Beatrice Tidal
| Also known as | Bea |
|---|---|
| Species | Human |
| Title | Sacred Head |
| Affiliation | Sacred Rulers, Sacred Guard |
| Home | Mountbridge, Earth |
| Powers | Land, water and fire; the Sacred Symbol |
| Family | Celine Tidal, her mother, identified by Lumikki Otsby as Amelia Lunala |
| Status | Alive |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Beatrice Tidal, called Bea, is the Sacred Head of Eslura, chosen while she was still living on Earth and had never heard of Eslura at all.[1] She entered the world through a cave outside Camp Tossbridge following a vision of her missing mother, and arrived carrying the Sacred Symbol on her right wrist.[2][3]
Appearance
Bea's eyes are green.[4] She cut her hair short to a bob, which she was grateful for on the descent from Galecrest while Reagan Hideaway fought to keep hers out of the wind.[5] She arrived in Eslura in a sundress with a scraped and bruised left knee from running through the woods, and a fist she had cut open on the stone of the cave.[2]
Five interlocking gold circles are set into the skin of her right wrist. The mark runs on a spectrum from gold to black, and it darkened to brown after Demise clawed it.[6] Wearing The Sacred Cloak in Amelia Lunala's old room at the Sacred City, her eyes turned from green to gold.[4]
Personality
Bea is quiet to the point that Alistair Archibald has to pull her back out of her own thoughts, and she is used to being talked about rather than talked to.[1] She keeps a sketchbook of invented worlds she calls her escapes, and disappears into it whenever the world around her stops being bearable.[2] She is afraid of heights, has never been in an aeroplane, and had to be talked onto the back of a dragon.[7]
Her instinct is to help even when she is certain she cannot. Told that the well at the Sacred City had run dry, she cut off Alistair's warning that her powers were too new and offered anyway.[8] The same instinct works against her: her powers answer her feelings rather than her intentions, and panic in Amelia's room brought a castle down around her.[4]
She is also stubborn about people. When Alpin Loomin knocked Barnaby Britto unconscious and locked him in a closet as a danger to her, Bea argued that Barnaby had done nothing wrong, then waited for the gopher to fall asleep and took the boy a handful of berries.[9]
Background
Bea grew up alone in the woods with her mother, Celine Tidal, and thought nothing strange about it.[2] Her mother disappeared, and by the summer she was sent to Camp Tossbridge she had not seen her face for nearly a year and a half.[2] She was placed with Fran and Joe Dildecker at Mountbridge, who had made it clear from the day she moved in, a year and one hundred sixty-four days earlier, that she was a subsidy check to them.[10] She slept in their attic and chalked the days off on the wall.[11]
Admitting to Fran that she was seeing things got her pulled out of Mountbridge High School and held three days in the Mountbridge Psych Ward while she tried to prove her sanity.[2] Fran and Joe then sent her to Camp Tossbridge for the summer.[10]
Story
Sacred: Eslura's Calling
At Camp Tossbridge, Wren Grout and two other girls from Mountbridge cornered Bea in the mess hall, took her sketchbook and read her mother's initials off the cover. Bea lunged for it and the book tore in half in their hands. She ran out of the fire door into a storm and kept running until she found a cave.[2]
Inside it a golden glow filled the cavern and a figure she took for her mother called her name and retreated down a tunnel. Bea followed it deep into the earth to a chamber where the figure vanished. A five-fold symbol lit the wall beside her. She touched it, her arm sank into the stone, and Reagan Hideaway, who had come looking for her, caught her free hand and was pulled through with her. Bea fell out of the dark into cold water.[2]
She surfaced in Eslura with the symbol on her wrist and a Shadow Reaper on her trail.[3] Alistair Archibald brought the two of them to Farenworth, where he told her what the mark meant: that Eslura had chosen her as its next Sacred Head, guardian of the Sacred Rulers and of the Sacred Books.[1] Alpin Loomin was ordered to escort them to Galecrest for the High Moon Festival, and Tabitha Glowdish ambushed the party on the way and took Reagan and the Eyearke Stone with her.[1][12]
Bea went on with Alpin, met Barnaby Britto in an abandoned house and freed him from the closet Alpin had shut him in, and travelled with the two of them through Haberpaw to Treenode, where Seely laid out his research on the Olphin Stones and the innocence of the Olphins.[9][13] Demise caught up with her there and dragged a claw across her wrist.[14] The symbol darkened to brown, and Nordwelg judged that part of the Reaper was still inside her, eating away at whatever energy she had left.[6]
Alistair took her to the Hollow of Gewa and told her that she is made of the same energies that sustain the world, and that her body has to be carried back to the source of that power. She laid her hand on the Heart of the Book of Land and the mark came back toward gold.[6] He also told her that the Sacred Guard of Blighburrow, Galecrest, Ovallia and Zybersia answer to her.[6]
The party reached Galecrest during the High Moon Festival, and Bea promised Barnaby she would get him inside the Eslurian Opera House.[7] The Nelazgians attacked the city that night. Cornered in an alley with Reagan, Alpin and Barnaby taken hostage, Bea felt her hand go warm and green, and drove the grass growing between the cobblestones up through Drayzuzian's chest, then wound it around the throats of the two Nelazgians holding her friends. Reagan was clawed open in the same fight and healed with dragon spinal fluid by Millennium Loftwind.[15] Over breakfast the following morning, Officer Kazke arrived from Morgaedion to say that Obellius Kalaar had escaped and was coming for her.[15]
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
Bea left Galecrest with the others as the Nelazgians closed on it, and parted from Reagan to train with Alistair.[5] Reagan lifted the Eyearke Stone over her head and gave it to her outside the ruined castle at the Sacred City, telling her it belonged to her.[16]
At the Sacred City the townspeople were divided over her. Bray asked why they should trust a little girl when Amelia could not stop Obellius; Alistair answered that the Books had chosen her.[8] Livina showed her the last surviving mural in the city, and a young bunny named Bow asked her to fill their dry well. Bea agreed. Water burst out of the earth, destroyed the well, tore through the lean-to and blew a hole straight through the middle of the mural. She ran.[8]
Alistair found her in the castle and took her to Amelia Lunala's old room, where the Sacred Cloak still hung in the wardrobe. Bea put it on, looked in the broken mirror and saw her mother looking back, wearing the same cloak and with gold eyes. When the vision faded, her own eyes had turned gold. She panicked, and the castle split apart around her and Alistair.[4]
Nindra woke her in a garden with a puff of Sniffysno, told her that her emotions were making her powers unmanageable, and taught her to breathe.[17][18] Nindra then had her hold the Eyearke Stone and think of a happy place. What came was a vision of herself standing over her kneeling friends with the stone held out above them and Obellius at her shoulder. Bea threw the stone away inside the vision and woke to find a gold crack splintered across it.[18] She kept it afterwards and vowed never to become the version of herself it had shown her.[19]
She went back to the town square and fixed the mural, growing grass and vines out of the cracks in the wall into a five-fold symbol with gold petals blooming along the stalks. Alistair, who had been dug out of the castle, told her it was better than the original.[11]
Lumikki Otsby and Remidigon Otsby arrived at the square from Veskadoth. Lumikki went pale at Bea's name and told her that the woman who had shared their cell, who spoke of a daughter called Beatrice Tidal and kept turning over a bare wrist to look for a symbol, was Amelia Lunala, the former Sacred Head. Bea asked where she was, and already knew the answer.[11]
Relationships
Reagan Hideaway was Bea's counselor at Camp Tossbridge and followed her through the cave into Eslura. Reagan has charged herself with protecting Bea ever since, stepping in front of Drayzuzian's claws for her and telling her afterwards that a counselor never leaves her camper behind.[15]
Alistair Archibald found Bea on the night she arrived and has taught her since. He calls her Beatrice, never Bea.[1]
Alpin Loomin dismissed her as a street urchin the night they met and insulted her most of the way to Galecrest, but escorted her there when Alistair asked him to.[1]
Barnaby Britto bonded with her at once. She fed him berries in the closet Alpin locked him in and promised to get him into the Eslurian Opera House.[9][7]
Her mother is the wound underneath everything Bea does. Bea followed a vision of her into the cave that brought her to Eslura, saw her again in a mirror at the Sacred City, and learned there that she is alive and held by Obellius.[2][4][11]
Behind the scenes
The pronunciation guide at the back of both novels lists Beatrice (Bea) Tidal and Celine Tidal without a pronunciation, alongside the names that carry one.[15][11]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Book 1, Ch. 8.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Book 1, Ch. 4.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Book 1, Ch. 6.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Book 2, Ch. 9.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Book 2, Ch. 3.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Book 1, Ch. 22.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Book 1, Ch. 24.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Book 2, Ch. 5.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Book 1, Ch. 13.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Book 1, Ch. 2.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 Book 2, Ch. 28.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 10.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 17.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 20.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 Book 1, Ch. 26.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 2.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 16.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 Book 2, Ch. 17.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 27.