The Lady of Vines

The Lady of Vines was the greatest of Alarielle's handmaidens, grown, so the glades sing, from a cutting of the goddess herself. For an age she was the Everqueen's shadow and shield: her voice in the wargroves, her blade in the hidden vales, the one spirit trusted to stand closest when Alarielle's moods turned to winter.

Her legend was sealed in the darkest hour of the Age of Chaos. When the last refuge fell and Alarielle diminished into a soulpod, it was the Lady of Vines who bore the goddess through a realm of rot, hunted by the champions of the Plague God, spending her strength league by league. She gave everything to see the soulpod reach safe soil, and from that soil rose the war-queen who turned the tide. Every glade remembers the price. The handmaiden did not march in the army her sacrifice made possible.

But the sylvaneth are a people of returning. In the age of renewal Alarielle sang her truest servant back from memory, and the Lady of Vines rose again: taller, stranger, crowned in living green, carrying a spark of the Everqueen's own divinity. She walks the realms now as herald and avatar of the goddess, and for the first time in either of her lives, with a will that is entirely her own. What a shard of a goddess chooses to become is a story the glades are still singing.