Asphodel

Fate is not often kind to the progeny of the ascended Gatekeeper, she who watches over the threshold of life and death and the divine, who ushers the exalted and the dead to their respective realms. Perhaps, this is providence seeking to undo what should not have been, or perhaps it is because of the chaotic and unnatural power of Naomi herself spilling out into reality around her descendants. They are hatched with their innate life-giving magic entwined with the power that Naomi gained upon her ascension, exposed to the essence of the in-between filling everything, which grants them uncanny abilities and leaves them open to the influence of dark forces in equal measure.

Asphodel is one of the fortunate ones whose stories have a happy ending; or at least, a happy middle, for the future of the Demesne's dragons is not written in stone. Her beginning was another matter. She herself only knows bits and pieces of the start of her story.

Her earliest memories are of playing with other foundlings in the nesting grounds of the clan that raised her. The names of her playmates and caretakers are too-quiet whispers, and their faces blurred in her mind, but she remembers that she and the other hatchlings were cherished and counted as blessings by the clan, because many other eggs had sickened and failed to hatch that season. Asphodel had just learned to fly when she experienced her second kidnapping, the first that she recalls. She was taken by dragons who consider themselves servants of the Shade. They'd been planning her abduction long before she even hatched, she'd learned, because of what she was, and what she could become.

It was the cultists who taught Asphodel of the lineage she inherited from both of her parents, the nature of Naomi and the bizarre influence it had on her descendants. Their mother, they told her, was a powerful seer. With two strains of Naomi's blood, the cultists hoped that she would inherit her mother's power and become the perfect vessel of the Shade. With the right preparation and exposure to its power, the cultists hoped that she would become its voice, telling them of their future and give them the Shade's guidance.

Asphodel hardly understood what was happening. She didn't know about her great-great-grandmother or even her parents's names. All she knew was that she'd been ripped from her happy life- one that she'd been told wasn't hers to begin with- because factors beyond her control made her the perfect material to be molded into a tool of forces she didn't comprehend. The cultists had spied on her parents and on prospective foster clans for months, and when she hatched, they threw everything they had into stealing her and planting her into a suitably caring clan's nests. She was a parasite, the cuckoo in the warbler's nest, gorged on care and food that might have gone to many other hatchlings had the cultists not ruthlessly intervened, so she would be fit to serve their purpose. And all the while as the years passed darkness and the unseen layers of reality soaked into in body and mind.

As she entered adolescence perhaps fate took pity on her plight, for her fortune suddenly swung in the opposite direction. An organization dedicated to the extermination of Shaded forces learned of the cult's existence, and brought the full force of its wrath upon it. In the chaos even Asphodel's wardens had to leave their posts to join the battle, and Asphodel was able to escape from the compound. She took off, and in her desperate terror did not stop flying until forced down by sheer exhaustion. She was found unconscious in the wilderness by dragons making their way to the Diabase Demesne, where she was tended to by Deirdre until she was restored to health. Of all of the dragons of the Demesne she is closest to Minerva, whose stories delight her and whose kind and caring manner comforted her as she recovered from her ordeal and tried to grow up as normally as possible.

Gentle Asphodel is melancholy yet cheery in her quiet way, withdrawn but bubbly when spoken to. She's often caught staring intently into vacant space, drifting purposefully toward no apparent destination, and seemingly unaware of her surroundings as she watches and listens to the imperceptible realms of her ancestor. Like Tilphousia, Asphodel can see departed dragons and invisible spirits, but her being is not so firmly anchored in the visible reality of Sornieth. Sometimes her gaze wanders across space to far-flung places of the globe, or through time to distant pasts, or across worlds to portentous visions of possibilities shown to her by denizens of that all-surrounding Other. Sometimes her senses float away and cloud her perception of what is real and what is possible in the midst of a conversation, somewhat like Caelia attuning to the subtle and dramatic changes in the weather to make her predictions, except at the opposite end of the spectrum of apparent reality.


On her mother's side, her lineage traces Naomi, to Willow, to Mara, to Lyka, to Nexus, to Oracle, to Malware, and then to her.

On her father's side, her lineage traces Naomi, to Willow, to Thorn, to Rivit, and then to her.

Cousin

by Drytil

Lyrics from the Owl City song "The Real World"