Veronique

Lilliend

Veronique was the daughter of an innkeeper in the domain of Lilliend in the Wartorn Cluster. Her family had saved up for three generations to be able to send a girl to one of the nation's vaunted boarding schools, apparently unaware that these served as the feeding grounds of the domain's vampiric Darklady, Camille Churnstone.

Veronique possessed a keen mind and a hunger for knowledge of the wider world, and was especially eager to learn practical matters such as maths and geography, which might serve her family when she returned after graduation. She was disappointed by the rote learning she was subjected to instead at the Athenaeum Boarding School for Young Ladies, especially as the school lacked a mathematics teacher at the time, the last one having died some time before Veronique even entered the school. Perhaps as a way to compensate for the lack of mental stimulation, the young girl acquainted herself with many of the school's hidden passages, left over from the time when the building had still been the fortress of an old-time warlord.

When Ciska arrived at the Athenaeum due to the manipulations of a noblewoman who thought to offer her up to Camille as a replacement for her own daughter, the scholar and the girl were forced to share a bed for warmth, and Veronique was later assigned to serve as Ciska's guide when she toured the school. Veronique was delighted to discover that Ciska was a font of knowledge on the very subjects she had always wished to learn more of. They spent quite some time in the evenings in discussion of maths.

After Ciska interrupted Camille's feeding on the students, the school's teachers locked all the girls in a room and blindsided Ciska, locking her in a hidden chamber. It was Veronique who showed her fellow students how to escape the school through the secret passages, after which she went back to free Ciska from her cell. Unfortunately, the two of them became lost while trying to escape themselves, and stumbled into Camille's own quarters in the hidden passages and rooms. While Ciska was able to retrieve her equipment, which had been stolen by the teachers and given to Camille, the vampire captured and assaulted Veronique before they could escape. With the vampire sucking her blood, Veronique turned a pleading gaze on Ciska. The scholar reacted by stabbing Veronique in the heart with her sword cane, ending both the pain of vampiric feeding and her life in one stroke.