Cibola Campaign & Anastasia's Revenge

 Well, it has been more than a quick minute, that's for sure. But, here's a new post, all about my outcast noble gang for the upcoming Necromunda campign I'll be arbitrating, called Cibola. This is the origin story & lore I've come up with for my gang, working title (and seriously, emphasis on working, I will come up with something better....maybe) Anastasia's Revenge. 

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Lady Anastasia Marie-Belladonna au Eidersen lives for revenge. It is her one motivating goal. Her burning desire. Her ultimate ambition. Her unachievable victory. She will not be satisfied until she can grind the ashes of an extensive list of enemies into the ground, one by one, and lay waste to all that they hold dear.

She was not always like this. Anastasia was never described as affectionate or playful as a child. Her nurses, handmaids, tutors, chaperones, and the whole multitude who had a hand in raising her up from infant to her majority would often use words like “determined”, “ambitious”, “calculating”, but a burning need to inflict pain & suffering? Never. 

 

Lady Anastasia Marie-Belladonna au Eidersen

 

People are capable of transformation, and those who are raised to have great expectations can make truly great transformations, if provided with sufficient motivation. One such motivation would include being betrayed by your family, stabbed in the back by those with whom you should have shared the closest of bonds. So, it came to be, that on the eve of Lady Anastasia’s accession to a position of great power in House au Eidersen’s sprawling mercantile and manufacturing empire, a position guaranteeing her eventual lordship over the whole house, she was struck down by her siblings, her brother Arduo and sister Marcella. At the urging of their uncle Duke Orision, the man who had assumed lordship over House au Eidersen when Anastasia’s father died under suspicious circumstances years before, Anastasia’s siblings had plotted and schemed to put themselves in her place. To usurp her achievements. To claim the victory she had labored for years to grasp.

In the course of one night, Anastasia’s allies and supporters among House au Eidersen, its allies, and associated enterprises were killed, silenced, or co-opted. Many of her closest companions, friends and family she had known since infancy, were cut down in front of her.

Her old tutor Balico unceremoniously run through by a guardsman two hundred years his junior, sword point erupting from his chest as he gave a surprised chuff, managing to demurely settle the tea cup he had been holding on a side table before collapsing to the floor.

Her chambermaid Alexis, shot as she leapt in front of Anastasia to block a las-bolt, her last act one of sacrifice that was added to a rapidly growing ledger in Anastasia’s mind.

Galtus, who Anastasia could fondly recall helping her climb in and out of the high coach her father favored for travel when she was a child; Galtus who had guarded her door for decades, was cut in half by a plasma beam, though not before he had taken a dozen traitors with him.

Most painful of all had been Alexandar, her paramour. Drawing his sword and challenging her brother Arduo to honorable blade to blade combat, hoping to buy her time to escape, Arduo had simply shot Alexandar in the head, reducing a paragon of nobility and chivalry to blood and brains smeared across the wall. 

 

Mellisandre & Armaund

Cpl. Alyss & Sgt. Graves flanking Lady Anastasia

The scenes played out again and again through the night. Just when she thought she was safe, surrounded by true allies, yet another treachery would be revealed. Each safe house had been compromised. Each secret cache of weapons or creds turned out to be not so secret after all. By the dawn, Lady Anastasia’a retinue consisted of two of her most loyal guardsmen; Sergeant-At-Arms Graves and Corporal Alyss, her personal doctor Melisandre, and her seneschal, confessor, and  political advisor Armaund.

They were hunted, hurt, alone, scared. But they were alive, and that counted for something. And so, gathering what meager resources they could, this band of survivors fled into the Underhive of Nova Actium. When they finally found shelter in Cibola dome, they stopped running. They found shelter. They planned. They took stock of what they had, and what they could get. And, they swore revenge.