Editing Avery Darling (section)

== Dancing with the Damned ==
At the time, Elaine had just been told to create the role of an orphaned neonate Mekhet Unbound, moving from Manchester to Edinburgh, interested in joining the Carthian Movement. Further instructions would await her there as soon as she had become and installed herself as Avery Darling. She spent a year building her identity as recently embraced Mancunian riff-raff, then moved to Scotland. She was welcomed at the court of Invictus Prince Rory Morrison and suffered all the indignities visited upon the newcomers and status-less that were par for the course at his cut-throat court, all for the purpose of playing her role, working the system, being ready for her assignment.

But that assignment never came. She spent year after year at court, perfecting her role - essentially a recreation of her old Allan Grey persona adapted to another era and other circumstances - but her marching orders never came. Her conditioning would not allow her to break radio silence or to leave without receiving new orders but her tortured need for action made waiting unbearable. She went through the motions of simulating her adopted life but more and more she began spiraling into a crisis of depression and a relapse into drug addiction.

Paradoxically, the Night of Ashes - which saw a great many of the Kindred of Edinburgh along with their Prince destroyed under mysterious circumstances - was Elaine’s salvation. During that bloody crisis when the Circle’s champion Finn MacCool defeated the deadly Striges and established the Crimson Throne, Elaine woke up from her addled stupor of purposelessness and despair. She did her best to survive the catastrophe and found the old rush again. Then she found another and helped them and suddenly, she had a mission: The one she had always had. Orders from above or no. 

She’s good at being other people and then moving on but now Elaine is faced with finding out what it means to be herself. The name may be false and the mission might continue some distant day but for now she realizes that - whatever else happens - for good or for ill her actions are her call. She’s a con woman, a piss-artist and a libertine but there’s one thing she believes to be true. The Great Tapestry is real and in that greater whole every thread matters. And Elaine has found out, after all this time that she still cares.