Mary "Mama" Leeds
She started as a healer. That is the part of the story that people forget, or choose not to repeat, because it makes everything that came after harder to dismiss. Mary Leeds tended the wounded when the Iron Revolts sent refugees staggering out of the Big AC, stretched her supplies thin keeping strangers alive, and healed ten people in a single day before collapsing from exhaustion. The woman who would become Mother Leeds spent the first weeks of the crisis saving lives.
The Pure Bloods changed that. They came with armed mercenaries and the unshakable conviction that country folk would submit to new management. They shot the headsman. They declared themselves rulers. Seven groups tried it before the locals stopped asking questions and started burying bodies. Mary was among those who fought back, but she was different. Something was awakening in her, a pressure behind her eyes that resolved one afternoon into a wave of fire that charred an entire mercenary squad to ash. The Pineys took care of what was left. They had been eating well, she noted, without a trace of discomfort.
Pyrokinesis came first. Then the flesh. She learned she could twist limbs, reshape muscle, make a person scream without touching them. The headaches that had started weeks earlier were psionic resonance crystals forming inside her skull, a process that, in the absence of training or guidance, tends to accelerate whatever the individual was already becoming. Mary was becoming something that enjoyed making Pure Bloods suffer.
She killed trader caravans alone. She was caught, exiled, called a monster by the community she had bled to protect. She remembered a house from her childhood, a place her mother had told stories about. The Leeds estate, deep in the Barrens, where legends of devils had kept the superstitious away for centuries. She went there. She did not come back out as Mary.
Over the following years, the woman who called herself Mother Leeds created thirteen modified beings she named her sons, each one shaped after a creature from the old legends of the pine forests. She found willing volunteers among those who hated the Board and the AC establishment as fiercely as she did. She found a parasitic moss in the tunnels beneath the estate that served as a biogenetic catalyst for her psionic fleshcrafting. And she found Indrid Cold, a Pure Blood Aberrant whose psionic abilities and surgical knowledge made the entire project possible. Whether Indrid found her first is a question that the surviving records do not answer and the available evidence does not settle.
Thirteen sons. Twelve modified from living subjects. One built from scratch, from harvested materials, assembled over months and given fire in its teeth and wings on its back. The thirteenth was the Jersey Devil, and it was the last thing Mary Leeds is known to have made. Her journals end shortly after its completion. The estate's living quarters were found flooded with moss. Mother Leeds was not found at all.
The Pure Bloods changed that. They came with armed mercenaries and the unshakable conviction that country folk would submit to new management. They shot the headsman. They declared themselves rulers. Seven groups tried it before the locals stopped asking questions and started burying bodies. Mary was among those who fought back, but she was different. Something was awakening in her, a pressure behind her eyes that resolved one afternoon into a wave of fire that charred an entire mercenary squad to ash. The Pineys took care of what was left. They had been eating well, she noted, without a trace of discomfort.
Pyrokinesis came first. Then the flesh. She learned she could twist limbs, reshape muscle, make a person scream without touching them. The headaches that had started weeks earlier were psionic resonance crystals forming inside her skull, a process that, in the absence of training or guidance, tends to accelerate whatever the individual was already becoming. Mary was becoming something that enjoyed making Pure Bloods suffer.
She killed trader caravans alone. She was caught, exiled, called a monster by the community she had bled to protect. She remembered a house from her childhood, a place her mother had told stories about. The Leeds estate, deep in the Barrens, where legends of devils had kept the superstitious away for centuries. She went there. She did not come back out as Mary.
Over the following years, the woman who called herself Mother Leeds created thirteen modified beings she named her sons, each one shaped after a creature from the old legends of the pine forests. She found willing volunteers among those who hated the Board and the AC establishment as fiercely as she did. She found a parasitic moss in the tunnels beneath the estate that served as a biogenetic catalyst for her psionic fleshcrafting. And she found Indrid Cold, a Pure Blood Aberrant whose psionic abilities and surgical knowledge made the entire project possible. Whether Indrid found her first is a question that the surviving records do not answer and the available evidence does not settle.
Thirteen sons. Twelve modified from living subjects. One built from scratch, from harvested materials, assembled over months and given fire in its teeth and wings on its back. The thirteenth was the Jersey Devil, and it was the last thing Mary Leeds is known to have made. Her journals end shortly after its completion. The estate's living quarters were found flooded with moss. Mother Leeds was not found at all.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
The journals of Mary Leeds were recovered from the lower levels of the Leeds estate and decoded by John Bastille of the Fallow Hopes, with translation assistance from Artemis Glassgale Thierry. The documents span two volumes covering approximately five years, from the immediate aftermath of the Iron Revolts through the completion of the Jersey Devil. A gap of roughly four years separates the volumes, coinciding with the Three-Year Horde.
The first volume records Mary's transformation from healer to killer. Pure Blood refugees fleeing the collapse of the Ironworks arrived in her town near the AC with armed guards and ambitions of lordship. The locals resisted, and Mary's emerging psionic abilities made her the most effective weapon they had. When the community learned she had been killing AC trader caravans on her own, they cast her out.
The second volume picks up years later, with Mary already established at the Leeds estate and well into her cryptid project. She had perfected her control of the parasitic moss she found beneath the house and completed several modifications before resuming her journal. The entries chronicle the creation of sons two through thirteen, culminating in the Jersey Devil.
Bastille's transcription includes extensive annotations questioning whether Mary was truly the architect of the project or a tool wielded by her first creation, Indrid Cold. The transcriber notes that every major technical breakthrough in the journals coincided with Indrid's involvement, and that the specialized equipment and scientific knowledge present at the estate had no plausible origin without outside assistance.
The first volume records Mary's transformation from healer to killer. Pure Blood refugees fleeing the collapse of the Ironworks arrived in her town near the AC with armed guards and ambitions of lordship. The locals resisted, and Mary's emerging psionic abilities made her the most effective weapon they had. When the community learned she had been killing AC trader caravans on her own, they cast her out.
The second volume picks up years later, with Mary already established at the Leeds estate and well into her cryptid project. She had perfected her control of the parasitic moss she found beneath the house and completed several modifications before resuming her journal. The entries chronicle the creation of sons two through thirteen, culminating in the Jersey Devil.
Bastille's transcription includes extensive annotations questioning whether Mary was truly the architect of the project or a tool wielded by her first creation, Indrid Cold. The transcriber notes that every major technical breakthrough in the journals coincided with Indrid's involvement, and that the specialized equipment and scientific knowledge present at the estate had no plausible origin without outside assistance.
Children
