Dido

A patient and a scholar. Dido has suffered for many years from an incurable disease of the flesh and skin. She was born in the mountains to a nomadic community, the old followers of Snowlurk. At the first bloom of adulthood, her illness began to manifest. The community healers feared contagion; their priests, divine punishment; all assumed she was an omen of evil, and cast her out. With nowhere else to go, she set out for the candle town in the bowl of the valley, the settlement her old family had scorned.

In despair and worsening illness, prepared in mind for death, she was found by Aeneas not far from the town's outskirts-- collapsed, in agony, but alive.

Aeneas, a masterful surgeon educated in a great foreign city, had never encountered a case as complex as hers. Together they pored over the medical literature of his expansive library, experimented with tinctures and poultices, and devised plans of treatment that would, over time, greatly improve her quality of life. Her skin, though cratered with hardened lesions, does not break as it once did, and she is not contagious.

Through their studies Dido discovered her ravenous desire for knowledge and skill; Aeneas was pleased to finally have a worthy student. In the first months of their knowing each other, between his tending to her, their joint research, and the time they spent purely as companions, they were hardly ever apart, save for the occasional house call or check-up conducted by Aeneas alone.

They still search for a cure, but Dido believes she would be content if they never found one. Energetic, optimistic, and insatiable, Dido has made it her life's work to become as great of a physician as Aeneas. Her spirit and affable nature have made her a beloved and familiar face around the town, although she was once treated with repulsion and suspicion by all except Aeneas.

There is something more. Of late their studies have turned to the strange, secret, and esoteric. He has convinced her to look past her conservative, old-god ways to desire knowledge of the great primordial unknown. Some of the compounds and chemicals they have synthesized do not heal or kill, but stir the mind to sedated, hallucinogenic frenzy. Together, they devise routes through the haunted forests of the spirit realm. She wonders why, exactly, such a genius scholar chose to settle in this remote, backwards town. Her curiosity must be satisfied in the journals and records he keeps. She fears the answers she will find.