“Why should I stop myself from using this gift to protect the things I hold dear? Anything I can do; everything I can do, without hesitation, I…”
A mighty magus who rarely smiles. Perpetually locked in a youthful appearance, it is still hard for her to conceal the aged weariness and experience reflected in her sharp eyes the color of chocolate. To this woman, there is a time for pleasure and a time for work, and pleasure is too rare a commodity. She has too many things to do, all for the sake of whatever duty she has appointed for herself at the time. It is precisely that single-mindedness that makes her both innocent and cruel at the same time. Elizabeth Báthory is both aware of her appealing looks yet uninterested in seducing others, and she might sometimes do the most provoking and enticing gestures without the slightest intention. For a person immortalized in legend as the cruelest of killers and her major lack of outward expression, she is a surprisingly outgoing, respectful and amiable person, as long as you don’t get in the way of whatever she is devoted to at the moment. She is undeniably vain, self-centered and narcissistic, perhaps because she truly believes that she and her work are the stuff of greatness and thus deserving of undivided care and attention. A person who does not share her highest opinion on her greatness and that of her magic will quickly find herself Elizabeth’s enemy. Furthermore, whatever chance she had of connecting with others was ruined by the mental disease that was the bane of her family—from an early age, like many among those of the blood of Báthory, Erzsébet suffered from terrible fits and bursts of uncontrollable rage and wanton savagery that more often than not was unleashed on hapless furniture. This only added to her reputation and to the public image that ruined her in the end.
Erzsébet was born into the renowned Hungarian magus family of Báthory, the second child of George and Anna. While she was diagnosed to have thirteen magic circuits, she lacked any of the standard Elemental Affinities, which rendered her incompatible with her family’s Earth-based tradition, even if she was born the heir. Instead, she was engaged to another magus of renown in the area, Ferenc Nádasdy, at the age of eleven. When they married three and half years later, Erzsébet moved to her new husband’s castle in Sárvár. What her husband never found out was that a year earlier his wife had a humble peasant take her virginity and impregnate her, merely as an experiment on the experience of pregnancy and motherhood. What could have easily become a terrible scandal in the midst of Hungarian aristocracy mattered little to the clinically cold young lady.
The couple did not spend much time together, what with Ferenc’s studies and later the war against the Ottomans. With all the time in the world and little to do beyond administrating her husband’s lands, Erzsébet took to the arcane arts that had been denied to her in her early years. Fortunately for her, her husband’s most basic literature was not ensorcelled or protected, allowing her to develop her magic pretty much in a self-taught manner. Erzsébet was determined and possessed an incredible tolerance to pain; failure only drove her to try harder to find the branch of magic she could excel at. She quickly learned that using her own blood, either as a reagent in potion-making or as a component in a ritual, almost always resulted in unexpected and rarely negative effects. Further research led her to conclude that her Elemental Affinity was likely to be ‘Life’, a variation of the Fifth Imaginary Element. Using her blood as the representation of the ‘flow of life’ and Alchemy as a basis, Erzsébet developed a thaumaturgical foundation and quickly grew in power and skill. It is truly lamentable that what could have become a potent Thaumaturgical System was completely lost with her passing.
At the same time her research became fruitful, the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire knocked at the front doors of her territory. Located precisely on the road to rich and wondrous Vienna, her husband’s Csejte Castle and surrounding village were most definitely relevant targets. Their numbers would never be sufficient but, if she could somehow use her Magecraft to protect her lands…
Erzsébet turned to her latest research: the creation of artificial Magic Circuits. Warfare was normally a job for men, but, if she could assemble a cabal of magi out of the otherwise hapless women, then they would have a better chance to prevent Csejte from ever falling!
It started with those she believed possessed magical talent. She would awaken their Magic Circuits and reveal to them the world of mysteries that fate would have otherwise denied them. Once she had a small group of followers, the collection of subjects for the trial implantations began in earnest.
There were successes, eventually; commendable achievements that speak volumes of Báthori Erzsébet’s genius at Thaumaturgy. However, before those successes, there were also many, many failures: pitiful young women who suffered horrible agony as they fell apart upon a lamentable attempt to contain an unnatural structure both the World and their own bodies earnestly rejected. At the beginning, Erzsébet lamented and wept over every single death. But she was a researcher with a mission; her devotion to her objective became reckless abandon and an unhealthy obsession. Every failure became a step closer to fruition. Her mind was able to justify her atrocious experiments, and she never looked back or regretted anything. The broken bodies and pools of blood left behind by the sacrificed test subjects were morbidly recycled and used for other avenues of research—their blood vessels and nervous systems embedded into the very walls of Csejte Castle and used as external channels for the conversion of ambient mana into prana to power the formidable defenses of the castle and the ever-increasing amount of magical experiments taking place in the dungeons Erzsébet had claimed as her workshop. In her determination to protect her land and its people, she almost dragged them to hell along with her.
The conclusion of this pitiful story is as well-known in the revealed history. The countless deaths consequence of Erzsébet’s unending research could not remain hidden forever, not even with Magecraft. The odd happenings at Csejte eventually caught the attention of the wrong people, and the brilliant and unhinged magus was brought to justice. While the Mages’ Association would have loved to get its hands on the records of her research, Erzsébet took down all of Csejte’s magical defenses before she was locked away, allowing everything to be destroyed by the angry mob which assaulted the underground dungeons in outrage and disgust at the public version of the grim happenings that took place in there. Demon summoning, bathing in blood for the sake of eternal youth—those are ridiculous lies, but they conceal a truth just as outrageous and further add to the weight of her legend. Regardless of why all those women died in the dungeons of Csejte Castle, Báthori Erzsébet has been immortalized as the most prolific female serial killer in history. A woman who started with the best of intentions, unhesitatingly stepping into a horrendous road to ruin.
Originally Posted by G-Man
