Nualia was an aasimar foundling raised by Sandpoint’s previous religious leader Ezakien Tobyn. Her childhood was lonely and sad as her unearthly beauty marked her out. Other children played cruel jokes on her and rumours that her touch or proximity could cure warts and rashes, that locks of her hair brewed into tea could increase fertility, and that her voice could drive out evil spirits led to endless awkward and humiliating requests over the years. When she came of age Delek Viskanta, a local Varisian youth, began to court her and she practically fell into his arms in gratitdue.
Knowing that her father wouldn’t approve of a relationship with a Varisian (he wanted her to remain pure so that she could join one of the prestigious Windsong Abbey convents), they kept the affair secret. They met many times in hidden places, a favourite being an abandoned smuggler’s tunnel under town that Delek had discovered as a child. Before long, Nualia realised she was pregnant. When she told Delek, he revealed his true colours and, after calling her a slut and a harlot, fled Sandpoint rather than face her father’s wrath. Nualia’s shock quickly turned to rage, yet she had nowhere to vent her anger. She bottled it up, and when her father discovered her delicate condition, his reaction to her indiscretions only furthered her shame and anger. He forbade her to leave the church, lectured her nightly, and made her pray to Desna for forgiveness. In so doing, he unknowingly nurtured her growing hate.
Then one night when seven months pregnant, she suffered a bizarre dream; wrathful energies suffused her mind and she flew into a frenzy. She miscarried her child later that night, a child whose monstrously deformed shape she only glimpsed before blanching midwives stole it away to burn it in secret. The double shock of losing a child and the realization she had been carrying a fiend in her belly for seven months was too much. Nualia fell into a coma.
As she slept, she dreamed unhealthy dreams of Lamashtu. Nualia became obsessed with the cruel demon goddess and the conviction that her wretched life was inflicted on her by those around her. She came to see her angelic heritage as a curse, and the demon-haunted dreams seemed to show her how to expunge this taint from her body and soul, replacing it with chaos and cruelty. When she finally woke, Nualia was someone new, someone who didn’t flinch at what Lamashtu asked of her. She jammed her father’s door shut as he slept, lit the church on fire, and fled Sandpoint.
The locals assumed Nualia had burned in the fire, a tragedy made all the worse by the death of Father Tobyn as well. Yet Nualia lived. She fled to Magnimar, where she enlisted the aid of a group of killers known as the Skinsaw Men. With their aid, she tracked down Delek and murdered him. Yet his death did not fill her need for revenge. Sandpoint and its hated citizens still lived.
The leader of the Skinsaw Men gave Nualia a medallion bearing a carving of a seven-pointed star called a ‘Sihedron medallion.’ Nualia learned that she had a larger role to play, and that her dreams were a map to her destiny. Taking the advice to heart, Nualia returned to Sandpoint, and found herself drawn to the brick wall in the smugglers’ tunnels where she and Delek had conceived her deformed child. Nualia bashed down the wall, and in so doing, discovered some ancient tunnels known as the Catacombs of Wrath and a creature named Erylium, also a follower of Lamashtu. For many months, Nualia studied under Erylium’s tutelage. During this time, Nualia received another vision from Lamashtu – a vision of a monstrous goblin wolf imprisoned in a tiny room. In Nualia’s dreams, she learned that this creature, named Malfeshnekor, was also one of Lamashtu’s chosen. If she could find him and free him, he would not only help her achieve her vengeance against the town of Sandpoint, but he would be the key in cleansing her body of what she had come to see as her ‘celestial taint.’ Nualia wanted to be one of Lamashtu’s children now. She wanted to become a monster herself.
She dug up her foster father’s remains during the attack on Sandpoint and offered these in a ritual to Lamashtu, which saw her rewarded with a promise of things to come – her left hand was transformed into a demonic red talon and she was sent a yeth hound as a companion.
Nualia’s journals outline her plans to send an army of goblins against Sandpoint and to burn the town to the ground, not only to offer it all as a burnt offering to Lamashtu in hopes of being made a half-fiend, but to fuel something called a ‘runewell’ in the Catacombs of Wrath below. This is some kind of pool which can create things called ‘sinspawn’ – to manifest a sinspawn, a creature need only allow a few drops of its blood to fall into the pool and moments later, a sinspawn emerges.
The notes go on to say that if one were to overextend the runewell’s stores, it would be deactivated. Nualia wasn’t sure how to reactivate it, and several times stresses that the runewell shouldn’t be used much until after Sandpoint is razed and the deaths of hundreds of angry citizens and goblins have refilled the well.
