Editing Darklord (section)

===Bethany Stone===
Darklord of Stonewall. A sad, broken, bitter woman, Bethany was born the daughter of a family of puritans, self-righteous and obsessed with sin. When her father discovered the child Bethany, a cheerful, whimsical young girl, had dreams of leaving the family home to become a dollmaker, he destroyed the dolls she had painstakingly constructed over years of work and beat her within an inch of her life. Later, when she came of age, he arranged her marriage to a man of high standing.

After long years of often-lonely marriage, pregnant with her sixth child, Bethany's father and husband were caught in a terrible accident, with the former dying and the latter being left in a coma. That was hardship enough, but as she cared for her husband, Bethany discovered his diary, in which he revealed he had only wed her to cover up his "sinful" nature as a homosexual. Enraged, Bethany began tampering with her husband's medicine to ensure he remained comatose, and then launched her own moral crusade, something aided by the fact she established her charismatic but broken-willed son Clarence as the town's minister.

When the Salem Witch trials broke out, Bethany eagerly spread their madness to Stonewall. But the tenth victim was the friend of Bethany's youngest daughter, Katherine, who unearthed evidence that this was really a way for Bethany to resolve a land-dispute between their families in the Stone's favor. When Katherine tried to intervene, she called out her mother for the cold, twisted monster that she was. Bethany promptly stabbed Katherine in the heart, and that was when the Mists took the town.

Bethany Stone is now a [[harpy]], although she has limited shapeshifting abilities that let her masquerade as a human. Her curse is that she will be forever doomed to lose her children before they are fully ready, whether by death, betrayal or abandonment. Though she doesn't know it yet, as part of this curse, she will become spontaneously pregnant and give birth to a human child every 5 years. Both of her arms are permanently blood-red from the elbow down, although she considers it a sign of her righteousness and so doesn't hide it.

The borders of Stonewall are permanently closed; unless the departee has the approval of either Bethany or Clarence to leave, they will be struck by lightning bolts until they turn back. It's unknown if lightning immunity will nullify this border, but it's not explicitly countered.

Nothing explicitly says that Bethany cannot just be killed in a fight (and, frankly, Stonewall is described as the kind of place where wiping out everybody is actually the heroic thing to do), but she ''does'' have an explicit method of redemption. If the party can find one of the dolls she made as a child, as one survived her father's wrath, and present it to her, she will break down in tears. If consoled and successfully reminded of her long-lost dreams, the rest of the town will break down weeping with her, and then Stonewall will slide out of the Mists and back to the prime material. On the other hand, if they fail, then she'll destroy the doll herself and become even more fanatical.