agility: 74(32+42)
Vitality: 30(18+12)
Intelligence: 36(20+16)
Will: 42(19+23)
Charisma: 53(18+35)
Arcane: 40(8+32)
Passive Skills(13): [Umbral Heart], [Power in Death], [Masterful Stalker], …
Active Skills(7): [Shadow Walk], [Aura of Silence], [Phantom Strike], …
After so long, Marianne had been concerned that she wouldn't be able to readjust to her old life, but the moment she entered the mindset of an assassin, once again, her power felt as natural as breathing. The darkness was her life for so many years, and it felt like coming home when she returned to it.
*****
Marianne spent her youth in darkness, and when she reached adulthood, she had the rare privilege of immediately unlocking her class. Her class, [Living Shadow], had a fairly straightforward, if rather unfortunate, unlock condition. All that was required of her was to spend at least a week, straight, in total darkness. Sadly, that was a circumstance she was more than familiar with, across her childhood, and as such, she had fulfilled that condition long before her system unlocked. The skills she was given at level 1, however, were more than enough to free her from that life, before things got worse, as they were bound to do, once she was no longer a child.
[Shadow Walk](Active Skill): Become one with the darkness, melding with your shadow to pass through any physical obstacle in your way. (Does not bypass magical barriers)(Duration & Cooldown improve based on your Agility stat)
[Umbral Heart](Passive Skill): Your affinity with the dark lets you draw strength from it. Your shadow is animate, and bends to your will. You can command your shadow to act independent of you, or shape its form to act as a weapon, or tool (Precision, range & maximum volume of solidified shadow improved based on your Dexterity stat)
The people who made her youth Hell met their end by the edge of a blade, formed from the very darkness they had consigned her to. However, it was those very deaths that illuminated her path, in life. Of the skills she was offered, when those kills granted her her first few levels, one stood out as significantly more powerful than the rest. A skill that would singlehandedly shape the next ten years of her life.
[Power in Death](Passive Skill): Whenever you kill an intelligent being without being detected, you gain a permanent +1 bonus to the highest stat of the slain individual.
An assassin. She had no family, no connections, and nothing holding her down. Her class was seemingly purpose-built for the occupation, and she had been handed one of the strongest skills she had ever heard of, which practically screamed "assassin". Stat-boosting skills were already seen as incredibly valuable, but something like this? A progressive, permanent boost, with no upper limit? It was practically legendary.
Two-hundred and fifteen people. That was her all-time kill count. Because of her [Power in Death] skill, she was meticulous in her work, never allowing herself to be seen during a job. She had never failed an assignment, and every single kill she accomplished was done so in such a way as to meet the conditions of the skill. Because of that, it was extremely easy to keep track of her body-count. All she had to do was add up the bonuses she had to each of her stats, and she had her total. Seven people with Strength as their highest stat, forty-eight with Dexterity, forty-two with Agility, etc. Every notch on her blade was a permanent increase to her capability, making the next notch that much easier to make.
For ten years, she killed. Her affinity for shadows, and her terrifying efficiency, earned her a nickname in the criminal underworld. A name so notorious it even appeared on her stat sheet, under her titles, an occurrence that was usually saved for major positions of authority with global significance, such as the king of an entire country, or the high-priest of a major religion. She became known as [The BlackDeath], named for the deadly plague that once ravaged the land, due to her power over the darkness, itself.
It was near the end of those ten years that she first met the man who would change her life. Count Dominik Tavanor was an imposing man, and he led his family with the merciless efficiency one would expect of both his race, and his position. He employed Marianne's services several times during the last year and a half of her time as an assassin. She never consciously thought of him as anything but another employer, but she started to naturally gravitate toward him. His bearing, his personality, and the way he treated her left an imprint she couldn't ignore. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he called her in for a "job" and simply asked her to sit, and talk.
He told her he could tell she wasn't happy with the life she was living. He offered her something more. A real job, and more importantly, a life not defined by death. He said she could start over. [The Black Death] could disappear, and she would never have to kill again, if she didn't want to.
At first, she thought he was mad. She had everything she needed. She had money, power, and a line of employment that would continue to grow her strengths for as long as she lived. She dismissed him, out-of-hand, and she left in a surge of darkness.
But his words stayed with her. As she killed her next target, she recognized the hollow feeling inside her, the feeling that Count Tavanor had noticed, even before she did. She tried to ignore it, telling herself she was just letting the man's words get to her. However, the feeling stayed. After her second kill, since that meeting, she was no longer able to ignore it. She tried to convince herself that she was simply forgetting what had gotten her to where she was, and she just needed to remind herself of the truth. After her third kill, a man who was just like the people who "raised" her, she accepted it. She wasn't happy. She hadn't been for years.
It took one month for Marianne to return to Count Tavanor. When he walked into his office to find her sitting by his desk, there wasn't a single bit of surprise on his face. He just walked around the desk, sat down, and asked for her name. He gave her a job, as a maid. He gave her the one thing she'd truly needed, and the one thing she'd never had: A home.
It was at that time, as she started working at Tavanor manor, that the man who changed her life introduced her to the woman who changed her everything. Verena Tavanor, sixty-three years old, when they met, was the most inspiring person she had ever known. Sixty-three may have been young, for a vampire, whose aging slowed, nearly to a halt, after they fully matured, but it was very old for a classless individual.
Despite that, she was one of the most accomplished members of the nobility, in the entire kingdom of Agoria. She was progressive, determined, and truly unstoppable, when she put her mind to a project. Under her guidance, and by her father's will, the territory under house Tavanor flourished. Their profits rose, their people prospered, and Duke Edwin Maurice had even considered appointing Count Tavanor as his successor, before the duke's own son was born. However, despite it all, Verena couldn't see, in herself, what everyone else saw in her. All her accomplishments were overshadowed, in her mind, by her failure to unlock her class, her difficulties with her temper, and her insecurities about her body.
Marianne's favorite times, working for house Tavanor, were those during which she was attending to the young vampire. Marianne felt like she could truly be herself, around Verena. She was smart, witty, and her temper was not nearly as bad as she'd been led to believe. Although, the part about her temper was something that was only true when she was around Marianne. The assassin-turned-maid had an uncanny ability to calm her lady with her presence alone. For this reason, less than a year after she started working for them, the Count appointed Marianne as his daughter's personal lady-in-waiting. It was the happiest time in Marianne's life.
For over seven years, she served the Tavanors, six and a half of those years spent as Verena's lady-in-waiting. Then, in a single moment of foolishness, she had ruined it all.
*****
Marianne was pulled from her reminiscence at the painful reminder of what had brought her to her current situation. She had lost control. She had struck her mistress. Marianne knew, now, that Verena's temper was no exaggeration. The maid was aware that she was special, for some reason, but she was so sure that she had reached the limit. There was no way Verena would let something like that slide. Marianne knew she had gone too far. If she ever returned, she would be subjected to the full force of her lady's wrath. She was wrong, of course. Verena wanted nothing more than to have her trusted maid back by her side, but Marianne didn't know that.
Marianne was trapped in the past. Her actions had evoked memories of her childhood, of years of pain and misery, but she had been on the other side of the violence, this time. She had hit Verena, just like she had once been hit, and she was absolutely certain that Verena felt the same way about her as Marianne had felt about the ones who raised her. There was no logic in the thought, but trauma rarely cares for what makes sense.
She had panicked. She had run. And when she came to the conclusion she'd reached, she went to some of her old contacts in the underbelly of the city. She stopped being Marianne, and [The Black Death] was reborn. Eight hours, that's all it had taken for the first person to reach out. That's what the bracelet on her arm was for. A select few people, who she trusted not to waste her time, had access to a method to send a call to the enchanted band, alerting her of a worthwhile potential employer. That was where she was headed, now. Someone wanted somebody dead, and even seven years later, she was still the best of the best in the art of the kill.
As she emerged from the darkness of an empty alley, wrapped in the darkness that had been her home for so long, Marianne silenced her emotions, preparing herself to return to a life of death.
Or so she thought.