Adelaide Parker

Adelaide Parker nee Donovan

She was 33 when she died

She/Her

Alaskan Homesteader

Human

Emily vanCamp

5 FT 8 IN

Lithe and thin normally, not strong enough to run a homestead on her own, but she was dangerously underweight when she died

Dark brown

Golden blonde

Loose waves, kept to the high shoulder, but her ends tended to curl when her hair got too long in the same way her daughter's does

Yes, she had some

Just ears

Sadly, towards the end of her life, there were too many to name.

While Cynric and Faina received elements of their mother in bits and pieces, Ellie is a spitting image of her - hold a photo of Adelaide next to Ellie and there is absolutely no mistake that they are mother and daughter. Cynric and Faina will recognize Ilene near immediately from this fact alone.

They have one photo of their mother that had been found when Trinity rebuilt Faina's record: a family shot with the four of them, Adelaide seated with Ellie on her lap and Cynric and Faina to either side, that must have been taken by Arod shortly before his disappearance. It is the only chance for Cynric and Faina to remember their mother as she was, not the wastrel she had become by the time of her untimely passing.

TW for references to drug abuse, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation

The kids were too young to really remember Adelaide as she was. They weren't able to see that the noticeable shift in their mother's personality after the death of her youngest child wasn't just due to grief, and the stress of losing their homestead and having to relocate to the city, with her husband and youngest child dead and with two small, grieving children still to care for. It is a lot, enough to make any single mother crack under the pressure... but it wasn't the reason.

Prior to Ellie's death, Adelaide struggled but was still determined to survive. She was quiet, kept to herself, but was as determined as she was calm and level-headed, brave and resilient. Able and willing to snap back against what obstacle stood in her way. The attitudes and tendencies of her two oldest children come from her more than they know. But afterwards... to them, it appeared as though the grief finally consumed her. Within six months of Ellie's funeral and their move to Fairbanks, during which Adelaide struggled but still made a valiant effort in taking care of her children... the first tendrils of addiction sank their claws into her.

First with alcohol; another six months later, the first tastes of hard drugs. 18 months after Ellie's death, Adelaide gave up on any form of gainful employment, bouncing from odd jobs and under the table work until even that dried up. Two and a half years in, the flow of people in and out of the house started. The final three months of her life, Adelaide hardly left her room, and had stopped leaving her bed altogether the week before she died.

Cynric and Faina watched this all unfold in front of their eyes. Took care of their mother, and each other, as best they could. Cynric was 9, and Faina, 7.

Adelaide taught them a lot, before the end. How to cook, to take care of themselves, to fish and forage and hunt small creatures for meals; sew and mend and repair broken things; math, for balancing a budget, how to handle money. Cynric remembers Adelaide used to love to read aloud from whatever books they had on hand. If she had been given half a chance to do so - as proof of the life they had lived on the homestead, happy and peaceful and carefree - Adelaide would have been a good mother to her children.

Instead, her children believe she succumbed to the grief and her own inner demons, lost to a world of alcohol and drugs, refusing to eat, wasting away to nothing. Choosing to walk into the grave as if the three years before she died had only been one long suicide note. That despite trying to hold on for her two living children, Adelaide eventually answered the call to join her husband and youngest child in death. Leaving Cynric and Faina to take care of each other as the parents and Adelaide as the child, until the fateful morning they were pulled out of school by social workers with the solemn announcement that their mother was dead, and did they know of anyone to call for them?

The kids reflect this in different ways. Cynric is crushed by guilt, that voice in the back of his mind that if he had only tried harder, he could have saved his mother, his sister; forcing anyone away who could get close and be taken away again by his actions. Faina buries her grief in hatred towards her mother for abandoning her children, and adopts Adelaide's self-destructive nature without even realizing she's done so.

And then, of course, there is the small matter that Ellie isn't actually dead. That Adelaide sacrificed a piece of her soul to save her, a bad bargain that ended up costing much more than promised.

As with Arod and his family, next to nothing is known about Adelaide's family history. Her maiden name was Donovan, although even that was buried until Ilene made the connection between Adelaide Donovan and Adelaide Parker. She was not a native to the area of Snow Haven or Fairbanks, but she was native to Alaska in general; one of the few details she shared of her life before her kids that her kids remember, is the detail that she always said she was born and raised there.

It is unknown how she and Arod met, their marriage certificate appears to have been destroyed when an archive burnt down in an electrical fire, and if Ilene had not found the engagement announcement notice they would have no information at all.

Towards the end of her life, there was a constant flux of people in and out of the house that Adelaide introduced to her kids as coworkers, friends, and even relatives... but as adults the kids are able to recognize that it's likely Adelaide knew none of them and they were all drug dealers, users, and sex workers and their pimps.

Faina would have no way of knowing this, but Adelaide is actually a family name on her mother's side, passed down to the firstborn daughter in a family.

Adelaide was relatively young when she started having kids - she was 24 when Cynric was born.

Adelaide was a Human, aware to some extent of the supernatural.

Adelaide was aware of the supernatural underground to some degree - although no one knows the full extent. She knew enough to know exactly who to go to and where to find them when Ellie was minutes from dying and too far away from any medical intervention to save her. It's also clear from the contract Trinity received surrounding the exchange of half of Adelaide's soul for her daughter's life, that Adelaide knew what the magic entailed, what was happening, and why she was doing it.

But how Adelaide, as a confirmed Human, knew all of these things - enough about magic to understand the contract she was signing, not only about the local groups to the area but also where, when, and how to find them in a moment of crisis - is a mystery.

Ilene believes it may be tied into why Arod and Adelaide buried their pasts so deep no one could find them, and chose to make their homestead in the middle of an unforgiving Alaskan tundra - but she has nothing to base that on outside of those few strange facts.