Berielle

the Princess of the Damned

A five-hundred-year-old cradle-tale tells the story of a king seduced by a Succubus. As she drained his live the king's seventh daughter, the Virgin Princess, begged to monster to spare her father. She would give her own life to save him. This moved the normally heartless succubus to mercy, and she give the princess her wish. The tale has been told and retold over the centuries. The name of the king changes from nation to nation, and the princess is usually known as the Seventh Daughter, or the Virgin Princess. The succubus's name, however, never changes, Berielle. She is perhaps the most famous of these creatures, even in most hearing the tale think her a myth.

The Song of Berielle, as it is usually known, is an age-old tale used by the Trijan faith to teach the virtue of purity and value of self-sacrifice. There is some truth to the tale, though the details are wrong. Berielle was the princess, the seventh daughter of the king. There was no succubus, it was the Avatar of Nyx. The avatar had been fatally wounded by a hero, whose name is only remembered by Berielle. In her wraith Nyx, in the last moments of her avatar's life, slaughtered everyone in the castle. All but two lives remained, the hero and the princess who loved him, Berielle. She begged Nyx for the hero's life, offering her body as a new avatar. Nyx accepted, claiming it was not for mercy, but for the physical beauty of Berielle. Nyx wanted that beauty for herself. Nyx took Berielle's body as her avatar. She then killed the hero with the face of his true love.

As her origin might suggest, Berielle has never been devoted to Nyx like the other succubus are. She resents the Aggoles but is compelled to serve eternally. When she awoke as a succubus, she hated her fate. At first, she would not feed. Over time she weaked to the point her survival instinct overwrote her morals. Centuries have now passed, and she has come to accept and even embrace her nature. The Song of Berielle give one truth about succubus Berielle. She is a merciful murderer. Her kills are as gentle as possible, often draining the live from her victim so slowly they simply fall asleep, never to wake.

Berielle has a soft spot for princesses with tragic love lives. Nyx endlessly mocked her for being the guardian angel of broken girls. Her resentment for Nyx shields her from the torment. Many of these princesses are mentored by Berielle, and end up on the throne. This usually happened when the king and his sons all seem to die in their sleep of mysterious causes. As much as Berielle tries to help, she is a creature of darkness with a jaded view of the world. This bleeds into her mentorship of these young queens, making for harsh rulers.

Berielle finds herself often infatuated with adventurers. Especially strong knightly types. She will take them as lovers, believing this one will be the one for her. It can last a few years, even a decade, but inevitably she realizes that man is not her hero, the one whose name she never speaks. When she wakes from her fantasy, she killed the lover who is not her lost hero, putting the blame of her delusion onto him.

Berielle has a strangely unique feature in her appearance, whatever her form at the time. She is missing her small finger, what some call the pinky finger, from her right hand. Most think it was lost before she was transformed, because any damage done to a succubus will regenerate over time, without blemish Even limbs will come back once a succubus feeds. This seems a contradiction to what we know of Nyx, however. The aggoles is vain and does not take avatars with any blemish, especially one so blatantly 'unperfect'. Berielle, for her part, has told dozens of stories of what happened to her small finger. Perhaps one of them is true. Perhaps she doesn't even know herself. Like the name of her lost love, she will never tell the real story of her lost finger to any.