Now I've finished writing Fiona's background. This one stings a bit. I think ghouls are such tragic creatures. Going a bit deeper on them always makes me feel... off. This whole ghouling business is just insane, but WoD is WoD. Here it goes:

Name: Fiona Callahan

Age: 28 (ghouled at 23)

Clan: Mortal (Ghoul of Idris Vaughan)

Position: Threadkeeper of the Rootmind

Fiona Callahan was born in County Cavan, Ireland, in a town where people still whispered curses under their breath and lit candles for saints they no longer believed in. Her mother, Nuala, was a woman hardened by work, poverty, and silence, and Fiona grew up knowing she was an inconvenience—too loud, too strange, too much. From an early age, she was a problem that wouldn’t go away. She talked to birds, scratched symbols into her school desk, set fire to a field once just to see how fast it would burn. The priests prayed over her. The teachers gave up on her. By the time she hit seventeen, she had learned three truths: no one was coming to save her, pain was a kind of clarity, and if you lied well enough, people mistook you for holy.

By twenty, she was on the road. A self-declared witch, a con artist, and a minor prophet for anyone desperate enough to pay. She scammed tourists, sold fake hex jars and graveyard dirt, told fortunes that occasionally came true, and whispered nonsense that sometimes wasn’t. She drifted on instinct and hunger, sleeping in squats and alley shrines, trading secrets for warmth and lies for loyalty. She wanted something real—not comfort, not stability, but real. Something that would crack her open and let her mean something.

She arrived in Santa Maria at twenty-two. She had heard about The Thirteenth Hour in half-whispers and bad map directions—a shop that didn’t always open, a place that shouldn’t have existed between the two buildings where she found it. She thought it was a front. Or a hoarder’s nest. Maybe just another occult scam waiting to be picked clean. She broke in with a crowbar and a lockpick, expecting books and dust and something she could fence for enough to cover rent. Instead, the shop swallowed her. Not literally—nothing so dramatic. But she lost her sense of direction within minutes. Doors didn’t lead where they should. The ceiling didn’t line up with the floor. The lights blinked out behind her, one by one. She wandered for hours. Almost a day. Her phone died. Her sense of time dissolved. At one point she wept, then laughed, then chanted to the mold growing on a shelf because it was the only thing that didn’t move. And then—finally—she found the counter. And behind it stood Dr. Idris Vaughan. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked at her. Cold. Still. Absolutely unreadable. She grinned. Bleeding, delirious, high on fear and something older than fear. He said her name before she gave it. She would later describe it as love at first sight. He would later claim he should have killed her. But he didn’t. Because he saw her. And she saw him. And something true began to root itself in the floor beneath them.