briar greensmith
Name: Briar Greensmith (born Drufila Ironwood) Occupation: Dancer at the Satin Cabaret Age: 428 (Physically 33) {Born 1597 Sexuality: Sapphic Species: Witch Coven: Circle of the Phial Hometown: Massachusetts Bay Colony Relationship Status: Single Personality Traits: ++ : Compassionate, Loving, Inquisitive, Resolute - - : Vengeful, Arrogant, Stubborn, Naive
( tw; Compulsory Childbirth, Compulsory Heterosexuality, Infanticide, Blood (blood magic), body horror )
tldr;
A woman out of time, deeply wronged by her coven, emerges 300 years later into the modern world. Her body is a vessel for a dark hex that replaces her ties with the natural spirits that drive her magic with a life-consuming seedling that curses any who prick themselves on its blood-thirsty thorns.
sought/current connects;
The Host: ( @declanofruin ) Ironwood's elders had tried to scrub Briar from history, but mortal men will always crave power, and so some foolish soul sought to keep the witch's grimoire rather than keep it. Thus it tumbled through time, a well kept secret, but not too well kept. Before it landed in its final resting place, enough of it's incomplete verses had been poorly copied to cause problems in the far flung future. Declan McCormick finds himself host to something akin to the Deathroot, and it links he and Briar inexorably. The Link: (daniella domotor) Briar's grimoire eventually came to rest with a vampire who had found her way into the good graces of Ironwood. This was one of the first people sought out on her arrival, and the two enjoy a, er... fraught relationbship. The Old Blood: ( @sunshincwitch ) Briar left Ironwood long ago, but in he return to the world, she finds that not only has it survived the centuries, but that there is a new rift in the coven surrounding a young witch, Chamomile. Briar would use this young woman as an athame for her revenge, a keening blade with which to sunder Ironwood, root and all. The New Blood: ( @estrideats ) Falling in with The Phial Coven, Briar plays at the potionmaker, offering draught and drug to those in the know for any and all applications one might ply from magic. She keeps a garden in her humble apartment; and sells her makings impromptu and under the table. Most are mundane, banal drugs that help with ache or worry. Others are more murky in their purpose, or outright bloody in intent. Friends/Coworkers ( @lrivkin , @bloodshcd) Briar is an odd duck to most, and splits her life between her witchly pursuits and evenings at The Satin Cabaret where she dances and plies her body in exchange for money and, secretly, as fuel for the seedling in her soul, blood that feeds the Death Root and provides the font for her magical power.
bio;
( tw; Compulsory Childbirth, Compulsory Heterosexuality, Infanticide, Blood (blood magic), body horror )
PROLOGUE IS PAST Seventh daughter born to her mother, Drufilla was raised in an era where man commited some of his greatest sins in the name of rooting out the sins of others. Raised in Ironwood Coven, she became beholden to the prophecy that a Seventh Daughter born of a Seventh Daughter would yield unimaginable and unlimitless magical potency.
Drufila, however, had no designs on motherhood. No desire to sire anything, for her heart had been taken by another Ironwood Woman. The two of them desired little else than to live their time out together, but A Seventh Daughter is too precious of a thing, and Ironwood's jaws were as cold and hard as strong as their namesake. They didn't care who Drufila Loved, but they wanted their Seventh of Seventh.
What resulted was a bloody swathe of murder that resulted in near ruin. For Drufila herself, and for generations of the Coven's history.
Drufila and her lover were dragged back to Ironwood's clutches in those early days, and Drufila's attempt to salt the earth of her womb to render herself useless to Ironwood's plan was met with harsh retaliation; her lover's blood and life were used to draught a concoction that would leave her fallow once more. The loss of love and the injustice of the ritual drove Drufila mad, and so once more she escaped Ironwood and into the woods of the countryside surrounding the coven's patch, from where where visited her vengeance upon them. Ere long she found herself quickened with an unwanted first of seven, in her grief and agony and hatred she used that child's life as fuel for her revenge; a Hex that would destroy Ironwood.
Blood and dark magic and her own affinity for the roots and herbs and flowers that grow up out of the Earth resulted in the cultivation of a seedling; the Death Root, a plague of a magical plant; she swallowed this seed and let it take root in her very soul, and it sapped up all of the magic in her, offering it's own power in exchange for blood.
It started simply; crops would harrow and yield only morbid, bleeding, misshapen fruit, livestock would turn up dead, wasted into nothing, strange black briars erupting from their bellies and sprouting up as they screamed about the incessant wailing of phantom infants. Soon enough however it was children doing the same; and anybody who would so prick their finger on those strange black thorns and would soon find themselves rife with consumption, a new soil bed for that accursed plant. Drufilla, to Ironwood, became the Briar Witch, a title she wore proudly.
It wasn't long before the leaders of Ironwood realized what the source of this hex was, and they bound together to commit to the world a ritual that would rid them of it. By the end, Ironwood's number was decimated, but Drufila was spelled away, trapped in another world, doomed to live out the same cold, wintry day for the rest of eternity.
The sisters of Drufila Ironwood scrubbed the shame of her name from their record. Her grimoire, and thus the nature of Deathroot, was intended for destruction, but those who covet power instead hid it away, where it tumbled through time in secret, the only record of this bloody and sinful era of the coven's history. PAST IS PROLOGUE Drufila emerged from that world after reliving the same wintery day for centuries, maddened by the torturous cycle of repetition . Drawn out of that hexed prison in the space between one year and the next, on a night where the stars matched those of the night she'd vanished and the veil between worlds had weakened, she found herself completely adrift. The keystone that acted as the block-gate to her empty mirrorworld had come to rest in The Siltshore Mausoleum in Port Leiry, bloodied and resting in a corner of the grass after an Ironwood Witch had lost their life in a massacre while in the area searching for the wayward Chamomile Greensmith.
Briar finds now a world that is as alien to her as any fairy story of her childhood. Flameless lights. Carts without Horses. Magical mirrors that held all the world's knowledge in them.
In the woody dimensions of her purgatory, the Deathroot Seed had fallen into hibernation and powerless slumber. She found, however, that three-hundred years had done nothing to quell her thirst for red revenge, and so she set about learning how to live in this new world, to find her Grimoire, to requicken the Death Root, and to find and destroy Ironwood once and for all.
