Mafalda Wintergale
Mafalda Wintergale (* 1961) is likely the most notorious member of the Wintergale family. She is the orchestrator if Winter's Treachery and considered solely responsible for the fall of the Wintergales.
Personality
Mafalda has a fierce, no-nonsense personality and is willing to do everything and sacrifice everyone to achieve her goals. She justifies this by considering herself a victim of her family's treatment.
Appearance
Sharing the typical attributes of her family lineage, Mafalda has white hair and amber-coloured eyes. Her dark brows add to her fierce gaze. She also a noticable number of dark freckles under her eyes as a result of dermatosis papulosa nigra.
Personal History
Being born into the Wintergale family, Mafalda had to deal with high expectations from her parents and family members from an early age. Like all Wintergales, she was destined to become a Warden, and, like all Wintergales, she trained hard from the moment she could walk. While prospective Wardens don't usually take the first of Pendragon's trials before the age of 16, Mafalda took it at 12, one year after she started school, as was customary for her family. However, she failed, if only barely. Her examiner encouraged her to continue training and try again next year, but unfortunately, it was expected of Wintergales to succeed each trial first try. Her parents, deeply disappointed by her failure, considered her a failure, and began to treat her accordingly.
Having lost the love and support of her parents, Mafalda was eventually accepted into the Pendragon Tower Academy to continue her training as a Warden. However, between her parents' rejection, and her fellow trainees' envy of her skills, she became desillusioned and, over time, developed a deep resentment for her family and their practices. Eventually she decided that she no longer cared about them, or anyone else, and only look out for herself. Thus she began to develop her own selfish agenda, and spent as much time as possible furthering it.
Being a member of the Wintergale family, she did possess a Niviculum, and the knowledge required to access Winter Vaults. She used this to remove items from the vaults, using them for her own purposes and selling them to the highest bidder. She did not care wether these items fell into the hands of Magi or Mundanes. In fact, she found watching Mundanes trying to control magic items to be somewhat entertaining. At the same time, she cared little for them, so she hardly minded if some of them died as a result of these experiments.
Eventually, however, her activities were exposed and she was forced to hide in exile, when her own family began to hunt her. To her absolute delight, the aftermath of her treachery caused her family to be ostracised and hunted as well. Although she liked to take responsibility for her family's demise, she knew that her deeds were only a catalyst.
Mafalda eventually learnt about her niece, Lycia Wintergale, and that her parents had given her away to protect her. Believing this to be a chance to further her own agendas, she hired a gang of rather unsavoury individuals to find and kidnap her. However, none of the girls they brought were Lycia. After their last failure, which incidentally happened to be Kathrin Wintergale, Mafalda grew tired of her associates and betrayed them, allowing the mto be captured by Wardens after manipulating their memories so that they forgot her, and believed they had intended to blackmail the girls' parents.
Wand
Mafalda's wand originally had the shape of a silver scepter with a black wooden shaft and a lens-shaped amethyst at the tip. It eventually changed into the shape of a silver dagger, or athame, with a black wooden grip and an amethyst embedded into it.
Trivia
- Kathrin Summerdale's kindnapping actually happened at Mafalda's behest. However, since she had actually tried to find and abduct her niece, Lycia, she showed no interested in the girl, and eventually betrayed her henchmen to the Wardens.