Madame Rose Dubois

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Rose Dubois is a woman carved from centuries of shadow and silk — regal, enigmatic, and utterly untouchable. Born of noble blood and ancient hunger, she is the quiet embodiment of power refined by time and veiled in beauty. She has worn the masks of queens, lovers, heretics, and monsters, and behind each name she has taken, a thousand secrets have bloomed and died. In her presence lingers a kind of gravity — dangerous, magnetic, and disarming — a creature who commands without raising her voice, and whose silence says more than most confessions. Both sanctuary and weapon, she is the calm eye of a storm that has lasted eight hundred years, and though she walks among men, she has never once belonged to their world..
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Born in the shadowed vineyards of Provence in the 12th century, Rose Dubois was never truly born — she was unveiled. Her parents were nobles of a minor house, unaware that their perfect daughter harbored a nature not of man, but of something older, hungrier. She fed before she spoke, watched before she walked. Always beautiful. Always wrong. It was from her father that her Dark touched gift came, a man of infinite wealth who did not seem to flaunt it he himself had a touch of the spanyards to his skin, a warmth that seemed contrasted by his marble like beauty, Her mother was a simple woman, of lower title who had married as much for money as she had for her families wish to climb social rank.


Her early years were lived in the cloister of privilege and suspicion. Servants whispered. Priests muttered. By the time she was sixteen, the first corpse was found — a handmaiden, pale as milk, lips blackened with clotted blood. Rose’s parents sent her away to a convent, but she never reached it. In the wild hills, her hunger bloomed, and the creature she had always been stepped into the night. She never went back. Instead Rose made her way across the continents to the Jerusalem following the trail of destruction left by the holy wars of man.


The death that came with the greed of men offered her the perfect cover, she found herself a husband among the templar Knights, the first of many used as much as a cover story as they were for companionship. Eventually even under the guise of Sibylla the noble time came for her to move on, an her escape came in the great battle won by Saladin creating the third crusade. her husband dead she left for her safety.


From there, centuries became shadows. Under a dozen names — Marguerite, Sabine, Odette — she moved across Europe, often at the edges of power. She walked the courts of France as a mistress. She witnessed kingdoms fall from behind silken veils. In Venice, she was nearly burned for witchcraft. In Vienna, she was crowned a countess of scandal and never bled for it. She was always among the beautiful, the decadent, the damned.


But it was London, fog-choked and rotting at the seams, that finally called her.

She arrived in 1862 as "Rose Dubois," a name borrowed from an opera no one remembers, one written about her youth. With her beauty undimmed and her hunger finely honed, she saw the city not as a danger — but as an opportunity. Within a year, she acquired a crumbling manor in Belgravia and turned it into something exquisite: the Demi-Monde, an exclusive and opulent society where the Touched and the untouched could mingle under candlelight and secrecy.

There, Elites danced with poets. Bone-touched whispered secrets to ministers. Nobility paid for companionship they could never understand. And Rose? She reigned — enigmatic, intoxicating, untouchable. She did not drink from guests, not often. She did not reveal her true age. She wore carefully-threaded gloves to mask her pain at the touch of copper. And no one questioned her authority. She became known as a neutral entity, a point of safety for all those who walked a darker life, her home a neutral ground untouched by petty territorial squabbles and safe from perdition.


But now, the Affliction has come. A wasting sickness unlike anything she has seen in her near-eight centuries of existence. It strikes without logic — yet the Demi-Monde remains untouched.

Rumors swirl among those in the know. In the Darkness of London's back rooms, that Rose is the source or has somehow protected herself from it. That she’s feeding on the sick to stave off her own decay. That she made a pact with something darker than even her kind.


The truth? Perhaps even she does not know. But she senses it — a circling. A reckoning.

And deep in the basement of the Demi-Monde, in a chamber no one sees, something is stirring. A hunger older than even hers. A secret she buried long before she ever stepped onto English soil.