History

Gabrielle Chattan was born into a family of wealthy plantation owners in the American South. The pressures and strain of dealing with the American Civil War (lasting from 1861 to 1865 CE) proved to be too much for her to handle, allowing the Curse to manifest. In 1863 CE, she changed into a black leopard for the first time.

Over the next three years, she thought she was gaining a measure of control over her transformations. However, by early 1866, she realised that she was wrong. She began a diary chronicling her struggles, later to be called the Diary of the Mad Witch, on the seventh of May of that year.

By the eighteenth of May, she found that her bloodlust was demanding people as prey. She killed at least two people by July. One, a boy named Emmanuel who was the son of a freed slave, she had loved dearly. She grew daily more horrified as her bloodlust increased.

However, on the third of June, her grandfather (her father having died in the Civil War) gave her a book, the Grimoire of Eleanor Chattan, which had been in the family for generations. She hoped to find an answer to her questions and a cure for the Curse in its pages. As she worked through the Latin and Gaelic spells, she copied some of them into her Diary, including the spell that allowed access to Eleanor’s pocket dimension through a standing inter-dimensional portal.

By the end of June, she had read the Grimoire. She had found no solution to her Curse, but only horror. She begged her grandfather to leave and take her brother, lest she kill them both.

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