Rosendorn Trollbane

Down in clearings around Dauchbeck there is a nice community of flax farms, orchards, and Govelhog hedge gardens. It is a tamed and pretty country, just about all of it tilled and planted. Even the groves of trees are coppiced, planted, and trimmed. The sides of the roads are lined in flowers, berry hedges, or overhanging rows of fruit trees. Superstitious, simple, country people live there, tenders of the ground and growing things. No more fight in them folk than in the livestock they keep. While I love the beauty of the wild country it isn’t hard to appreciate this kind of place. Folk and nature are woven together there they shape each other and grow as one. The kinda place the preachers seem to be talking about when they weave visions about the ‘New Kingdome’ that will be, when the Massiah returns. I can keen the appeal of it. That’s where Rosendorn Trollbane came to dwell. She moved into a big underground hall that the Grovelhogs had built. Frau Trollbane worked there as a ‘snoutdoktor’ who used her sense of smell to diagnose illness and identify healing herbs. You know how country folk are, any homeopathic medicine is preferred to a hospital visit. So they all loved her there.

Rosendorn Trollbane arrived with more gold to her name than those farmers had ever seen. She wanted to be the only swan in the duck pond. Surrounded herself with a loyal company of herb cutters, apothecary clerks, and barbers to run her little operation. This was in fact only a hobby project. With the calculated secondary aim of keeping people from criticizing the source of her wealth. For the first part of her life, she had served as a surrogate for a wealthier Warg house who needed fresh bloodlines and was having trouble with infertility. S Rosendorn Trollbane had a noble name and pedigree but no wealth of her own. They set her up with housing in their estate and offered her free education for her services. She bore them pups and studied in the craft of wortcunning as well as other medicine sciences. This is not uncommon in their culture. Often seen as a way a Warg female can ascend back into comfortable wealth from lower standing. She was well kept and valued in this occupation until the mysterious birth of her seventh daughter.

For whatever reason this last child was born not as a Warg but as a Wulver lycanthrope. Whether this was the result of an indiscretion, or a sport of bloodlines didn’t really matter. This was the end of that line of employment. Wargs don’t like making a show of such matters so she was very well compensated for her previous services. Her retirement to an obscure community was acceptable to all parties. Rosendorn Trollbane’s Wulver daughter named Raatsel lived with her as her secretary and valet. My cousin was smitten with her. He always liked Wulvers, must run in the family. We have a touch of wolf in our blood from our Opa. However, Raatsel Trollbane never accepted any suiter from the locals.

My cousin started to apprentice as an apothecary mostly out of an excuse to try and get closer to her, but Raatsel was so proud of her Warg blood that she wouldn’t have him. Strange I’d say, she wasn’t a Warg herself and her mother treated her more like a goblin servant than daughter. How she valued that heritage vexed many interested young bucks. After that hunt when my Opa, uncle, cousin, and self; killed that troll in the northern hill country it was Raatsel who came to tend him when he was recovering from having his leg near bitten off. When he was healed, the two of them went missing for three weeks. Figured he might have eloped. Then he limped back to my uncle’s home one day and spent the next week in a melancholy mood, never speaking about the absence for the rest of his life. Either his epic adventure wasn’t enough to impress her or perhaps her mother bared her fangs about it. Her loss says I, my cousin is as good an Orc as could be asked for. If a fine collection of hunting scars and folks calling “trollslayer” can’t meet the mark, then that girl was washed out trail to be sure.

He is a full Church Alchemist now with five noisy pups and a little plump peach for his wife. I’ve got a suspicion that he still thinks about that silly houseproud wortcutter. To this day Raatsel still lives in her mother’s shadow. Riding around the forest and picking toadstools. Her mother Rosendorn Trollbane will likely outlive her. Raatsel is aging like a normal woman but Rosendorn Trollbane will likely live for hundreds of years. Do you suppose it is the life she wants for herself or just something her Ma has forced on her? Whole small village saga seems foolish to me. With a pinch of spice though you’d probably have the makings of one of those penny romance stories that old housewives are fond of