Anabelle Secondary Characters

Journal Description

Geralt encountered this young woman’s ghost in the uppermost room in the haunted tower on Fyke Isle. She told him that in life she had been the local lord’s daughter.

When enraged peasants stormed the tower, she feared they would ravage her honor if they found her alive and so took a magic potion that put her in a corpse-like state of paralysis. When she awoke, she found herself lying amidst the bodies of her family and servants, unable to move. She watched in helpless horror as rats feasted on the pile of corpses and began to nibble on her as well.

This grisly death must have somehow put a curse on her and the tower, for her ghost had wandered it in restless torment ever since. Geralt engaged his vast experience with such curses to search for a possible solution. Having learned that Anabelle had loved a simple fisherman named Graham, Geralt decided this man and the bond of true love the two youths shared could be their salvation.

Geralt agreed to take the young woman’s remains to her love to have him give her a proper burial. Geralt hoped this would lift the evil spell on the cursed isle and bring Anabelle peace at long last.

Sadly, what Geralt took to be the ghost of an innocent woman was in fact death and disease in spirit form - a being known as a pesta, or plague maiden. Having lured Geralt into the open, it killed the unfortunate Graham and then escaped to spread the pox and feed on human suffering.

It is possible that this incident caused the local outbreak of Catriona that devastated the kingdom of Kerack and sowed the seeds of the coastal city’s ultimate downfall.

Yet when Geralt tried to leave the tower, the wraith revealed its true nature. It turned out what Geralt took to be the ghost of an innocent girl was in fact a plague maiden - death and disease in spirit form.

Perhaps there was something in the girl’s words that had put Geralt on his guard, or perhaps his witcher instincts simply warned him in time - either way, Geralt knew what he was dealing with a literal second before Anabelle revealed her true nature. The spirit was in fact a pesta - a plague maiden, a terrible wraith which spreads death and pestilence.