Briar

There used to be a Garden here, when the Dreamtime land was young

And all Creation bloomed and grew, when the Dreamtime songs were sung

The children of the Dreaming have lost since been swept aside

With no-one to sing the Dreamtime songs, the Garden slowly died.

- Eric Bogle, The Garden

Personal Information

Briar
Seeming:	Fairest
Kith:	Archived-Flowering
Court:	Courtless Court --
City:	Brisbane
Title:	None
Entitlement:	None
Group:	None
Player:	NPC
Storyteller:	Brisbane VST

Appearance

Mask: Briar looks like an impeccably well-groomed woman of Scandinavian features and colouration in perhaps her early thirties, tall and slender, with short, perfectly-coiffed pearl blonde hair, who favours clothes that are conservative to the point of WASPishness. She is gracefully made, with a long neck and delicate limbs, but her manner is cool to the point of inaccessibility. Her skin, where it is bare, is marked by scratches, as if she had lost a fight with an angry cat. Her small, tight smile has a Stepford perfection, and there is something brittle-bright and broken behind her eyes.

Mien: Unlike her husband, the Spring Courtier Sebastian, the Changeling formerly known as Abby Lund has not been refined by her Durance but rather roughened. Her mien has a feral quality to it - the crop of white hair tangles around her head in a wild mess, and the slowly-healing scars of her very recent violent trip through the Hedge in the grip of Loyalists are visible on every patch of bare skin; a painful reminder to Sebastian of his failure to keep her safe. She dresses skimpily in scraps of green silk and brown muslin, reminiscent of her botanical nature, and she wears no shoes. A green tinge lingers around her eyes, lips, nails, palms and feet, and here and there, the leafy, thorned vines of eglantine twine about her bare limbs. There is an undeniable sense of the nubile savage about her, something both seductive and utterly primal.

Mantle: As Briar has neither yet claimed a Court, nor been claimed by one, she has no discernable Mantle of any nature.

Mentality

Poor, poor Briar. Yesterday, she was Abby Lund, homemaker, former surgeon and insecure wife, until her fears about the increasingly strange behaviour of her husband over the last couple of years led her to follow him to a Spring Revel, where her unwelcome intrusion saw her experience things she could not explain. Sebastian was left with no choice but to show her the truth, and for this, Mother Lupa threw him into the Hedge and proceeded to beat him bloody. Abby rushed in headlong to stop her, and was immediately waylaid by the Loyalist Jack Rover, who carried her off, shrieking with malevolent laughter, into the Arcadian sky.
That was yesterday. On this side of the Hedge.
The Freehold, led and guided by the immense sacrifice of Erebus, who blamed himself for her loss as Sebastian had entrusted her safety to him, determined to get her back. By invoking a tremendous Goblin Contract, they were able overnight to summon her forth from her Durance, whereupon she was drawn to a Trod to collapse, footsore and exhausted from the pilgrimage, at their feet.
This Abby had been seventy years on the other side, and no longer answered to her name. Briar is a Changeling haunted by a past she can't recall and a nightmare that she knows was all too real. She is deeply traumatised, and impossibly disoriented - such that she barely qualifies as sane.
The Freehold is concerned that Erebus' bargain may not have been a good one...

Mortal World

In the mortal world, Briar is told she is Abby, the trophy wife of society mogul Sebastian Lund. It is an identity far less real to her than her lifetime as a flowering plant on the other side of the Hedge, but she clings to it with the desperation of a drowning woman reaching for a life-ring.

History

There was a time when men were kind-

When their voices were soft,

And their words inviting;

There was a time when love was blind,

And the world was a song,

And the song was exciting;

There was a time...

Then it all went wrong.

-Fantine, I Dreamed A Dream (Les Miserables)

Timeline

• ...
• ...
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Mortal Life

See above.

Arcadia

She breaks down when asked to discuss her Durance, but occasionally gives vent, in answering questions, to small windows of information. She was a rose bush in the pleasure gardens of one of the Fae - of the details and nature of her Keeper, Briar refuses to speak. But they would pick her flowers, for their pleasure, or their servants would cut her back into pleasing shapes. The mind of a plant is an alien thing, and Briar seems to have brought mercifully little lucid detail of these ordeals across with her; at times, it seems as distant and indistinct as a half-forgotten nightmare - at other times, it is as immediate and terrifying as a bad trip.
It seems that her sudden and violent abduction by Jack Rover is more real to her, as a memory, than much of her Durance. Whether this is a good thing, however, is very much up for dispute.

Escape

Briar did not escape, not in the truest sense of the word. She was deep in her Durance when Erebus' magic ripped her roots free and summoned her forth on a days-long pilgrimage into a corrupted Trod, where he and Sebastian were able to intercept and recover her just as she reached collapse. As a result of this, she does not have the same level of lucidity as most Changelings enjoy, upon their return to the world; Briar is dazed, confused and frightened, as her reality has been ripped away. She has no better sense of where she is or what has happened to her than a sleepwalker, suddenly awoken in an unfamiliar place.
Subsequently, it will take a great deal of rehabilitation before she has any hope of passing for a functioning human being again.

Quotes

Quotes By

"How could I be loyal to Them? They tore off my arms!"

- a hysterical Briar, during interrogation by Alessandro Trabocchi.

"I'm not a flower, and...I'm not a woman...what am I? Please...please, can't someone tell me what I am? Can't someone help me? I don't know what I am, I don't...I don't know this place...and everyone is lying to me, telling me I used to be someone else...! These aren't my hands!"

- Briar, sobbing, during the same interrogation.

Quotes About

"???"

???

Rumors

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Inspirations and Soundtrack

• Little Talks by Monsters and Men - Sebastian
• You Found Me by The Fray - Erebus
• Finding North by The Civil Wars
• Rose Red by Emilie Autumn
• S.O.S. by Apocalyptica feat. Cristina Scabbia