about.
FULL NAME: elena maria iniguez (first life), marina duarte rondon (second life)
NICKNAME: marina, la llorona
AGE: verse dependent (usually between 15 - 24)
BIRTH DATE: may twenty-first
ETHNICITY: mexican
GENDER: female
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: bisexual
RELIGION: undetermined
SPOKEN LANGUAGE: spanish, nahualt, englsih.
CURRENT LIVING CONDITIONS: living with her mother.
OCCUPATION: n / a.
PARENTS: yara duarte (mother), candelario rondon (father)
SIBLINGS: xochitl rondon (paternal half-sister)
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: agustin mondragon (ex-husband, deceased)
CHILDREN: gloria mondragon (deceased), diego mondragon (deceased)
EYE COLOUR: brown
HAIR COLOUR: brown
HEIGHT: 5'8"
elena maria iniguez was a girl born into a poor family on a small village in central mexico. though it wasn't her given name, everyone in town grew to know the girl as marina, an affectionate nickname due to her love for swimming down in the river. since youth, it had her favorite activity to pass time. if marina wasn't around wooing the men of the village with her joyous personality and looks, she was taking a dip in the water and letting it clear her mind.
marina was married rather young to a rich man who gained interest in her due to her beauty. his name was agustin mondragon, and he was a spaniard who had come to mexico seeking love and adventure. from the moment he first learned about the girl who spent her days in the water, he was determined to make her his wife, and he promised marina anything if she'd marry him.
marina was enchanted by him and his devotion to her, and though she'd no true interest in him at first, she grew to love him for the words of love that he spoke. they were married in a small ceremony, which marina was happy about as she didn't crave riches, just happiness. marina's only request after they were wed was to have a home by the river, so she may spend her days with the man she loved and the water she loved. he'd complied, making her a home big enough for her and their family to live.
they had two children within the next few years. a boy, the eldest, was named diego. two years after her, another child, this one called gloria, was born. the kids were marina's whole world. she loved them deeply, and cared for them with every ounce of love her own mother, whom had passed away when marina was born, couldn't show her.
as time went on, though, marina noticed that agustin was losing interest in her and their relationship. he was a noble from spain, and he had other obligations to attend to, obligations that took him away for long periods of time. but there was something different about the most recent moments.
just like herself, marina's children loved to play in the river. she'd join them most days, but the day that her husband came back to them, only to announce he was leaving her, she'd been too grief struck to do much except sit there and think about what she was going to do. the last few years had left her isolated from the rest of their village, her father had died years ago, all she had left was herself, and her children.
too wrapped up in her fears and worries, she didn't notice when her children suddenly weren't the anymore. it was as if one moment, they were there, laughing and playing, and the next there was nothing. only silence.
marina couldn't think, and panic gripped her heart. the only thing she had left was missing when they should have been right there. she did the only thing she could do, she jumped into the water, looking for them. but she tried for too long, and pushed herself too hard, and it caused her to drown.
it was only once she was dead that marina learned she was unable to get peace in her afterlife because she'd indirectly caused her children's death. more so, learned of another fact that played into her fate: she was a descendant of la malinche, the woman who had originally betrayed the indigenous people of mexico to the spaniards. because of the murder of her family at the hands of these very people, a witch had placed a curse that had begun with la malinche, and went down the line of her female descendants. none of them would ever live easy lives. they'd all have tragedy in their blood.
marina was cursed to wander the earth forever, looking for her children, unable to find them. everyone thought she'd killed her children, and her name was tainted. she became a cautionary tale.
in a shocking turn of events, however, both her kids didn't die. in fact, her son, diego, was very much alive. he'd been found by a fisherman the next town over, drifting in the water, half alive and too traumatized to remember anything. when the villagers asked him what happened, he wouldn't speak. he didn't speak for years.
unable to find answers, the fisherman that found him took him in and raised him as one of his own children. he was given the name andres. andres duarte.
the son went on to grow into a man and have his own family, never speaking of anything that had happened the day he'd been found. not until his own children asked him, decades later, close to the end of his own life. it was at this point when he confessed that he was a boy from the next village over who had supposedly drowned, but had never said for fear of being returned to his father, the only family he had left. andres, then diego, had never known love from his father, only marina.
it remained a secret that stayed within the family, none of them knowing about the curse that befell the women of their family. that would continue because of andres.
for a few decades, they were lucky; mostly men were born into the family, married to women who did not share the curse, and nothing obviously tragic happened.
eventually, more women were born into the line, and the curse continued. because the family had grown in the decades past, it became obvious something was going wrong. one of the great great grandchildren of marina realized this, and they decided to look back into their lineage to see if they could spot something amiss.
this descendant, yara duarte, had something special. yara was a woman of the family, but her mother was a witch from another family that was blessed with good fortune. yara and her sister weren't affected by the curse, while their cousins were.
so yara looked through their family's history, and she stumbled upon a journal that told about andres, and what he'd revealed about his childhood. yara went to the river that had been marina's place of death looking for answers, a river that held much superstitions, and she found them in a ghost that was still forced to wander for eternity.
marina was only a spirit, so the connection with yara was harder to maintain. an explanation harder to find. yara spent months in the river at night, when marina was strongest, talking to her about what she remembered. years had passed, but marina remembered. she remembered about the curse, and about losing her children. and no matter how much yara told marina, marina never remembered the encounters with yara. every night, her memory wiped clean of any knowledge yara tried to instil on her. she never remembered yara was her descendant, that her son hadn't drowned.
yara spent years trying to find out how to stop it, but she just ended up frustrated. she didn't know where to begin with the curse, she didn't know how she could go about saving her family. though she herself was a bruja, she didn't have enough time or power to make a difference. she was getting old, time was passing, and people were still dying.
yara decided to do one thing, one thing that she could think to stop it. she went to another witch she knew, asking for a favor. yara had never had a family, nor children, too afraid to risk the same curse befalling them.
she asked this particular brujo for one thing: a child from his own blood.
but. not just any child. a child with a soul of someone who had already lived and died. someone who had experience with the curse, and who'd suffered from it.
yara wanted marina's soul reborn in the child.
yara theorized that if she had a child with one of the strongest witches she knew, this child, marina born again, would be strong enough to make a change. to end their family's curse. she asked marina for her permission after being assured it would be possible, and after having everything explained to her again, marina agreed -- she didn't want the same thing that had happened to her to hurt anyone else.
so yara had this child. she continued to research the curse, continued on with her life and raised the child she named marina to one day grow up and save her family.
