Background:
Hecate grew up in the backstreets of city that never slept, where faith and fear traded places with every dawn. She learned to survive by being small, fast, and unseen. Her mother was a midwife who whispered prayers to the old spirits, and her father was a city guardsman who never came home from the night watch. People said he was taken, by something that moved through the alleys when the fog was thick enough to swallow screams.

She found his body three days later, torn open and left like a warning. The guards called it a beast. The priests called it a curse. Hecate called it her first hunt.

She trained herself on rooftops and graveyards, scavenging blades and throwing knives, learning the weight of steel and the rhythm of silence. When she was old enough to leave the city, she joined a band of monster slayers who operated outside the church's region, the kind who didn’t wear holy symbols or chant blessings before they struck. They taught her how to track monsters by scent and sound, how to kill quickly, and how to make sure the thing you killed stayed dead.

But one night, the hunt went wrong. The creature they were after wasn’t some mindless beast, it was clever, speaking with a voice that knew her name. It showed her something she shouldn’t have seen: a vision of her father standing among the dead, eyes hollow, marked by the same sigil the monster bore. When she struck it down, its blood shimmered like mercury, and she swore she heard it whisper, “He’s still waiting.”

Now, Hecate hunts for truth as much as prey. She travels from town to town, following old folk tales and rumors, carving her path through the dark one kill at a time. Every monster she slays, she checks for the mark. Every corpse she leaves behind, she wonders if she’s getting closer, or if she’s only cutting deeper into a mystery that doesn’t want to be solved.