Dorma

Mother of Roses

Once upon a time, there were no trees in the summer country. The grasslands withered beneath the all-seeing eye of the sun, and the river trickled sluggish and brown through the parched hills. Then came a sorceress from a distant province, where the trees grew as tall as mountains and the rivers flowed deep and crystal-clear to the sea. She saw how the young Light clans toiled through the cruel drought, and took pity on them. From her home in Glen Alba she brought willow to shade the stagnant river, oak and sycamore to make homes for the birds, and poplar and cypress to stand as bastions against the wind. However, she saved her finest gifts for last: figs and peaches, dates and pears, and most precious of all, a grove of golden apples, crisp and sweet as autumn rain.

Later, much later, a guardian would stumble upon a clan thriving in the shade of that first forest, and she would see the orchard with its golden fruit- the priceless apples said to grant eternal youth to anyone that ate them.

"Someone ought to guard that," thought Dorma- and so she did.

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Possessing a green claw passed down from her mother, Dorma tends to the sacred orchard at Val-ar-Aion's heart. The crops she helps raise there alongside her young Roses are what allow Val-ar-Aion to sustain such a large population of pilgrims and refugees. The wealth of the city can be in part attributed to the sheer abundance of produce, a veritable cornucopia thriving year round in the idyllic summer country.

Fruits and vegetables are not the only thing raised beneath that sun-dappled canopy, however. Despite her rural occupation, Dorma is no bumpkin, and takes great pride in her pedigree. Young drakes and dragonesses seeking to move up in the world flock to her gardens to learn class and courtly manners; even the Matriarch's own brood could not escape these lessons. After tending to their namesake and helping with the harvest for a number of years, many of her young Roses move on to become courtiers abroad. She often takes on Chapel orphans who seek to make their way in society rather than the more ascetic disciplines taught by the Lightkeeper scholars.

The students can often be found conversing for hours beneath the boughs of the ancient apple tree that Dorma has claimed as her charge, seeming for all the world to belong within the pages of a storybook. If those golden apples truly could grant eternal youth, who would ever want to leave that garden?