Bloodthorn
/ Acacia / Thornfire
She spent her senior years working the tiny plot of land outside the low-rent building she’d lived in for the last decades of her life, painstakingly raising a flourishing rose-bush in the sketchy soil. She poured all of her waking hours into working with ‘her babies’ and they were something of a neighborhood bragging point, a splash of color and hope in an otherwise bleak and increasingly run-down section of Paragon City. When she wasn’t kneeling in the soil, she was walking the streets, visiting with the newspaper vendor on the corner, or helping neighbors with their windowsill gardens.
Unfortunately, the city changed around her, and she failed to recognize how dangerous the streets were becoming. She had often walked by young people ‘lounging about,’ but in these times, the youth had gathered into gangs, such as the notorious Skulls. After giving a few of these young men a stern talking-to when they were harassing another passerby, her last sight was of someone young enough to be her grandson reaching into his jacket and shooting her dead.
She fell into her beloved roses, and her life’s blood was the last watering they ever received. She had no living family in Paragon City, and was cremated without ceremony, the tenants of her building agreeing to mix her ashes into the soil of her tiny garden.
Months passed, and the roses grew wild, trellising up the side of the building like some clinging vine (hardly normal behavior for roses), but the landlord was unwilling to do anything about it, because he knew the other tenants would protest if he even suggested cutting them down. It wasn’t until the autumn that the bushes had begun to creep over the walkway, and even the most patient resident was complaining that their children had been pricked by the out-of-control thorny growths while going out to school or play. So the building manager and a few tenants went to take some cuttings, which they intended to take out into greener areas to plant in memory of Rosy, and tear the rest of the bush up.
The bush had other ideas, and the two men assigned to the task found themselves hopelessly enmired in thorny branches so uncooperative as to seem almost alive. No matter how they twisted, the branches seem to tangle more firmly about them, snag more insistently into their clothing, and tear more deeply into their flesh, so that by the time EMTs were summoned, the two men had lost enough blood to be faint, and the rescuers had to fend off thrashing vines, seemingly flailing about from the struggles of the men trapped within, but suspiciously accurate as well.
The building manager, a follower of Santeria, came to the conclusion that perhaps Rosy’s displeased spirit was at work, and consulted a Babalawo of his faith to attempt to explain to the dear woman that her legacy had become a menace to the neighbors and friends she’d so cherished and needed to be moved. The priest agreed with his assessment, and called in favors from a friend at City Hall named Azuria. Azuria did not come directly, but sent a young man, a boy really, hardly old enough to be involved in such matters. The young man offered no name, appearing unannounced and saying only, “Azuria sent me,” and sat cross-legged in the dirt before the rose bush with eyes closed for a half hour, ostentatious cloak draped out behind him. When he got up, it was with the creaks and groans of a much older man, and he walked forward into the rose-bush, which seemed not to snag even on his fluttering cloak, and then reached down into the center of it, to bring forth a dark-green and red object, resembling a milkweed pod, but hard as wood and a foot and a half in length. He bundled it under his arm and told the building manager that the matter was settled and floated into the sky, ignoring protestations from the house residents who had gathered to watch this unusual event.
The next day, the rose-bush had withered in the night, and it was a simple matter to break the dry brittle stalks and take them away to be burned.
Azuria asked her ally to keep the ‘seed’ in the presence of sunlight and water, which he did, not telling her that water was not the vital fluid it sought. For the growth had been quickened on blood, and thirsted for more. So each day, he would cut his hand and bleed upon the seed in the sunlight, healing the wound with his magics afterwards. After three days, the seed split open, to reveal a tiny humanoid figure, female in form, but with dark-green and blood-red skin, and covered with tiny spikes. He kept this development as well from Azuria, not being sure of her reaction, particularly when he verified that this tiny creature still thrived only on sunlight and fresh blood. Three more days passed, and the creature could understand and speak English as well as her ‘father,’ and indeed often seemed to do so with the sing-song cadence of the elderly black woman who’s lifeblood had quickened supernatural life within her. He attempted to instill in her an understanding of the world that she now inhabited, and realizing that she must always feed on the blood of those she damaged with her deadly thorns, he guided her on ‘hunts’ within the city, hunts that left Hellions scratched and weak from blood-loss, raving to the guards at the prison hospital about some merciless and silent plant-woman who was hunting them down in the night. He knew that she was an elemental spirit, not a human child, but a force of nature, and that trying to deny her instincts, to force her to assume the guise of humanity, would just push her into outright rebellion, and into the waiting arms of forces like the Devouring Earth, with whom she shares a kinship.
And so her nameless young-old instructor was satisfied with her teachings. She was a creature born of bloodshed, and doomed to an endless life of the same, but so long as she restrained herself to avoid the kill, and limited her appetites to the criminal element, who often ended up at the hospital with diverse injuries at the hands of Paragon City’s super-human heroes, she would be a force for good. It wasn’t until she faced her first member of the Skulls that she seemed to show any hint of remembrance, and she seems to take special interest in punishing these gang-members for their crimes, so much so that she will often go out of her way to attack a Skull, even one loitering around performing no obvious criminal activity...
