Legends of Mad Queen Marietta

Mad Queen Marietta lived about 500 years ago and is widely considered to be the most powerful Fate Witch who ever lived. Two apparently mutually exclusive tales are told about her.

The first is a cautionary tale, usually told to little Clotho strega if they seem too careless of their powers. The Mad Queen, you see, helped her husband the king by cursing all of his subjects and servants, especially with Rods curses to break their wills. She took many Fate Lashes while doing this, but the Mad Queen didn't care. What she didn't know was that the Lashes not only tore at her body, but at her mind and at her soul. One day, she went even more mad than she already was and began a murderous rampage through the house, killing even her own children, before her mother thrust a knife into her throat to stop her. So don't tempt Fate Lashes, girls, or you'll go crazy like old Mad Queen Marietta.

That would make it singularly impossible for her to also be the self-styled Queen Marietta Lorenzo, an attested historical figure. That Mad Queen Marietta also did strange and more-unnatural-than-usual things with Sorte. The canonical tale is that, to assist in the Crusades, she wanted to remove the Cresent Empire from the Weave of Fate entirely - to erase it from existence. Instead, Lorenzo Island disappeared. Not from existence, because history still remembers the Lorenzos. But one morning, the island and everyone on it were gone. That loss broke the Lorenzo power in Vodacce.

Historians typically accept the second tale as the truth, and consider the first to be a moralising fiction.

The 7th Sea Game Master's Guide provides the first mention of Marietta and the first story; in the Vodacce sourcebook, the first story is completely ignored in favor of the Lorenzo backstory. Only one can be literally true, of course... unless Marietta managed a Sorte so powerful that she somehow created two separate histories for herself.