There are wildflowers in your bones, Yarrow-girl,
There are birch trees and bluebells in the very marrow of you

You are made of aborigine stuff—of sand and soil; of purloined wildness. You are a frontier, every slender, lithy inlet and dune of your body, a land untamed. Fields of wildflowers and barley; rivers of ichor along the unpaved hinterlands of your mottled shores.

We found you like a baby bird, pink and sightless; the plumage around your head downy and soft. You were naked as the place you were born, but for the hardier pilgrims of agave and prickly pear, for you, Yarrow-girl, had made it! You were, then, incipient as a seed sown in the soil, a thing in need of sun and rain above all else.

We saw you for the scion that you are.

We watched from the dark as, against the blighted, barren tracts of you, you flourished, dear Yarrow-girl. Willowy as a new sprouted forest, slender but tough, for we saw that you bowed but never broke. Not even in the most violent of gales. In time, upon the pockmarked and unlovely valleys came efflorescence like sprung Spring. A thick and wild copse of flowers and pliant switches grew from you as from the earth itself—at you withers and the base of your tail, from the root of your spine; across your bright and curious face, thickest around the eyes, hiding the shyness of your imperfections.

No mind.

Nature is so rarely perfect.

...sweet little-Yarrow-flower, the world is such a cruel place…

When I found you, little-Yarrow-flower, oh, you were such a wee hapless thing.

Oh, how the world seemed so big around you. How it seemed to have forgotten and misplaced you, flower. Oh, aye, but not I, love. I took you to my bosom and swore to you, no harm would ever come.

Such a gentle soul. Such a sweet little thing.

I bound your eyes with linen wraps so nobody would make fun of you.

I never let you out of my sight.

Oh, little-Yarrow-flower, if only I could have protected you forever.

But the world is such a cruel place, love. When you began to grow, flower, I started to worry so. I started to think you’d wander too far. That the world would swallow you whole and spit you back out and I’d have to tell you, ‘I told you so, flower ‒ mammy is always right.’ You became bold. You become bright and curious and, flower, it scared me.

And I knew, I just knew, you’d trust I always knew what was best for you.

You grew, flower, even in the dark. Even where the sun couldn’t find you. Even down there, you found beauty in the fungi that grew on the old, damp beams. You listened to every word of every book I brought down to read to you by lamplight. Every botany textbook and every fairytale tome. You were sharp and soft, flower, and that’s why I couldn’t take the risk.

It hurt me too, flower, to hear you cry and knock at that door all night like that.

You understand though, don’t you flower?

You’ll see, little-Yarrow-flower. You’ll see. Mammy is always right.

Fate is a peculiar thing, Yarrow. It puts people in places they never thought they would be. But never forget, Fate is a finicky thing, too. Sometimes it needs your help.

It was not the collar that shamed me most.
It was that I had been caught alive at all.

That I should have let those Court dogs catch me without more than just my spear in one of their guts. That I did not die that day under Solis’ light, on hot sand, as was meant to be.

Fate is a funny thing.

It found a Davke in Delumine, of all places, yoked to the cart of a fat, soft-skinned merchant who had bought me from the slave market on the notion that I could protect his wares. Fool. It took one spear in his own man’s gut to conclude that I would be no man’s muscle.

Better starved than tamed.

How long was I chained to that wagon, dragged between settlement and court? I cannot say. How long, before that fateful night fell and we stopped on the road, the Viride looming large all around... Why he, soft-spoken and gentle, crowned in wildflowers and barley, choose to break the cover of his furtive existence to set me free, I know not that either. But, there was a rebellious streak in his eye as he commanded his root-tendrils to fidget in the mechanisms of the lock at my throat.

He healed me.

He taught me how to be wild again.
Am I cursed?
Has Solis forsaken me, left me like salted earth?

Have I not given Him everything and more?

Is this all my labours will ever bear out? A reckoning of all my sins, of the sins of my fore-bearers, laid naked in broken things that I cannot make right.

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t that Solis sees the traces of Oriens in me. But if that is the case, then I am damned, for I have done everything I can think to rebuke that part of my soul.

She is beautiful, though.

I look at her now, and all I see is what could have been. I see the perfect places. The strong, willowy legs, the shaky but firm neck. The points of hip and chest and knee and everything is as it should be. I see things differently if I close my eyes. I see her shining in the sun. I see not just her, but him too and, Solis, why?

I see them, tattooing themselves into the sand of time, taking their rightful places beside the Sun-God.

Why?

...why can she not see?

Where are her eyes?

She is an ill-omen. She looks at me—or, she tries to look at me—and I all I can do now is find what needs to be atoned for.

I will bring her out myself. I think they will allow me that.

I should bring a spear with us… Gods… I cannot bear this regret again. How many times must I see him, wandering out across the dunes alone? How many nights spent sleepless, haunted by him? Can I bear another ghost?

There is a reason for all of this. For my fallow, diseased body; for their sacrifice.

I’ll count the freckles on her body, as I did his, as we walk.

I’ll bring her a little further this time, just so Eluetheria is on the horizon—perhaps that gives her a chance…

...Yarrow-girl.

I am having the weird dreams again. The ones were the forest seems to talk to me.

I gathered some mushrooms and primrose and trout lily today along the path. I bumped into Samuel and Neel and they asked me to play tag!

Lost my flowers, though. They fell out of my basket when I went to hide in the bramble and got stuck and I didn’t even realize. Heck.

Mammy was furious when I got home.

P.S.
I must get mammy to get Aelwred Bland’s Fungist’s Companion Vol 2, we are almost done volume 1. I do not think this mushroom is a Frilly Amanita...
Mammy says the wolves are getting bad. That’s why I can’t go into town today with her. I must stay put, just in case… if we were to get separated, she says, I may never find my way back.

She’s locked the door.

These wolves are crafty with their paws.

P.S.
It’s a Fairy-Hair Amanita, I am sure of it! I’ll get mammy to confirm its colour to me when she gets back.

P.P.S.
I was right! It’s blue-grey. Just like I thought.
I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND!

I haven’t heard a single howl in a week...

There cannot be wolves without howling… can there? I want to go outside! The boneset is blooming and I wanted to gather some… it just isn’t fair.

P.S.
I made mammy cry. I feel awful. If she lets me out tomorrow, I’ll get her some lilac… I know it’s her most favourite smell ever.
Not just wolves, now. Wraiths and dire-bears.

Tonight, mammy read me a story about a girl who left home, despite her mammy telling her not to, and she wandered into the woods. She left sugar cubes behind her, so she could find her way back home—I thought that was clever. But something ate them from behind her, and she was lost.

She got eaten…
It isn’t safe anymore.

Mammy brought me down to the cellar today.

She says there have been so many deaths in the woods and villages. She’ll bring books down and read to me, and some flowers and mushroom when she remembers. I’m scared.

It’s damp down here, and I can tell it’s dark. Mammy says its silly for me to be afraid of the dark, but I am all the same.

She’ll bring me back out when it’s safe.

P.S.
Mammy read me a bit of Alysanie’s Fables tonight. The one where the little girl is locked in the cabin by the lake to keep her safe from dragons, but a prince comes and saves her and kisses her.

But then they both die because the dragons got them.

P.P.S.
I found some mushroom growing in the corner and on the beams!
I cried and I cried, but mammy never came down.

My throat hurts so bad.

I had a dream where the cellar was flooding with water and I was trying to get up high so I could breathe but then I couldn’t and just as I was going to drown, I heard the lock on the cellar door click and the chains loosen and then I woke up.

It was still locked when I checked it.

When she came down to visit, mammy said I could cry all I wanted, but she knows what’s best, and she won’t let me get hurt. She cried and I told her I was sorry and we tried to figure out what the mushrooms down here are.
Mammy brought me another braille book. Mauus Jonane’s Botanicullarium.

Queen’s Pinkgill is good for headaches when dried and steeped. Coneflower can ease toothaches. It tells me what they look like, too. Queen’s Pinkgill is, as you would expect, a pinkish hue, large and flat-capped.

I wonder what pink looks like.

Coneflowers can be yellow or red or white.

Yellow, it seems, is the colour of the sun. So it must be warm. Bright. Bright, because the sun is bright. Warm because, well, even I know it is warm.

But red, pink and white?

Today, I pressed my ear against the cellar door.

I didn’t hear anything.
Mammy didn’t visit for three, maybe four, days?

She brought me food and a book, but when she was leaving I could hear her wheezing and coughing. I will see if I can get her to find some dried coltsfoot I might have laying around.
Last night I dreamed the packed dirt below me became soft, like a pillow of moss and starflower. I could smell it all. The earth and the bark and blooms, even though I know it’s winter.

When I shifted, I could feel the sun spotting my back.

Roots grew through the ceiling of the cellar and cracked open the stone foundations of the cabin. I woke up, covered in pollen and bumblebees and I heard the lock on the cellar door click, and the chains rattle loose.

I checked it. When it pushed up against the door it creaked and cold air rushed in and I screamed and let it slam shut again.

I’m scared.

P.S.
Mammy isn’t coming back.

The thing is, there should be snow on the door, it should be too heavy to open, but it wasn’t.

P.P.S.
I have to leave. I cannot stay down here anymore.

Wildflowers call you home

Her Eira blood has not shown itself in any active magic—at least not yet—but it does display in the efflorescence that graces her form. A burst of wildflowers and switches from her very body, around her face in a visor-like formation, thickest around the eyes, making it impossible to see the empty sockets below the blossoms. She also has clutches of growth at her withers an the base of her tail.

_{*Staff edit: Due to our character design rules being changed April 2021 (now all recognizably-equus fantasy designs with aesthetic, non-harmful designs aspects can be joined without items), this character's passive magic is no longer needed! The cost has been refunded and the item removed from their inventory.}