Emmanuelle Skyshard
Emmanuelle Skyshard is the Bastion of the Fifth sect of Ezra. A young Dementlieuse woman whom had been abducted by the Hazlani before escaping and finding her way to Barovia, she had been a faithful Anchorite for some many years before becoming the one to bear Her Fifth and final Revelation.
History
Emmanuelle Skyshard was born Emmanuelle Sophie de le Foret to the Krynn half-elf Noémie de le Forêt and the local Dementlieuse human Aldéric de le Forêt. She grew up an only child, helping her father with their farmlands in the valley near Chateaufaux, while her mother worked as a tailoress out of a small Chateaufaux storefront. The farm was lost when she was a teenager in an arcane fire, when looters sought to steal magical artifacts from a wizard that was their neighbour and Emma's childhood mentor. The wizard fell into disrepute and was arrested by the Gendarmarie for careless storage of these dangerous magics, leaving Emma and her family homeless. While her mother kept the storefront, it was tiny, and no place to call home.
The Toret of the Chateaufaux church would end up putting the three in his own home on his own dime, an act of charity that impressed and shaped the lives of both Emma and her father Aldéric. He would become an Anchorite of Her Third Revelation, but Emma struggled. She had shown little talent for arcane magic in her previous tutelage under her neighbour, and little ability with divine blessings as well. Deducing that her fate was elsewhere, she bid her travel on a pilgrimmage to the homes of the other three sects, travelling with the protection of one of the church's few Protectors, and a childhood friend, Roland Le Blanc.
This was not to be, and the Protector was slain on the road to the Grand Cathedral, and the wayward Emmanuelle taken prisoner by bounty hunters: the Church of the Lawgiver had placed a bounty on those of the Church of Ezra for shrines placed within the land of Hazlan, and she and her now dead protector fetched a high price from the corrupt priesthood of that church. She then fetched a price a second time over, as she was turned over to the nefarious Red Academy of Hazlan, where she was imprisoned for a considerable time. Emma learned the language of her captors there - they refused to deal in anything but vassi to her - and was otherwise left in darkness, with only dim magical illumination at all times of days in her sell, and the food and drink that her captors decided to grant unto her on occasion. She never saw the outside world in this time, until it ended: she was kept entirely in her cell, or one of the academy's infamous experimentation tables.
