"Do you really wish to know?" — Spoilers from the books and/or adaptations to follow!
Anabelle was the daughter of Vserad, the former lord of Velen around 1272. She was deeply in love with a local fisherman, Graham, but her father disapproved of their relationship. During the third Nilfgaardian invasion, she fled with her family to take shelter in the mage Alexander's tower on Fyke Isle. Later she was eaten alive by rats while paralysed by a potion during a peasant riot.
Journal entry[]
- Geralt encountered this young woman's ghost in the uppermost room in the haunted tower on Fyke Isle. She told him that in life she had been the local lord's daughter.
- When enraged peasants stormed the tower, she feared they would ravage her honor if they found her alive and so took a magic potion that put her in a corpse-like state of paralysis. When she woke, she found herself lying amidst the bodies of her family and servants, unable to move. She watched in helpless horror as rats feasted on the pile of corpses and began to nibble on her as well.
- This grisly death must have somehow put a curse on her and the tower, for her ghost had wandered it in restless torment ever since. Geralt engaged his vast experience with such curses to search for a possible solution. Having learned that Anabelle had loved a simple fisherman named Graham, Geralt decided this man and the bond of true love the two youths shared could be their salvation.
- If Geralt takes Anabelle's remains from the isle:
- Geralt agreed to take the young woman's remains to her love to have him give her a proper burial. Geralt hoped this would lift the evil spell on the cursed isle and bring Anabelle peace at long last.
- Sadly, what Geralt took to be the ghost of an innocent woman was in fact death and disease in spirit form – a being known as a pesta, or plague maiden. Having lured Geralt into the open, it killed the unfortunate Graham and then escaped to spread the pox and feed on human suffering.
- It is possible that this incident caused the local outbreak of Catriona that devastated the kingdom of Kerack and sowed the seeds of the coast city's ultimate downfall.
- If Geralt refuses to fulfill Anabelle's request:
- Perhaps there was something in the girl's words that had put Geralt on his guard, or perhaps his witcher instincts simply warned him in time - either way, Geralt knew what he was dealing with a literal second before Anabelle revealed her true nature. The spirit was in fact a pesta - a plague maiden, a terrible wraith which spreads death and pestilence.
Associated quest[]
Notes[]
- While her journal entry shows her hair and eyes as brown, her extracted game model has black hair and green eyes. It's unclear why the developers made this change.
- In the leaked material, her story was to be a bit different. Her father was to have promised her hand in marriage to another magnate for political purposes but she didn't feel any attraction for him. She started seeing Graham in secret and continued to do so when her family moved to Fyke Isle as Graham was responsible for bringing them supplies. However her father eventually learned of this relationship and had her locked up in the tower. Graham then agreed to help the peasants storm the tower in hopes of getting Anabelle out of there.