Hitting the books.

Alas, dear readers, I know that I, Brendan O'Shea, have been one terrible chronicler of later. The muse seems to have left me for a time. I've already been to the Emerald Isle and am on my way back. I almost paid a visit to Shakespeare's Undiscovered Country but more on that later.

Anyway, after the near-disaster in Jackson Park, I decided it was necessary to do some more background reading on the Legend of Balor and see if I could dig up any more clues on Caleb and his plans.

I decided to hit the libraries at Loyola University (for occult/mythology info) and at Tulane University (for local area history), which is actually older than the Loyola U. campus in NOLA.

I sat down at the library after it opened one day, surrounded by heaps of texts covering countless Irish myths in hopes of finding some kind of lead on Balor or Caleb, and here is what I found:

Balor was King of the Fomorians until his death at the hand of Lugh, his grandson. This death was prophesied to happen. Lugh, according to legend shot a stone from a sling with such force that he knocked Balor’s eye out through the back of his skull. This occurred at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired (Plain of Pillars.) An odd note, the story tell of Balor killing Nuada, king of the Tuatha but as a Tuatha Scion myself, I happened to know he is fine and well. Some tales say that he may only have fallen into a coma.

When struck by the stone Balor’s eye rolled back out his skull and its deadly gaze fell upon the fomorian troops and eradicated them within seconds. Its gaze was so strong that it reportedly destroyed a portion of the land itself. That land has since been filled in by water and is referred to as Loch na Súl (Lake of the Eye) or so the legends say. Some tales say that Balor too did not die and fell into a coma. Ogma once told me, however, that he saw the corpse himself and can attest to the death.

Since then Balor’s wife Cethlenn (a nasty bitter hag that serves as the Entropic avatar of disease) has stopped at nothing to bring down the rule of the Tuatha. Ogma had told me she has no regard for her own spawn, the fomorians, using them to any end that will strike a blow at the Tuatha.

Since then nothing appears in tales of myth leaving me unsatisfied since nothing spoke of Caleb. I then turned my attention to history and accounts of Balor in modern times.

I knew that Balor was the avatar of Rot as it applies to Entropy, and that since his death, rot was supposed to have not touched the world. As an Irishman I couldn’t help but laugh at this knowing well the blights of your mother land. In fact there was no famine as bad as the one that stretched from 1845 until 1852, one that saw a mass exodus of your people, a great many of which egressed to the U.S. Natural or supernatural, the Great Potato famine was made incomparably worse by prevailing British economic policy at the time. This got me interested in researching the time period in question. At this point, I broke for lunch.

I enjoyed what the locals call a "po-boy" sandwich and sat at an outside table at a small restaurant that serves local creole cuisine. Having been in virtually all the Irish pubs and bars in the French Quarter very recently, I was interested to learn more about the history of the Irish immigrants behind them stretching back into the 19th century. I decided to head for Tulane University, which was one of the oldest universities in the area. I greeted the reference librarian, explained I was researching Irish immigration to New Orleans in the time of the Great Potato Famine, and she pointed me to a host of relevant resources.

It is in one such book that I found mention of New Orleans and the Irish that immigrated there. One book tells of the poor and destitute orphans that arrived in America, their parents having died on the boat trip over. Into the story steps an Irish woman named Margaret Haughery who herself was an orphan transplant from only a few decades back. Margaret took the orphans in and looked over them in the process starting a string of orphanages in New Orleans. The tales go on to paint this woman as a Saint as she fostered care to all races, religions and circumstances in the hopes of giving the children a better life than she has experienced having lost not one but two families after her husband and child both died of Cholera.

This history began to make me speculate that Margaret Haughery may have been under a Geas similar to Laurel’s, and Geasa aren’t just laid on just anyone off the street. The more I read about this woman and her hard work and dedication to the people of New Orleans the more I became fairly certain that she must have been a Scion of one of the Tuatha...A thought that was further cemented much later in the evening when I compared notes with my teammate Gunnar (who researched material on the Loa religion at the University of New Orleans on the same day) and I realized that Marie Laveau and Margaret Haughery lived and operated in this city during the same period of time.

Before that revelation, though, I found more information.

I decided to look into the released documents of the emancipated minors whose names would be available from those orphanages, hoping to find some kind of lead. In 1936 from the St. Vincent de Paul Infant Asylum a name and photograph jumped out at me, Odette Samania (A common Haitian family name I was aware of, and knowing Voodoo is very prevalent in Haiti). Doing the math I realised that this couldn’t just be a coincidence; the girl in the photo would be approaching her 94th birthday this year. In the photo there is another person standing aside Odette, a young man approximately the same age. You flip the photo over and find the following inscription:

“Odette Samania & Luc Francoeur
Emancipation Day
August 2, 1936"

In the image you notice that Luc is wearing a ring with a large jewel that was identical to a jewel worn by Margaret Haughery in the few pictures there were of her. The jewel always struck me as odd in the photos because of Margaret’s otherwise extremely drab and simple manner of dress.

Unfortunately from there I hit a brick wall; nothing I found gave any more information on either Odette or Luc. Or Caleb, for that matter.