Paige Mahoney

Paige Eva Mahoney, born Paige Aoife Mahoney (pronounced: Page EE-fuh MAH-huh-nee), also known as the Pale Dreamer and Black Moth, is an Irish-born dreamwalker, a rare type of clairvoyant. Since the age of sixteen, she has worked for the infamous Jaxon Hall, mime-lord of I-4, as his mollisher.

History
Paige was born in Clonmel, the county seat of South Tipperary, Ireland to Cóilín Ó Mathúna and Cora Spencer. Her mother died of placental abruption. She lived with her grandparents in the Golden Vale's southern dairy-farming district for most of her childhood on their dairy farm called Feirm na mBeach Meala. On occasion she would visit her aunt Sandra McCarthy and her cousin Finn McCarthy in Dublin, where her father worked. It was in Dublin that six-year-old Paige witnessed the Incursion and the beginning of the Molly Riots in 2046. She was in Dublin with Finn and his fiancé Kay. Kay wanted to take Paige home because it was clear things might get violent, but Finn wanted Paige to stay to see history in the making. He tells her that bad people are coming from over the sea who want to lock them up and not ever let them leave. As tanks begin rolling onto the streets, Kay is shot in the heart, which compels Finn to go rushing toward the soldiers. Finn was arrested and presumably hanged at Carrickfergus, while Paige hid from the violence under the Molly Malone statue. Understandably, this event has had a significant impact on Paige's life and her outlook.

When Abel Mayfield ordered the invasion of the south of Ireland, Paige and her father were forced to move away, leaving her grandparents to face Scion's occupation. The pair moved to the Scion Citadel of London in 2048 under "special circumstances" when Colin was conscripted by SciSORS. Paige attended the I-5 School for Girls of Quality, where she excelled in Scion History, French, and Physical Enrichment. She was unpopular at school due to the pervasive hibernophobia in Scion. She was frequently called a brogue, a slur against the Irish.

When Paige was nine years old, she began to notice that she was different, but her clairvoyance was still buried deep within her. That year, her father took her to a tiny village called Arthyen, near the southern coast. She was homesick for Ireland, but being in Arthyen was better than school, where she was constantly bullied. In a field of poppies at the edge of Arthyen, Paige came face-to-face with a poltergeist. It sliced the skin of her left arm to ribbons and then threw her away to bleed to death. Dr. Nicklas Nygård found Paige and recognized her wounds as spirit-made. He treated her himself and his kindness left a lasting impression. After the incident, she repeatedly had the same dream of a field of red poppies. Not knowing that it was her dreamscape, Paige ran farther each night until she reached the edge. On one occasion, she jumped off the edge and unwittingly into the æther. She awoke in an ambulance and her father claimed that she had wandered into the living room and stopped breathing. Doctors claimed that she had simply fallen into a coma.

Paige sees Nick for the second time when she is sixteen when he is a guest speaker at her school. Dr. Nygård talks about his career and has a question-and-answer session. After the lecture, Paige catches up with him. Nick remembers her from when they met when she was younger. As they are walking by the school mistress, the woman suddenly gets a nosebleed. After the mistress leaves, Nick asks Paige if people often have nosebleeds around her. Paige tells him they do and asks if he knows why. Nick replies that he might know and that he will be in touch with her again in a few days. Before leaving, he tells Paige not sign up for university.

Later, Nick introduces Paige to Jaxon Hall who takes an immediate interest in her. He hires her to be one of his Seven Seals and she becomes known as the Pale Dreamer. Paige has claimed that her gift is instinctive and this is supported by the fear and anger triggers she uses when fighting with her spirit.

The Pale Dreamer
Paige has been trying to master her abilities, but has not had much success. Nick has been teaching her how to use a knife and how to spool spirits.

The Bone Season
On the seventh of March, 2059, Paige was dreamwalking in Jaxon Hall's den in Seven Dials, also known as I-4, supervised by fellow voyant Danica Panić. She was shocked to discover that Danica had allowed her to stay for a full hour in the æther. That night, on her way to I-5 to visit her father, Paige was subjected to a spot check on the London Underground. Fearing arrest, she accidentally killed an Underguard by forcing his spirit out of his body. She left the other Underguard insane, because she was unable to carry out a mercy kill. When she reached her father's apartment, she lied to him about where she was living and claimed to be staying with a school friend, revealing that he has no idea about her life in Seven Dials. Once in her room, she called her mime-lord, Jaxon Hall, to inform him of what had happened on the train. Though pleased with Paige's new ability, Jaxon told her to stay at the apartment and wait for Nick Nygård to collect her in the morning. After falling asleep, Paige was woken by the presence of voyants and fled from the apartment. She was pursued by Scion's security forces and almost escaped, but she was knocked unconscious and almost killed with Fluxion 14.

Paige woke up in the Detainment Facility with no idea where she was and still suffering after-effects of flux. She encountered her first Rephaite, Pleione Sualocin, who hit her when she refused to take the pills she was handed. Once she was in her uniform, Pleione took her to another room, where she met several more voyants, including Carl, Julian, Tilda, and Ivy, along with Sebastian Pearce, an amaurotic. The group was taken to the library in the Residence of the Suzerain, where they were addressed by Nashira Sargas, who informed them of their new positions as slaves to the Rephaim. Each human was then selected by a Rephaite keeper. Paige was chosen by Arcturus Mesarthim, Nashira's blood-consort, who had never shown interest in a human before. She then went with him to the Founder's Tower at the Residence of Magdalen. After he tells her to, she takes a bitter-tasting green pill, that unbeknownst to her, contained Warden's numen, salvia, which allowed him to go through her memories when she slept.

Paige ends up bedridden with blood poisoning after her first test. Still, she rejects both the antidote and the food that Warden brings her.

After sleeping deeply, allowing her brain to recover from the terror, she wakes up to find she has been clamped to Warden’s bed, with the drapes pulled closed around the bed. Paige peeks out when she hears voices. It is Warden and Terebell Sheratan speaking in a strange language while looking closely at some object. Paige sees that it is her phone. She worries that if they have found her phone, they must have also found the pamphlet with Jaxon’s number, which would allow them to trace it back to Seven Dials. She decides she must get her phone back from them as soon as possible. After Terebell leaves, Warden pulls the drapes back. Paige demands her phone back. He tells her it is safe with Terebell, that she will keep it from Nashira.

When Paige misses curfew, Suhail drags her back to Magdalen. After he leaves, Warden insists that she sit down and eat something, but Paige lies and says that she isn’t hungry, despite having lived on skilly and toke for a week. Eventually she gives in and finishes off the prepared meal.

After waking up after dreamwalking in Warden’s dreamscape, still furious with him about the salvia, Michael greets her with a spread of food. She tells him she’s not hungry and that she doesn’t want Warden’s ‘guilt breakfast,’ but since she doesn’t have against Michael personally, it doesn’t take much coaxing to make her eat.

Warden is surprised to learn that Nashira is sending Paige back to the same place she got her from, Seven Dials. Paige explains that Nashira wants her to lure out members of the Seven Seals, still not knowing that Paige is a member. Nashira believes that the gang has a dreamwalker and doesn’t know that Paige is that dreamwalker. Paige also tells Warden that three red-jackets, David, Carl, and Amelia, and one Rephaite, Situla Mesarthim, would be going with her and Warden.

After the disaster in Trafalgar Square, Paige wakes up in Warden’s bed, with her wounds healed. Warden assures her that he didn’t hurt Nick. She asks him why he didn’t just let Paige go home, and he says that he has his reasons. Warden informs her that Nashira has rescinded her red-jacket for trying to escape, and she is now a yellow-jacket. David and Carl were unharmed and returned safely. However, Situla was made latent, and Amelia was dead, she had drowned. Antoinette Carter and Jaxon have escaped.

Paige and Warden finally give in to their feelings towards each other with a kiss moments before she is marched up to the stage for public execution.

The Mime Order
After escaping from Sheol I, Paige, the Seals, and the surviving voyants escape from the Tower of London. Paige then spends the next few days laying low in a safe house in I-4, tucked away in a warren of Soho backstreets. She is taking Nightcaps to help her dreamscape recover from fighting with Nashira. When she is finally able to enter her own dreamscape again, great patches of the poppy field have been uprooted. That's the fabric of her mind, torn and scarred. When she touches the seeds of the poppies, they change to a different kind of poppy poppy anemones, the only thing that can do harm to the Rephaim. Besides her mental trauma, her body is physically damaged as well. Everything is weak, worn thin, and whittled down. Her fingernails are flimsy, her skin is sallow, her hair is brittle and dull, and her ribs and hipbones bulge.

Paige realizes that her only option for safety and money is to return to Jaxon. She reluctantly does so. He has her dye her hair black to help her disguise herself from Scion. She also cuts her hair so it is level with her chin and she wears hazel contact lenses.

Paige is sent to the Devil's Acre, Hector's territory, to get Eliza's painting back from him. Upon arriving at his townhouse, she discovers his body and the bodies of his gang, minus Cutmouth. As she is trying to get the painting, a poltergeist attacks her. Using the necklace from Warden, she is eventually able to force it out of her dreamscape. However she has been really injured. She makes it out of I-1, and ends up passing out in Birdcage Park from the mental, spiritual, and physical pains. Nick gets an image of her from the æther and tells Jaxon where she is. He rescues her and brings her back to the den. They discover that the poltergeist was the London Monster. He used a phantom blade on her arm to make a collection of slices in a rough 'M' shape surrounded by splaying, blackened veins, with a glistening inkwell where the two middle lines met on her arm. When Jaxon touches it, it feels like liquid nitrogen has been poured on it. Her wound is essentially an invisible knife in her arm.

During the scrimmage, Paige and Jaxon fight as a team in the Rose Ring and defeat all of their opponents. As Jaxon is about to be named Underlord, Paige challenges him for the crown. He comes extremely close to defeating her, but she is able to beat him at the last minute by possessing him and forcing him to issue a surrender. Jaxon leaves, warning Paige that he will find other allies.

In her address to the Unnatural Assembly after being crowned Underqueen, Paige exposes the Rag and Bone Man's conspiracy and the Grey Market. Just as she is about to drop the bombshell that Scion is nothing more than a façade for Rephaite control when Warden and his allies show up out of nowhere, nearly throwing the crowd into pandemonium. Paige introduces the Ranthen to the syndicate and declares war on Scion.

The Song Rising
Jaxon reveals to Paige that he has returned to his former ally, Nashira Sargas, and that he was the traitor in the Bone Season XVIII uprising, XVIII-39-7. He tells Paige that she has fallen for Warden's "seduction" hook, line, and sinker, and that everyone can see she’s being emotionally manipulated into working with the Ranthen. Paige is fully aware of Jaxon’s own abilities as a manipulator, and logically she knows that Jaxon is using psychological warfare to destabilize the Mime Order. However, it still effectively plays on her fear of being controlled and her doubts about what Warden may or may not feel for her.

Paige makes a deal with Styx, the king of the toshers, to hide the syndicate in the Beneath. The Mime Order goes into hiding in an underground crisis facility as Senshield and ScionIDE are unleashes on London.

Upon meeting Elspeth Lin in the Scion Citadel of Edinburgh, Paige discusses the ellipse reading Liss Rymore did for her in Sheol I. The cards were the Five of Cups, King of Wands inverted, the Devil, the Lovers, Death inverted, and Eight of Swords. The Five of Cups is the past and represents Paige's father in mourning, presumably for his wife. The King of Wands inverted is the present and represents Jaxon and the hold he had once had over her life. The Devil is the future and represents hopelessness and fear, but according to Liss, Paige had chosen that path willingly and it is something she can escape. It symbolizes someone who controls and manipulates others. Elspeth explains that the Lovers card will show Paige what to do. She tells her, "There's tension between spirit and flesh, too much tension." Paige think the Lovers card could represent Warden, but she worries he could also be the Devil card. Elspeth finishes by telling Paige that she must follow the path of the Lovers card. She should stay close to the person she thinks the card might represent, and make sure she's identified that person correctly. If she strays from whoever it is, Elspeth believes Paige will make herself vulnerable to the person represented by the Devil card.

Hildred Vance uses Paige’s weak spots against her in Edinburgh by executing Colin Mahoney and recreating the scene of the Molly Riots, intending to trigger Paige’s traumatic childhood memories and make her surrender out of despair. Paige does surrender, just not for the reasons Vance intended. When Paige realizes that Senshield’s core is hidden inside the Westminster Archon, she surrenders to Scion on the spot, hoping that as a prisoner she’ll have a better chance of destroying it.

While imprisoned in the Archon, she learns from Jaxon that Hector was the one that ordered her sold to Scion. He also informs her that the Rag and Bone Man killed Hector on Jaxon's orders.

Paige battles the poltergeist powering Senshield's core in the glass tower of the Archon. In the fight, the glass shatters and Vance and Paige are seriously injured. She is rescued by Alsafi. Before he can follow her to safety, they are met by Nashira. Alsafi sacrifices himself so that Paige can escape.

The Dawn Chorus
It is January 2060, and Paige and Warden are in the Scion Citadel of Paris, staying in a safe house so that Paige can try to recover physically and mentally from her torture in the Westminster Archon. She has learned that she was imprisoned in the Archon for twenty-three days. She knows she spent an entire week lashed to the waterboard and tortured by Suhail Chertan. She had only been able to wash once in the twenty-three days, just before her meeting with Jaxon. Paige is struggling to deal with the words Suhail told her, "That even Warden's standards aren't that low, and that he sees her for what she is, the damp rot of mortality." Because of Suhail's mental torture, Warden's very presence fills her with self-loathing, and she can't bear for him to touch her even though his touch brings her comfort. Warden is giving her Scimorphine for the pain, and since she can't handle being near water, even to drink it, Warden offers to set up an IV instead, which Paige agrees to.

Paige survived her time in the Archon by dividing her imprisonment into steps. She wonders if she can do the same with her healing. She asks Warden if he ever gave up on her, and he says that he didn't. He was willing to propose a hostage exchange, his life for Paige’s. Terebell and Maria forbade it. He might have done it anyway, but an alternative plan arose.

She is going through withdrawal from the drugs constantly injected into her. A specter has appeared in her dreamscape as well, a smoke, Rephaite-shaped reminder of her ordeal, staring out from the darkest circle of her mind. While battling with her body and mind, still unable to bear Warden's touch despite how badly she wants it, she realizes what Suhail has done through his mental torture. Nashira must have ordered him to keep invoking Warden, to chisel away Paige's ability to take solace in him, so that even if she escape, it would always hurt to be in his presence.

Paige thinks about the last card in Liss' reading for her, the Eight of Swords. It represents her hopes and fears. She thinks perhaps her torture is represented by this card.

The Mask Falling
Coming soon...

Physical Description
Paige is 5"9' and has gray eyes and a serious look to her face. She has naturally dark lips. Her hair is white-blond and curly. She is not someone who would usually be described as fashionable. She has a trellis of scars on her left hand from the poltergeist attack she survived when she was nine. After being imprisoned in Sheol I, Paige has her name as a slave, XX-59-40, branded on her shoulder.

Personality
Paige is fiercely independent, driven, loyal, and possibly the most defining aspect of her character is her sense of doing the right thing. Paige believes that all clairvoyants have the right to freedom. She is driven to destroy Scion's doctrine of tyranny or die trying. While she says that "head down, eyes open" is her motto for staying alive, she has a borderline suicidal habit of provoking her enemies and entering into dangerous situations. Both in Sheol I and in the syndicate, Paige is told to follow strict rules or risk death, but she never listens. She would rather risk her life fighting for what she and her fellow voyants deserve than keep her head down and be grateful for what she's got.

Not only is Paige physically tough, but she is also mentally tough. No matter how injured, exhausted, or in pain she is in, she always gets back up and keeps going. When she's made a slave in Sheol I, she refuses to lie down and take it. Instead, she plots a mass jailbreak with the other prisoners, and they stage their revolt on the very day that the Sargas were supposed to celebrate the consolidation of their power. After having been mentally and physically tortured for weeks in the Archon, Paige manages to escape her cell, sneak into Victoria Tower, and face down both Hildred Vance and the Senshield poltergeist. The experience nearly kills her.

Paige tends to doubt herself on many levels, especially once she becomes Underqueen and has to deal with the pressures and responsibilities that come with the position. Like Warden, she is proud, emotionally guarded, and deeply loyal. They both have a strong sense of responsibility to the people who depend on them.

When Paige chooses the Black Moth as her new alias, it is an echo of the speech Gomeisa Sargas gives Paige about how humans are like moths. At the time, Gomeisa was pointing out the weak, pitiful, self-destructive nature of humanity, but Paige appropriates it for the allusion to a short-lived life that ends in fire, matching her determination to bring down Scion even if it means sacrificing herself.

Etymology
Paige is a name for both males and females. The name is of English origin that means "young helper" or "young child." In medieval times, a page was usually a young boy whose service was the first step in his training as a knight. Eva is the Latin form of the name Eve, derived from the Hebrew name meaning "life" or "living one." It is the standard biblical form of Eve in many European languages. Mahoney is the Anglicised form of the Old Gaelic O'Mathghamhana, which means "descendant of Mathghamhain," and an Irish surname.

Trivia

 * Nick calls Paige sötnos, which means "sweet nose" in Swedish.
 * Paige's favorite flower is wild oat.
 * Paige is demisexual, meaning she only experiences sexual attraction to people with whom she has an emotional bond.

Appearances

 * The Pale Dreamer
 * The Bone Season
 * The Mime Order
 * The Song Rising
 * The Dawn Chorus
 * The Mask Falling