Marina Garrick
Reconstructed memorial. Marina died at Lyon before story files existed, so this record was assembled afterwards from the chapter wrap-ups and the play records. She was the campaign’s first character, and for two chapters she was its spine.
Chapter 0.1 — Loom & Lucidity
In the spring of 1813, Marina Garrick was a Surrey gentlewoman taking the Brighton season with her friend Georgiana Dillwyn, hosted by the Hamptons on Marine Parade. Then Lord Cosgrove’s head burst apart in the Pavilion Gardens in front of her, and the season stopped being a season. Polite society called it apoplexy. Marina followed the thing that had actually happened, through drawing rooms and card tables, to Captain King and a soirée at his London house.
A warning note from Gideon Crow told her to leave. She went upstairs instead, trailing the gloved Mlle Dumain, and she was still searching when the party below tore itself apart. In the basement she and Georgiana found Crow’s body and a machine called the Air Loom fighting free of the radicals who built it. Both women were pulled bodily into its psychic interior. They walked corridors lined with trapped victims, reached the mirrored centre, and broke it. The Hamptons took the girls home. Marina came back changed, though the full shape of the change had not yet declared itself.
Chapter 0.2 — Curate & Curability
Eleanor Mortimer had befriended her in Brighton, and the invitation to Osney Grange looked like kindness. It was a larder. Marina declined the stew on the first night, saw Charlotte Mortimer’s ghostly form standing at her own grave, and the next day found dismembered body parts in the crypt beneath the Church of St. Sithney. On the second night she refused food and drink and bolted from the dinner table. Beamish grabbed her. She went dead-weight, broke free, and kicked Eleanor’s jaw hard enough to kill her, and she had almost reached the door when Beamish shot her in the back.
She woke tied to a chair in the attic. When the ghoul that had been Charlotte Mortimer came for her, Marina broke free and ran while the creature turned on Henry and Beamish and consumed them both. She stole the Mortimers’ waiting coach and drove through the dark to Portsmouth, a gunshot wound in her shoulder and her mind beginning to come apart at the seams. It was the first break. It would not be the last.
Chapter 0.1 — Portsmouth, Ravenwood, and the Order
She arrived at The Fox & Hound half-dead. Mrs Margaret Fairchild took her in and Dr Ambrose Hargreaves stitched her shoulder. Then Lady Honoria Lyndhurst arrived with the certainty of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment, and offered a choice: come to London and learn the truth, or walk away. Marina chose London.
At Ravenwood House, Lord Percival Harcourt tested her in his chamber beneath the antiquarian society and offered her the Order of St Aelfric. At Hartwell House she was given rooms, a maid (Miss Eleanor Finch), and the first stability she had known since Brighton. Through the winter she trained under the Order’s instructors, and when Harcourt sent her to Tarryford to observe the Northlake Ball, she went as an operative with a cover story rather than a survivor with a wound.
Chapter 0.1 — The Long Corridor
Tarryford gave her a table full of strangers who would become her family: Emma Wentworth and Georgiana Wentworth, James Bennet, Jane Radcliffe. It also gave her the Long Corridor, a portal at Northlake Hall into a dark realm of squat, headless Horrors. Two expeditions went in. On the second, after Georgiana’s blood ritual closed the portal, the Horrors descended, and James Bennet was overtaken, dismembered, and consumed while running for the way out.
Marina walked out of Northlake Hall with the surviving women, and the campaign was no longer a solo game. She had now watched a friend die to buy her the time to live. The Order recruited the survivors, and the party that would carry the fight to London, Lyon, and beyond formed around her.
Chapter 0.5 — The Scandal Beneath the Stage
At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Marina lived the same evening five or six times over while Giles Mercer’s interpolated monologue folded the dress rehearsal back on itself. She survived a burning script, a compulsion that put cursed lines in friendly mouths, and the collapse of a false theatre into a devouring maw. Jane Radcliffe did not come out. It was the second friend the work had taken, and Marina walked away from the wreck of Drury Lane carrying that arithmetic.
Chapter 0.6 — The Viscount Who Loved Me
Bath was meant to be a wedding. Marina stood as bridesmaid to Harriet Palmer alongside the newly arrived Charlotte Thorne, with her brother Robert among the groomsmen. Then Viscount Huntley died on his wedding night, leaving a shrivelled heart in green ichor, and the party followed the trail through the murderer Francis Fable to the bones of a Siren beneath the city.
The investigation cost her dignity and something dearer. She fell clean out of a window examining scratch marks at the Huntley house, which the table never let her forget. And in the black water of the Siren’s cave her nerve broke entirely: convinced Gus was attacking her, she stabbed him badly before anyone could stop her. He survived and forgave her. She was learning what her friends would come to know well, that Marina’s mind was the battlefield the Mythos kept returning to.
Chapter 1 — London: The Orphean Society
The Order sent the five of them, Marina, Emma, Georgiana, Charlotte, and Gus, after two missing agents and a name recovered from Drury Lane. The trail ran through the Orphean Society at Grosvenor Street to a stone circle on Salisbury Plain. On the night of June 12, 1814, the Aeternum Choir’s London cell began Segment I of the Grand Canticle at Stonehenge, and Marina ended up directly beneath the forming manifestation of Yog Sothoth as luminous orbs pressed through the seam in the world.
The party broke the harmonic sequence. Hume and Danforth died, the summoning collapsed, and the thing’s dissolution dripped acid onto Marina where she stood. All five investigators survived, were formally inducted into the Order of St Aelfric, and were dispatched to Lyon. Marina had now stood under an unfinished god and walked away. The ledger of what that cost her mind was still open.
Chapter 2 — Lyon: The Orphans’ Hospital
In the basement of the Orphans’ Hospital, the party found Dr. Carreau performing surgery on a child. Emma shot him. Jacob pinned him to the ground with a sword. And Marina’s fractured mind, triggered by the basement’s horrors, showed her a lie: she saw her own brother where Carreau lay, and she shot Jacob dead where he stood. Upstairs, Gus was already dying under Jacob’s botched field dressing. Two friends died in the same building within minutes, one of them by her hand.
There was no undoing it and no time to grieve it. The Aeternum Choir’s Lyon cell was still moving toward its ritual, and the party pressed on with Marina among them, more dangerous to herself and to the people she loved than any of them wanted to say aloud. See Orphans Hospital Raid.
Chapter 2 — Lyon: The Silkweavers’ Guild
In the tunnels beneath the Silkweavers’ Guild, the party met the ciimba and then the Chakota. Marina chose her ground: a tunnel corner, lantern oil, matches, and the intention to burn the creature as it squeezed through. It was a good plan, and she held her position while the Chakota came on.
Then her mind shattered one final time. She mistook Moreau for an attacker and lunged at him, and Moreau grabbed her and spun her into the Chakota’s mass. As the creature folded itself around her, Marina lit the oil and her gunpowder. The explosion killed her and the Chakota together. See Silkweavers Guild Assault.
Whether her final act was heroism or madness is a question the campaign leaves deliberately unresolved, and that is the truest epitaph she could have. Marina Garrick was the first investigator of the Canticle of the End, present from the very first scene in Brighton, and every mile of the road from Marine Parade to the tunnels under Lyon was paid for out of her sanity. Her death marked the moment the campaign’s losses became irreversible and personal. Anna’s next character, Adrien de Montferrand, joined the survivors in Vienna.