Nicolae
Nicolae is Rose's father. When he was a baby, his mother Isolde left him with Father Anton, assuming The Dark Man would never look for him in a hospice of Hala beneath the shadow of Castle Ravenloft. Anton had hoped somewhat that Nicolae would take vows and stay with him in the hospice, but he met and fell in love with Rose's mother and left to start a new life.
After Rose was born (and her mother Petra presumably died in childbirth, because she's not around and that's how fairy tale moms die?), she and Nicolae had an ideal relationship. Nicolae was a woodsman and the first person to teach Rose to love nature.
One morning, Nicolae didn't come out of his room. When Rose checked on him, she thought at first that he was dead--he was still and cold and his eyes were closed. After her initial panic, she found that he was breathing very faintly and had the barest trace of a heartbeat.
If she went for help, anyone who came to see him said that it looked almost like a vampire attack except for the lack of bite marks, and warned her that if the creature came back, her father would be too weak to survive. Whether because it wasn't a vampire, or because the vampire only wanted to feed from him once, or because it was frightened off by the garlic and that Rose strung up to protect her father, she didn't know, but the color slowly returned to his cheeks over several days and his rest began to look more like normal sleep--except she still couldn't wake him. Sometimes he would thrash and scream as if he were in the grip of terrible nightmares--sometimes about her dead mother, sometimes about monsters, sometimes about Rose.
Over a week later, he finally woke up, but he wasn't her father anymore.
The cruelty started small--an unkind word here, an unreasonable request there--but it escalated. Almost every time he insulted her, or forced her to do a thankless chore, or eventually physically harmed her, he would study Rose as if he were expecting something. Rose knew that there was some specific reaction he wanted from her, and she sometimes begged him outright to tell him what he wanted her to do, but his responses were always vague and insulting--"I want you to be less of a useless brat," "I want a daughter instead of a leech,"--or were things that she had already done without changing his behavior--"I want you to stop sniveling and do what you're told for once," "I want you to learn how to take one little tap without howling like a spoiled child." On and on it went, with Rose trying everything she could think of to please him, hoping against hope that she would finally do whatever it was he wanted her to do, and he would smile and embrace her and be her father again . . . until the day he came home from the blacksmith's with a package he tried to hide from her. She waited until he was out of the room, peered inside, and saw the branding irons.
That was when she finally ran away.
Rose now knows that The Dark Man was responsible for what happened to her father, and that Vanya had the same chills and lethargy after the Dark Man kissed him. Rose had gotten a kiss without any ill effects, either because she was wearing her ring or because the Dark Man was playing some game with her.
The last time Rose saw her father (or was it really her father?), it was when she tried to find out who was scrying on Julien while he slept. She followed the scrying back to its source and saw her father having extremely vigorous sex with her mother--and both of them looked pretty much as they had when last she saw them, so the ages weren't right at all. Her mother saw Rose watching, whispered something in Nicolae's ear that immediately put him to sleep, and apologized because Rose wasn't supposed to see that. When Rose told Vanya what she'd seen, he told her that the Gentleman Caller had fooled him once by appearing to him as his dead wife, so the thing having sex with her father was probably him.
From what you've read in Nicolae's journal and learned from Emyr and the bookseller in Vallaki, the Gentleman Caller has been using suggestion and other spells (possibly modify memory and/or various illusions, since Nicolae thinks he's actually seen Rose doing terrible things) to gaslight Nicolae into believing that Rose has been possessed by some sort of demon or other evil creature. He tricked Nicolae into thinking that by making Rose's life a living hell, he could make the demon decide that it would rather go possess someone else; if he ever let the demon know he was onto it, however, it might attack him or run away. When Rose did, in fact, run away, he signed a pact with the Gentleman Caller for magical power so that he could find and confront her. By this point, he's been so weighed down by constant use of suggestion that he can no longer tell which thoughts are his own. He's currently on his way to Darkon to seek out a group of wizards called the Fraternity of Shadows and college of magical instruction called the Brautslava Institute.
You're hoping that through some combination of spells like dispel evil, break enchantment, protection from evil, etc. you can deprogram him.
Timeline of Nicolae's degeneration
(based on what you read in his journal and what you've heard from others)- The Gentleman Caller tricked Nicolae into taking his ring off and drained his life force (when he did this to Vanya, it was through a kiss). Nicolae believes that Rose was the one who did this to him.
- Nicolae fell into his illness for over a week and woke up cruel and strange (which you now know was a half-baked attempt at an exorcism at this point, he already believed Petra's ghost was coming to him. He kept seeing Rose performing horrific acts in the forest by night.
- Nicolae bought branding irons to step up the torture of the "demon;" Rose found them and ran away
- The Gentleman Caller, as Petra, started pushing Nicolae toward buying absolute garbage books on the arcane that would confirm everything he'd been planting in Nicolae's head without giving him any tools to recognize or fight the actual demon whispering in his ear. He also began pushing him toward signing a pact, which Nicolae resisted.
- Nicolae went to seek out Anton, his adopted father, and learned about his corruption. Because Rose was there, he blames her. Since Rose and Lucia (Anton's "abhorrent creation") left with Carnival, Nicolae doesn't know whether Carnival is also a hotbed of demonic activity.
- The Hala witches told Nicolae that Rose was a druid, and "Petra" told him about Emyr. Nicolae didn't know whether Emyr was the demon's dupe or its willing accomplice; if it was the latter, any attempt to confront this powerful infernalist druid could lead to Nicolae's death or worse. Desperate, Nicolae agreed to sign a pact. Judging by the state of his house, he hasn't returned since.
- Nicolae traveled to Emyr's forest and demanded his help in capturing Rose. Emyr refused, triggering his curse.
- Nicolae returned to Vallaki, asking questions about the Fraternity of Shadows and the Brautslava Institute, and bought books about traveling to Darkon.
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