Capt. Hazel Morrison

"This ain't some hillbilly hedge witch or some two-bit conclave bureaucrat. This is Captain Hazel Morrison, Heroine of Soissons, the meanest arcanist in the whole goddamn Allied sector. This kid goes around looking for danger like a junkie looks for dope."

"You sound sweet on her."

"Sure, poke fun all you want, but I ain't gonna be the one in that gal's sights. Find yourself another sap; I'm out. If you had any brains in your head, you'd be out, too. Because if you go down to that college, you'll come back in a matchbox."

-Alleged conversation between Cincinnati bootlegger Mickey Donovan and George "Gorge" Cooper; September 8, 1921. Cooper would be killed the following day in Autumn Grove. His remains were incinerated in the altercation and could not be recovered.

Sorceress Capt. Hazel Morrison CE CB, MiD (Mentioned in Dispatches) ; aka “The Bloodstaff; the Red Sorceress” (ca. 6/B/Gravity, Seven Towers Conclave). Congressional Order of Valor (COV). Captain, Company A 1st Brigade, American Arcane Expedition, Western Front.

Hazel Morrison’s life has been marked by a long string of rejections, loneliness, and hurt. Hazel started life as a Type B mundane, but in college she contracted therametamorphic disease (TMD) from a romantic partner, and then Jensen’s Consumption as a secondary infection. When she was told she wouldn’t live to see forty-five, she joined the American Arcane Expedition as a 2nd Lieutenant in late 1917 and was sent to France, where she expected a quick death. Hazel figured she had nothing - and nobody - to lose anyway. Initially she was attached to the British Royal Sussex Regiment (Company C, 14th Battalion) at Ypres in the summer of 1918 (where she was mentored/apprenticed by Col. Sir Percy Sutherland, who called her his “young Yankee maide-de-camp”). Sutherland respected and cared for Hazel, who became a sort of surrogate daughter, and groomed her for command. At Ypres, Hazel won the respect of her British comrades for her coolness under fire and effective leadership, and was mentioned in dispatches. Hazel was ordered back to her US unit days before Sutherland could win her an officer’s commission in the Royal Sussex, but was promoted to 1st Lt. after her service with the British army.

  In July, the 1st Arcane was secretly assigned to the American 1st Div. sector for the coming Aisne-Marne Offensive. On July 18, Hazel’s patrol was ambushed and she lost her commanding officer and friend, Capt. Freddy “Rocky” Rockwell. This affected Hazel deeply. She'd never been truly comfortable in the role of command; she felt personally responsible for every hardship and danger and wound and death her soldiers suffered. Now a captain and a company commander, Morrison decided to defy orders and attack the German-held Fort #7 at Soissons on the American left flank. Hazel had seen an American infantry battalion (from the 2nd Div.) cut to pieces trying to take Fort #7 with no support from brigade or division. Hazel had "snapped a bit", as Colonel Sutherland liked to say, and decided to take it upon herself to neutralize Fort #7 before any more Americans could be killed from the flank or before any more wasteful attacks could be made on its fearsome slopes. She was an arcanist; she had resources at her disposal that a regular infantry officer did not. Morrison scaled the heights with a small hand-picked team (really, a few young, fanatically loyal soldiers in her company threatened to mutiny if she went alone, so she agreed to take them along), then fought the feared German ace battlemage Colonel Klaus von Schwarzenheim and killed him; von Schwarzenheim gave her his highly-advanced Bloodstaff and told her to “end this madness before we all die”. Hazel took 82 prisoners and used the staff to cast an inverted gravicentric pulse to obliterate the fort. Received Congressional Order of Valor and the title Sorceress. Reflecting on her time on the Western Front, Hazel bitterly remarked, “Every time I tried to get myself killed, they just kept giving me more goddamn medals.”

  On her return home, she joined the Seven Towers Conclave as a field agent and was assigned to Autumn Grove to monitor the Blackstead area and the Knights of Augustine. In September of 1921, she rescued Sadie Van Tassel from the Knights and helped bring Courtney Ashford home from unlawful banishment, then went to war against the Knights. She helped Courtney and her friends form the Keepers of the Veil, assisted them in forming a blood covenant, trained them into a lethal and effective combat unit, and led them to victory against both the Knights of Augustine and against Howgrave’s incursion out of the Blackstead Forest. Hazel is far prouder of training the girls - and fighting alongside them - than anything she did during the war.