Teresa Bleysmith

In 5th Edition continuity, Teresa Bleysmith is the darklord of Staunton Bluffs. Her backstory is largely the same as that of pre-5th edition Sir Torrence Bleysmith, whom she betrays in 5th edition canon. Teresa Bleysmith now exists as a ghost, damned to endlessly repeat the day of her betrayal.

According to the article "Legacy of Blood - The Bleysmith Family" from Quoth the Raven Issue 29, Teresa Bleysmith was fourth child of Count Rupert Bleysmith. She was a skilled combatant but nonetheless died defending Castle Stonecrest against the invading Avergnite army.

In the Darklord-MRA discord campaign (which was based on a somewhat careless reading of the paragraph description in Van Richten's Guide), Staunton Bluffs is portrayed as a "Groundhog Day" scenario, where time restarts every time Teresa dies, forcing her to relive the day when she betrayed her brother to an invading army. She departed Castle Stonecrest through a secret passage to meet with a small band of brigands, who followed the same passage back into the castle and eventually opened its gates to the army which had meanwhile marched across the small county, burning three small villages to the ground and slaughtering every inhabitant. The day-long massacre ends with the brigands killing not only Torrence but his children, whom Teresa genuinely loved, and she threw herself off a cliff to her death in grief; the Dark Powers denied her such an easy escape from the consequences of her short-sightedness, and now she mindlessly replays the day of her betrayal over and over.

Teresa Bleysmith appears as a black-haired woman of fairly average attractiveness, who would look ordinary enough if not for the marks of her dark bargain, which are invisible to herself and any other inhabitant of Staunton Bluffs. She smells permanently like smoke, and her tattered clothes look to have barely escaped a fire; a series of black tally marks appear on her skin as the inhabitants of Staunton Bluffs die one by one during the mercenaries' attacks, until by the end of the day she's almost completely black from head to toe with these "tattoos". Even at the start of the day, though, when nobody has yet died in the current loop, the smoke smell around her marks her guilt, as do the bloody tears that stream continuously from her eyes. Only at the end of a loop, when she takes her own life in guilt, is there any visible explanation for this blood, as her broken body lies at the base of the bluffs with a sharp, two-pronged rock impaling her through the back of the skull.

A haughty aristocrat with a profound sense of entitlement, Teresa doesn't consider herself malicious, but her incredible myopia meant that she simply did not consider that the brigands she betrayed her brother to, being murderous cutthroats as they were, would not stop with just one death, and might even kill her beloved nieces and nephews (to say nothing of the massive civilian casualties). It did not occur to her to specify that these children, or any other innocents, were not to be harmed; she naively believed that her betrayal would result in a quick and reasonably bloodless coup, instead of the scorched-earth invasion which happened. Since she is somewhat more morally lucid than the average Darklord, not being as willfully committed to Evil as your Count Strahds and Azalin Rexes, the Dark Powers simply deny her the ability to learn from her experiences and possibly repent. Instead, her memory is erased every time she dies, and she reverts to being the same spoiled and treacherous girl that she was at the start of the day, again freely and recklessly making the choices that caused hundreds of deaths in the real Staunton County. Interactions with player characters have the potential to "destabilize" the time loop and even possibly avert it, but in such an event the Dark Powers will most likely just reset the loop early, rather than allowing Teresa to actually reconsider her selfishly destructive choices. (Alternatively, if the time loop is broken, this can be used as an excuse to replace the "Groundhog Day" scenario with a more nearly RCS-canonical version of this Domain.)