Description 

Miss Eden Wells, an individual that is appropriately forgettable for a deliberate reason. Admittedly her tall and broad stature draws the eye usually, however, patrons of saloons or the local folk dismiss her pretty quickly. She has long, wavy tresses the color of raven feathers left loose and rolling past her shoulders. A taste for monochrome and is almost exclusively wearing blacks and greys. Her attire is rough even amongst the common rabble; dusty overcoat, tattered button-down shirt, ripped jeans, and fading boots. A beaten and ruined hat slanted low over her eyes as if shielding her icy eyes from the world, or the world from her. She's almost always trying to get away with wearing a bandana over her face, and should locals see her without it: Gnarled disfigured scarring rips away any ounce of beauty she may have had. It's deep and looks as though it was never stitched well or at all. It destroys the entire left side of her face and goes as far as her neck, leaving her mouth set with a partial snarl and lacking the ability to express, beyond still being capable of blinking. The left eye is also bloodshot from the trauma.

Eden is soft-spoken with a hint of a french accent and always appears in solitude.

Early Life 

Eden’s earliest memory was of sharing a stale loaf of bread with her older siblings for Effie’s birthday. It had been no big ordeal, but they hadn’t complained as the last slices were placed in each of their waiting hands.

It was no fault of her parents that they were born into extreme poverty. Her father, Leonard had been an ambitious man from France, drawn into the colorful words of the American future. He’d been a doctor working on a new “miracle cure” for TB — unbeknownst to him, plenty had tried and failed in his wake. Still, he gave everything he had and more, and for a while, men and women flocked to his roost in the hopes that this time, it would work. During this time of trial, he’d meet his lover and best friend: Josie McKee. And they’d have their firstborn, Effie, not even a year later. By then money was becoming tight and angry individuals were showing up at the house to demand compensation for his useless miracle tonic. Josie feared for the safety of their little family and begged Leonard, with the last of their savings, to leave Saint Denis and go as far West as they dared.

Mihail arrived two years later, another expected pregnancy. Leonard and Josie were not entirely happy living in the biting heat and rickety remains of their house — but they weren’t defeated about it. With the odd jobs, Leonard could find and Josie knowing a little about herbs, the pair made the house feel as close to home as possible. For their children. However, the dream of getting married had to go on the back burner because they simply couldn’t afford it. But the bright side? They didn’t have to scrape by all the time. Their newborn son and almost three-year-old daughter could have good clothes and comfortable beds. That was more than Leonard and Josie could hope for, even if where they were simply wasn’t what they dreamed of.

And then she arrived, like an unexpected omen that nobody could know would cause such strife.

Little Eden Wells arrived during the night in 1877 to a pair of open arms and a father's stressed eyes. Unlike her siblings who had brown eyes and blonde hair, Eden took her mother's black hair and her father's blue eyes. Despite being unplanned, Josie fell in love with her littlest daughter as she had done with her other two. She became the youngest by an age gap of 8 years between herself and Mihail.

Everybody was overjoyed.. almost everybody.

Leonard saw his youngest daughter and felt no joy but the settling seed of doubt and anxiety in his heart. After so many years of working hard and living in minimum comfort, he feared that would be taken away with another mouth to feed. However, he could not voice such feelings, not at the sight of his lover in such adoration over another daughter. So he swallowed that seed of doubt and carried on, figuring he could just work a little harder to keep the meager comforts they had. He had to. He needed to. But inevitably.. it was not sustainable. Food went from mildly filling to shambling for scraps or learning to make a loaf of bread last long past the day it went stale as Eden grew and grew.

Effie and Mihail both started picking up odd jobs too by the time Eden was three, and Josie gave up her love for selling herbs to acquire a more labor-intensive profession. All these things went unnoticed to little Eden, who still received the doting of her mother and the playful antics of her older siblings. To a toddler, there could never be anything wrong so long as there was comfort and love — but Leonard withdrew. Withdrew from his youngest at first unintentionally, and then resentfully, with purpose. Thoughts unbidden entered his mind about his youngest; she was to blame for their small family falling into poverty. The reason his son and daughter now walked with holes in the soles of their shoes for months at a time. The reason why his Josie had aged considerably from doing such stressful work for less and less money. Why he was unhappy.

Eden was to blame for his downfall.

But little Eden paid none of this any mind. Enjoying her youth under the impression that she was loved by all. That her father just loved the way he loved — even if, at the age of six, she caught him hugging them or kissing their brows when he never dared to look at her for more than a few minutes. Her seventh year was when her siblings also began to change; they began pushing her away, telling her that they had no time for her anymore. Shunning her from playing with them and their friends. But it wasn’t bad, she believed. Her mother always said that blood was thicker than water, and the family always sticks together. To Eden, it had to be true because her mother was still the same. Kind, loving, and open. Even when she developed a cough, Josie made sure Eden was shown as much love as the rest of her children.

By the time Eden was eight years old, that cough of Josie's had developed into something worse. She spent most of her time lying in bed, and when she did try to work it would be slow going and leave her with no energy for days on end. Eden would try to help with whatever she could but found that she was no match for half of the work that her mother did. Josie reassured her nonetheless and told her that it was the thought that counted the most.

It was now that the little girls' reality was starting to tear away the filters of naivety. People weren't meant to look like skeletons wearing skin. Something was deeply amiss.

On the day of her eighth birthday, Josie collapsed in the heat fetching flowers. Leonard was the one who found her, with Eden at her side futilely trying to drag her back up the hill and back to their home. Shoved aside by her father, Eden followed closely as he carried his partner indoors. With a bit of water and a cool rag, Josie roused to find Leonard at her side looking equal parts worried and furious. Furious enough that he'd locked Eden outside and left her banging on the door long into the evening. Confused and upset, her mother seethed at Leonard for his behavior towards Eden until he relented and apologized. Saying he had been irrational, but she had risked her life all for flowers. He had simply been scared.

Fetching flowers for the leeches birthday, was what he really wanted to say. But while he had apologized, his mind had finally been made up. His children and his partner had suffered long enough, and he was going to do the best thing he could think of to restore them back to how they used to be before she had come along.

Alas, Leonard thought as the sun drifted lazily beyond the horizon and his children came home worn and beat, it would be cruel not to give the little wretch a birthday to remember. He knew Eden waited patiently for everybody at the table to share in a small, more expensive meal as they often did when anybody had a birthday. But Josie was too sick, and her siblings too tired to care. He watched Eden sit there until she tired and fell asleep with her little head on the table. Sad, and forever waiting. Thankful for their broken clock face reading the stroke of midnight, Leonard played up a warm facade; he roused Eden with a finger to his lips and the first nice words he’d ever said to her in all her years of living under his roof: “I remembered it’s your birthday. Come, Eden, I have a surprise for you. But we mustn’t make a sound. Jump aboard the wagon when your dressed, I saved this, especially for you.”

That was when he should have felt awful, knowing exactly what he was going to do and seeing her sleepy ocean eyes light up. Watching her wary adoration melt into complete and total trust. But he’d wanted her gone, and that was what he did.

It was the last time Eden ever followed anybody blindly and without question. For her father took her far, far away. Where the desert became lush tall trees and grass so green she had never seen such a thing. And it was there that he stopped the wagon and told her that he needed her to jump off and wait right there. Blindly she had, and she watched as her father steered away. Watched, and watched, and watched... The bite of the chill breeze off the nearby streams and the sound of distant thunder finally unraveled her nerves and excitement. Eden cried for her father, as loud as she dared in a world unknown to her. And he never came back.

And just like that, Eden learned that family was not loyal. It did not stick together. It could not be trusted, that word Family.

So she wandered. For days at first along a path that seemed to loop around on itself. Her flimsy clothes barely chased off the chill as her innards succumbed to grueling hunger and thirst. Her tears after the third night no longer came but instead had dried like dusty marks down her dirty cheeks. And then she wandered off the beaten path, scared of every noise and whip of wind through the trees. Everything hurt, and she had scrapes and bruises from running and falling at the loudest sounds.

What Eden would later recognize later as a series of unfortunate events, she was attacked by an animal. A mangy cougar just as starved as she in the middle of the wild valley. Likely chased off by bigger predators or simply out of other options, it took its chance on an unsuspecting child and mauled Eden with the intent to kill. Whether it was by the miracle of her own survival instincts causing her to fend off the beast with her left arm or not, Eden gurgled out a scream through all the blood and pain that tore through her face and arms. And a nearby hunter heard her, and the sounds of the ravenous beast he had been tracking for days because of how it had attacked multiple other unsuspecting hunters and traders.

The grizzled man rushed, took aim with his mighty bow, and slammed it into the throat of the animal with a wet, dull thunk. Eden lay shivering in shock, ripped arms curled to her chest and face. She briefly saw the hazy figure of a man in furs looming over her and then nothing. The sounds of a dying animal's last breath on her mind, and pure terror. She'd never been attacked before, never seen anything die before. She knew death existed, but she hadn't even thought it was anything like that.

It took months for Eden to fully recover from her wounds.

And it was during those months that she learned the hunter's name was Bosco. That he didn't talk much, and he had no friends besides those that he traded with. He knew about herbs, wasn't afraid of anything, and hunted for everything. He was a survivor, who didn't have much money to his name and still took the time to keep her wounds clean. Not once did Bosco ask where Eden was from, he didn't call her anything but girl even when she gained the strength to speak, he only helped her get better. Fed her with watchful old eyes, and tucked her in with any furs he had lying around.

Eden decided when the pain vanished, so would the memories of her old family with it.

And for better or worse, those memories did vanish as she grew up under the guidance of Bosco. He was no father figure, and there were times when Eden made him so incredibly irate that he whipped her for it, scarred her for it. But she'd learned that there were no easy lessons to learn out in the wilderness; there was no opportunity to make mistakes. Mistakes meant death. There was no real love or adoration between the two, but there was a strange sort of respect. A weird admiration for two individuals who were chewed up and spit out at a young age somehow making it out the other side.

But Eden grew up guarded, and teachings from Bosco taught her to always watch and be prepared for anything and anybody to take a turn for the worst. Living in the wild was not living in comfort anymore, not that she ever truly understood the feeling of comfort, to begin with.

At the age of seventeen, it did take a turn for the worst. Because Bosco had debts, and those debt collectors of an old gang he used to run with finally caught up with him. She remembers hearing men talking as she lay off in the dark just beyond the camp light. Talk about Bosco being willing to sell her into the gang as compensation for his debts. He told them she was capable of whatever they'd want to throw at her; he told them she could be expendable, a bullet shield. Eden felt old feelings creeping back, the icy grip of anxiety snaking around her spine and worming its way into her heart. She grabbed her knife and remained wide awake long after the men left and Bosco settled down some hours later to sleep. That bone-white grip on the handle never eased up.

The next day passed without any incident. Bosco was the same as he usually was, and for whatever reason, that seemed to steel her spine and make her see red. That the man who saved her from death could say she was expendable so easily, and sell her life over to some other place. That he could look at her and act as though nothing were amiss, but she could see the subtle signs. The sharp glint in his eye, a similar resignation she remembered in a man she no longer viewed as a father.

Eden's time was running out. So she decided to take life into her own hands.

The next night, Eden waited until Bosco found his way to bed before making her move. She'd stoke the fire a little, yawn, make a little noise as if she was going to bed, and lie down where she waited two hours just to be sure. Bosco was a big man, burly and hardened. But his teachings and lessons had made her all the same; coarse, guarded, and calculating. Remorseless when it came to her life or somebody else's. And so it was by a great shock when he felt strong thighs straddle his arms down by his sides, and the neutral, lightless expression staring down at him. When he saw Eden with her mangled face illuminated by the low flickering of the fire.

He knew she knew, and could do nothing but stare in a sweat with a gag shoved deep into his mouth as she pulled free his hatchet and began the process of cutting off each individual digit at the knuckle. Tying his wrists with tourniquets to prevent him from bleeding to death. The process was slow going with Bosco passing out every so often. But Eden cauterized the wounds with a hot knife to prolong his living, his hands missing and then his feet; until his heart simply gave up.

As a message to the gang, Eden left his head on a wooden spike by the old campsite. A warning. Chopping up the rest of Bosco methodically, like she was taught when preparing an animal, she then promptly littered his body across the vast expanse of the redwoods and the valley to be undiscovered by the law.

From then on, Eden remained alone. Capable of feeding and fending for herself, and sleeping dreamlessly. Some days she can't sleep at all, and on those days she simply watches the night. Only later adopting a bandana when the local folk of Strawberry started murmuring Twoface in her company. A nasty nickname for her partially paralyzed face and snarling lip. Ironic considering her mother had named her after the Garden of Eden.

Present Life 

Nowadays Eden can often be seen riding all across New Alexandria, from Annesburg all the way out West to Tumbleweed. She still spends most of her time alone out in the wild, however, has taken up other means of opportunity to earn money. Most notably, the woman works in the lumber yards and for a time she would do deliveries across the state. In her other job, she makes no habit of bringing it up. But it was an opportunity for her to sate boredom, and have a little fun.

A few individuals have learned her name, and those that have don't much talk to her. Besides a recruit deputy who frequently telegrams her, much to her caution of his motives, and the likes of a strange pianist. The strange pianist most of all; Eden doesn't make a habit of trying to end their conversations too soon, finding interest in what the attention seeker has to say.

The newfound friendship between the women Adrianna Hoxie and Charlotte Black has begun to occupy the stoic woman's time more and more. She feels less annoyed about accompanying them and often listens to their chatter with content. Apparently even feeling inspired enough to bestow some wisdom; saying more than the occasional sultry sentence, which is a feat in itself.

Headin Jacobs, much to the cost of her sanity, has become a friendly presence that Eden obliges whenever he spots her and comes over. They share very similar pieces, and yet are entirely opposite of one another. A strange enigma of a man that she would never admit has become an endearing friend of sorts in her solitary lifestyle. The same could be said for one such Billy Butters.

(TBC)

Affiliations 

None.

Quotes 

To Charlotte Black & Billy Butters: "Little Snackies."
To Charlotte Black: "I believe I'm starting to understand what a home might feel like."

Trivia 

> Eden has a fear of cougars.
> She isn't afraid of death but hates the idea of dying in debt.
> Eden sees no real reason to lie. But this often makes her come across as rather dry or blunt.
> Eden must always keep moving. She hates being idle.
> She does have bouts of insomnia but doesn't seem bothered by it.