**Backstory**: The fifth child, but first daughter, of a herding family in Wicholm, a farming village nestled among the Drachenheim foothills, the healthy, fit, and endlessly curious Cierra didn't take long to be identified as a Nightwalker. Wicholm, and a few other villages in the region, were safekept by a pair of Nightwalkers, Alen and Hala, a wedded couple. Though they were often away on patrols, chasing the trail of some creature or another before it could reach the village walls, they were just as often seen about town, their very aura of power and bravery energizing the people. Children clung to them and begged for stories of their adventures, while the adults toasted their health.

And, as had been arranged years before when her heritage was noted, Cierra was apprenticed to them the day she was old enough to hold a gun. Moving from her family's tumbledown house to the pair's home on the edge of the village, the ensuing several years were a blur of long days and longer nights. Learning the lore of the beasts, to make and set traps, to stalk them silently, and when she was ready, to kill. All the knowledge a Nightwalker needs to defend their home.

She, in turn, gave them all she had. She loved them dearly, especially Hala, the big sister she'd never had, and she threw herself wholly into her training. Her fervour for experimentation only grew with her, and in her precious free moments, her mind kept working, turning out strange, wondrous, and occasionally even useful devices from salvage and scrap, and yet most of of them functioned only for her, falling to pieces the moment they left her.

Alen's lessons were solely practical, but before sleep each night, Hala lectured her in what she called the duties of a Nightwalker; to bring light back into people's lives, by being a figure larger than life, to give of yourself until there's nothing left. Cierra, a young girl struggling to see herself as such a figure, took to dressing up for the part; she began calling herself Cardinal in public, and like an actor in a play, she slowly mastered her part.

And so the years passed. Until,

**Tome Manifestation**:

The sallow figure came to town one day, more than a decade later, pushing a cart full of ancient books, among them an eldritch-looking tome. Alen, suspecting it for a spellbook, bought it, that it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands, and, after showing it to the other two, they planned to lock it up until the chance to have someone more knowledgable look at it could arise. But, as always, the tome had other plans.

Having touched him, its influence tugged at Alen for days, weeks. It twisted subtly at his mind, disgusing its will as his own, and he took to carrying it with him in secret, convincing himself that it was better guarded this way.

Perhaps it was random chance, or perhaps like calls to like. What they thought was an average skirmish was on the verge of becoming a tragedy; despite wounds that should have killed it a half-dozen times over, a bloated sac of a creature with too many legs like swords, and a tongue like a whip had Cierra and Hala struggling in its grasp, bound and impaled.

A desperate Alen opened the tome.

When the women had healed enough to see again, one creature remained. It wasn't the one they'd been fighting. A monster with a body like a headless centaur, 'wings' of writhing, dripping tendrils, feet like a cat's with claws as long as swords, and uncountably many arms. With a gurgling scream, it turned towards them, the ground shattering asunder as unearthly hands reached through to grab at them.

Hala bade Cierra to run while she drew the creature away, that finding the book merchant was their only chance to stop this thing, the only way to get Alen back. Hala said she'd be fine. They both knew it was a lie. And Cierra ran.