Green Woman

The Green Woman is one of the ascai, powerful beings that serve Vlastach. She is given particular dominion over plant life, and sent on missions that deal with vegetation, forests, and related matters. Often this means simply aiding the spread of rare or important flora, by protecting them from pests or transplanting them to new areas. However, it may mean stopping excessive logging or even preventing construction that would threaten important plants, which may put her into conflict with city-dwellers and other civilized people.

Appearance

The Green Woman appears like a young woman with light green skin and hair, the latter slightly darker than the former. Even her teeth and the scleras of her eyes are very light green, though her irises are brown, those and her black pupils being the only invirid parts of her body. She is lightly built, with rounded features and a narrow nose. Other than her coloration, she appears completely human, albeit like a rather large human—though only 154 centimeters tall as a mortal, as an asec her height has been increased to 242 centimeters.

Her only clothing is a tunic made of green leaves. This isn't always the same tunic, nor made of the same kinds of leaves; while she seems to particularly favor eucalyptus, maple, and poplar, she often decides to tailor her vestments to the local flora. It's not unknown for her to change her tunic without warning in front of witnesses. When this happens, the old leaves flutter to the ground as new leaves fly to her from the surrounding foliage and weave themselves into a new tunic.

On not too infrequent occasion, not only is the Green Woman seen to be dressed in leaves, but leaves sprout from her flesh in one or more places, as if a tiny shoot were embedded in her skin. This is not, in fact, too far from the truth; these leafy extrusions indicate the presence of greengets, her vegetary scions.

History

The Green Woman was once human, in her case a Qishaian woman named Kian Tu Hi. The youngest of ten siblings in a poor family, she had few obvious prospects outside of the hope of marriage to a man with more resources than she had. There was a man who loved her, one Shei Ko Li, but she did not return his affections—not because she disliked him, but merely because she had no interest in men. The closest thing she had to a lover—and even their relationship was fairly chaste—was a woman named Yiang Lei Mo. In any case, it didn't seem as if it would have mattered much even if she had felt for Ko Li what he felt for her. He was as poor as she was, and her family would never have accepted their union.

In time, though, when Kian was seventeen years old, her family did find a match for her, an older and significantly less impoverished man named Jing So Shi. While Kian had never had strong feelings for Ko Li, he at least had been harmless; Jing was demanding, domineering, and abusive. Kian did her best to try to delay the marriage her parents pushed on her, but the final straw came when her would-be suitor Shei Ko Li challenged So Shi to a fight, thinking to defend Kian. When this ended in So Shi's brutally killing him, Kian had had enough; she fled her home and ran into the wilderness to escape So Shi and her family's plans.

Not having anyone else to turn to in the wilds, Tu Hi swore herself to the land. Even while living at her parents' house, she had always had a love for plants, cultivating a well-tended garden; if the land accepted her fealty, she promised, she would do her best to serve its interests, particularly with regard to the world's flora. The land did accept her, and she became a dedicant, and later also a landworker. As a dedicant, she served the land in any capacity it demanded, but she always kept her particular affinity for plants, using her landworking powers to create a number of new plant species, including but by no means limited to a number of ornamental flowers still popular today. She seldom went anywhere without a retinue of animated plants to guard and aid her, and she constructed many landshaped structures out of living plants—more than any landworker before or after her.

Tu Hi didn't forget her old life. She used her powers to provide for her family, and persuaded Lei Mo to join her in Vlastach's service (though Lei Mo never achieved nearly the renown or favor that Tu Hi eventually did). She even remembered Ko Li, petitioning Vlastach to return him to life—while she had never really loved him, she didn't feel he had deserved to die the way he did. Vlastach assented, but conditionally, bringing him back not as the normal man he was but as a thing more plant than man called the Gamlag.

Applying her abilities to combat when necessary, Tu Hi ably fought for Vlastach during the First Demon War and in other, lesser conflicts. She became one of the land's most honored and trusted servants of her time. When her end came, however, it was not at the hands of demons or other fell beings, but by the effects of a powerful mortal devotee of the then-new discipline of landreaving, who saw an ultimate rebellion against Vlastach in the slaying of his renowned servant. Even this, of course, was not the end of her, because Vlastach brought her back as an asec—and one of her first acts was to destroy the landreavers who had slain her.

Powers

Powerful as she was in her mortal life as a dedicant and landworker, as an asec the Green Woman is now more powerful still. Her powers over plant life seem virtually unlimited, able to cause their rapid growth, their animation, and their transformation into other forms. (She also can blight or wilt plants if she desires, but she rarely chooses to do so.) She makes less use of animated plants as servants and guardians now than she did in her mortality, but this is only because she is so much more personally powerful that she doesn't need them, and not because she lacks the power to create them—indeed, when she elects to, she can create such vegetable servants far more formidable than any she created before her death and her ascension as an asec.

It is not only plants over which the Green Woman has power, however. She has a panoply of abilities that work against any foe. Some of these powers are broad and not directly related to her particular plantal purview; among the powers she favors are equivalents to the ritual of conveyance, the draught of virtues, the ritual of reclamation, and, of course, the ritual of landshaping. Naturally, she also does make heavy use of botanical powers; as a mortal she mastered spells such as the ritual of alteration, the ritual of bloom, the ritual of munificent growth, the ritual of plant growth, the plantwall ritual, and the treeform ritual (some of these rituals she may have created), and she is all the more proficient with them now.

By no means do all the Green Woman's powers mirror known rituals. She has control over plants finer and more drastic than any known ritual can provide, able to coax them into nearly any action she desires. Moreover, she can turn other beings into plants, either retaining their mobility or, for enemies, fixing them in place and rendering them incapable of action. She can (and not infrequently does) often turn animals into half-animal half-plant beings she calls noqi. She also sometimes creates new beings from her own body, entities she calls greengets that start as tiny seedlings growing in her flesh and eventually, after removal from their dermal beds, grow nearly as large as humans.

Goals and personality

While certainly the Green Woman's phytophily is her most notorious characteristic, she does (contrary to what some people seem to believe) think of things other than plants. For one thing, she has a strong sense of justice. The Green Woman is quick to use her powers to right what she perceives as a wrong, even if it has no bearing on Vlastach's goals (though not, of course, if it actually works against those goals). This is not to say she is a crusader who actively seeks out injustice to fight, but she will certainly do her part to punish the miscreants if she runs across it.

While the Green Woman often seems quiet and distant, and it is easy to take this as a sign of apathy toward humanity (or other ellogous beings), she actually does tend to quickly develop strong sympathies or antipathies toward those she encounters, even if (with the exception of the aforementioned exaction of justice) she rarely acts on them. Still, someone who has won the Green Woman's regard may find themselves unexpectedly rewarded should her path ever cross theirs again.

Despite her zeal for justice and her devotion to vegetation, the Green Woman is not without a sense of humor. This even comes across in her acts of vindict; she sometimes chooses to punish malefactors in a way that she sees as humorously ironic. Nor is she above simply telling jokes, though her delivery is so dry, and her usual demeanor so apparently solemn, that those who don't know her may not realize her intention.

Legacy

Kian Tu Hi's main residence during her life, an edifice of living plants called the Green Tower, withered and faded after her death. On her ascension she restored it, however, and enchanted it to thereafter keep its verdancy without the need for maintenance. Now, the Green Tower is known worldwide and is a common spot for tourists and pilgrims (as well as an occasional target for spiteful landreavers).

Aside from the Tower, the Green Woman founded a number of beautiful, elaborate, and unusual gardens—some as an asec and some while she was still a mortal—which have a comparable level of renown. Among the most famed are the Night Garden, composed entirely of plants that glow in the dark; the Hungry Garden, made up largely of carnivorous plants (not all of which are harmless to humans); and the underwater Eel Garden in the Mirror Sea just off the coast of Ymbledar.