Greensleeves
| Greensleeves | |
|---|---|
| Greenie | |
 | |
| Information | |
| Colors |
 (Center)    (Mana use) |
| Species |
Maro-Sorcerer Formerly Human |
| Job | Druid |
| Spark | Planeswalker |
| Birth, Life & Death | |
| Birthplace | Whispering Woods in Aerona, Dominaria |
| Lifetime | War with Phyrexia |
| Born | 4057 AR, reborn as Maro-Sorcerer in 4562 AR |
| Death | After 4077 AR |
| Family | |
| Parents | Brown Bear and Bittersweet |
| Relatives |
Rainfall, Angelwing, Poppyseed (sisters) Gull, Sparrow Hawk, Cub, Lion (brothers) Hyacinthe and Sweet (nieces) |
| Sources | |
| Greensleeves Cycle | |
Greensleeves was an archdruid during Modern Times on Aerona (Dominaria), and briefly a planeswalker. She ultimately became the Maro-Sorcerer of the Whispering Woods.
Description
Almost all the inhabitants of White Ridge had names referring to nature - the men's names were related to animals, and the women's were related to plants. Greensleeves was so named for her penchant to root in the grass, smearing green stains far up on her arms. She had thick, auburn-brown hair which curled and tended to be thick and wild. She wore threadbare green- and brown clothes with a thin shawl around her shoulders. She was quite small and thin for her age[1] until she was 17, when Chaney's druidic magic caused her to bloom into womanhood, fleshing her form out.[2]
As an adult, Greensleeves' auburn-brown hair fell in shimmering waves over her shoulders. Her skin was tanned, her face serene. She wore no jewelry, and her pale green, lichen-colored dress was very simple in cut. Her sleeves were slightly darker than the rest, and a belt of woven grass outlined her waist. Her cloak was all in green wool, embroidered with more details than could have been noticed in a day. Similar to the tapestries that adorn the walls of castles, it unrolled a multitude of scenes woven with shining threads.[3]
History
Dim-witted
During her youth, Greensleeves lived peacefully with her brothers Gull and Sparrow Hawk in the village of White Ridge, on the border of the Whispering Woods. She was perceived to be dim-witted because she couldn't talk, but only chattered in animal sounds to communicate simple emotions - fear, hunger, interest, etc. One day, in 4073 AR, a falling star was seen in the sky, which was reputed to be a bad omen. This was proven true when White Ridge was destroyed the next day during a wizard's duel. During the Destruction of White Ridge, many of the villagers were killed, including Greensleeves' parents and two of her siblings. Almost all the remaining villagers decided to relocate elsewhere. One of the dueling wizards, Towser, came to Gull and, after assuring him he had no part in the destruction of the village, asked him to become his new freightmaster. Gull, confused by the mind magic of Towser and with nowhere else to go, accepted his offer and brought Greensleeves along.[1]
Speaking
After a difficult slog through the forest, the Towser's wagon train reached its destination: the place where the star fell. The star was revealed by Towser to be a Mana Vault, a powerful artifact that could store mana. During the night, the camp was attacked by another wizard who kidnapped Greensleeves and Gull's girlfriend, Lily. The wizard was defeated by a suddenly appearing Fungusaur. Finally, out of the Woods, the convoy stopped for the night near a swamp. During the night, though, Kem, a bodyguard of Towser, was kidnapped by Sedge Trolls, so Gull and Greensleeves entered the bog and saved him. The convoy then finally reached a coastal city. Gull was amazed to find out that Greensleeves suddenly could talk since it was the overwhelming magic of the Whispering Woods that had clouded her thoughts.[1]
Wizard
One night, the siblings and Lily were kidnapped by Towser's minions. Back at the camp, the wizard revealed his intention to kill Greensleeves and store her power in the Mana Vault. A fight started, and Towser was forced to teleport away Gull, as well as his friends Morven and Stiggur. The three found themselves on a tropical island, where they met other creatures enslaved by Towser, including the centaurs Helki and Holleb, and the giant Liko. It appeared that the island was where Towser would send his minions when he didn't need them and that there wasn't any way to escape from it. Still, Gull refused to surrender and started organizing the people on the island in a ragtag army, until one day he was summoned back by Lily who, unbeknownst to herself, was also a wizard. By that time, Towser had tied Greensleeves to an altar and he was ready to kill her when Kem changed sides and came to her rescue. At the same time, Greensleeves, who also was revealed to be a wizard (she had summoned the Fungusaur), started summoning her friends and all the creatures of the woods to fight Towser's minions. Still, Towser was a veteran wizard and could control his creatures better than Greensleeves. She resolved to use an earthquake, which destroyed the cliff they were on and plunged them into the sea. A tsunami cast by Greensleeves was coming, so Towser escaped with his flight spell. Gull, Greensleeves, and Stiggur escaped from the huge wave taking refuge in a crack in the cliffside, while Morven and Kem were swept away by the sea. After the water had settled, they found that Lily and some other friends had survived, including Helki, Holleb, and Liko. They vowed to form an army to fight Towser and all other evil wizards who saw people as mindless pawns.[1]
Archdruid
Greensleeves was compelled by a strange voice to leave the army camp and enter the woods, where she found a cave. This was the home of Chaney, an old druid, who was willing to teach the inexperienced Greensleeves everything she knew about magic. When Gull and the others found out about Greensleeves' disappearance, they quickly followed her trail. During her training, Greensleeves found out that time in Chaney's house flowed differently and what seemed to be mere days were indeed years. When Gull and the rest of the army finally found her, Greensleeves had grown up and become a much more skilled wizard.[2]
Planeswalker
While Rakel continued to drill the men and women of the army, transforming them into real soldiers, Greensleeves and Chaney discovered that the Mana Vault was in reality the "Stone Brain", a living artifact created by the Sages of Lat-Nam in hope to stop the Brothers' War. The brain had the power to stop wizards from using magic, so Greensleeves used it on Haakon, the self-appointed King of the Badlands. When Haakon managed to free himself from the Stone Brain command just enough to summon some Phyrexian Gremlins, they snatched the artifact and returned to their home plane. The only hope to save Rakel and recover the Stone Brain was to planeswalk to their location, which Chaney claimed she was too old to do. However, the druid believed Greensleeves could do it and donated a Nova Pentacle to help her focus her mana. Greensleeves was successful in planeswalking to Phyrexia, bringing some of her friends with her. After being attacked by demons, she teleported herself to the Stone Brain and donned it. She could resist the voices of the helmet, as they were similar to the effect of the Whispering Woods. Among the voices, Greensleeves found the spells she needed to destroy the demons, save her dying friends, and return home. Later, when Chaney died from old age, Greensleeves absorbed her life force to become an archdruid herself.[2]
Final sacrifice
Gull and Greensleeves' army grew into a formidable force and liberated almost all of North Aerona from evil wizards. However, all the fighting and death took their toll on Greensleeves. By 4077 AR, the druid just wanted some peace in the company of her lover Kwam and her brother Gull, who had married Lily and become the father of two daughters, Hyacinthe and Sweet. Greensleeves was supposed to regularly summon the wizards they had defeated and tagged with the Stone Brain, but she was often too tired to do that. Greensleeves was also frequently visited by the shade of Chaney, who advised the druid in cryptic words that she would need to make the "final sacrifice" to win the war.[3]
Meanwhile, ten wizards under the leadership of Towser and Karli had regrouped and protected themselves from Greensleeves's magic. Aided by the elemental Ur-Drago and the huge Keldon warlord Ix, who had a personal grudge against Gull, they attacked the army from three different directions. Greensleeved tries her best to help on every front, but the casualties were heavy. Petalia, captain of her bodyguard, was lost in the Abyss when the druid banished Ur-Drago. In another part of the Woods, Gull was confronted by the Keldon warlord, but before the enemy could kill the woodcutter, Greensleeves teleported herself, Gull, and the survivors of their army to their headquarters, called Greensleeves' Grove. However, even the center of the Whispering Woods had been ravaged by the attackers. After seeing one of the wizards, Gurias, kill another of her bodyguards, Greensleeves unleashed her fury, killing him and summoning her most powerful spells, which caused the enemy to flee.[3]
Greensleeves understood that the evil wizards had found one another thanks to the Stone Brain, so she intends to discover every secret of the artifact. She donned the helmet once more, and found out that its ultimate secret was buried somewhere in the ruins of the College of Lat-Nam, somewhere on the long-lost isle of Lat-Nam. The same night, Chaney's shade passed on to the afterlife, after reminding Greensleeves once more of the final sacrifice. The party teleported to Lat-Nam, a warm island partly covered by scrub forest and a poisoned glass desert, where once the College stood. The army was quickly attacked by the Duler Angels and the merfolk of the Copper Conch. After several battles, Greensleeves parleyed with the angels and the merfolk, who had been tasked by the Sages to be guardians of Lat-Nam. Befriending them by explaining the common goal, the rest of the army was summoned to the ruins, and excavation was started. After unraveling a Dragon Engine and other traps, a tunnel was found, leading eventually to a cave by the ocean. The troops realized then that the rest of the college had collapsed and was underwater.[3]
The merfolk then brought Greensleeves to the Lord of Atlantis, who carried the druid to the underwater portion of the College, where Greensleeves found the skull of a Sage. She mentally asked the skull for the secret of the Stone Brain. When the girl returned to the camp, she found out that they had been discovered by Towser and the other wizards, who were already attacking their army. After a long battle, the army retreated to the tunnel, where Gull had a prophetic dream about his dead family. Among them, he did not see Sparrow Hawk, their long-lost brother, and this made him realize what the warlord's identity was.[3]
Towser proposed a truce, to which Gull answered by asking for a personal duel between himself and the warlord. When Gull revealed to the Keldon warlord that the latter was in truth his brother Sparrow Hawk, who had been kidnapped and enchanted by Towser to be a war machine, the two brothers reconciled. However, Haakon unleashed a fireball against the two, who were engulfed in flames. This caused Greensleeves to go mad with anger and sorrow, making the "final sacrifice" of her ideal that every life was sacred. She blasted Haakon with a Lightning Bolt, caused Queen Thunderhead to fall into a fissure, and then trapped the other wizards in the desert. She summoned a Force of Nature, which drained the magic of the enemy mages, leaving them withered and weak. Absorbing the mana of the creature, a combination of that of the mages and of Lat-Nam's innate mana, Greensleeves became a godlike being and briefly lost herself completely, seeing her friends and family as mere ants compared to her.[3]
High Wizard of the Domains
Before she could unleash her overwhelming power and destroy the isle, she was brought to her senses by Kwam, and saw that her brothers had survived Haakon's fireball thanks to the enchanted might of Sparrow Hawk. Greensleeves decided then instead of annihilating everyone to pour all of her mana into the Isle of Lat-Nam, curing the land of the poison and transforming the desert into a verdant forest. Healing the land let her release all her pent-up mana harmlessly, which reduced her back to her normal self.[3] This outpouring of mana caused Greensleeves to lose her spark.[4]
In the aftermath of the Battle of Lat-Nam, the surviving evil wizards, stripped of their mana by the Force of Nature, were brought before the druid, who used the secret of the helmet revealed to her by the skull to strip Towser of his magic using the Stone Brain. Seeing how the punishment caused Towser to run away screaming madly, Gull found the solution too drastic and cruel, so he decided to let the other surviving wizards retain their magic, but only for doing good. Greensleeves kept to herself the last secret of the Stone Brain, its ability to give magic to anyone, thinking that a similar power was sure to cause another war for control over it. In the end, the wizards all pledged obedience to Greensleeves, who was declared High Wizard of the Domains by her followers.[3]
Maro-Sorcerer
Hundreds of years later, sensing the return of the plane's greatest enemies, Greensleeves was reborn as the Maro-Sorcerer of the Whispering Woods, a being of pure elemental power. The former archdruid swore to protect not just the people of Dominaria, but the land itself.[5][6]
On Greensleeves' spark
Greensleeves appeared only in early novels, in which the concept of a planeswalker's spark was not yet developed. At the time, any mage powerful enough could break the plane's veil with the right spells and sufficient mana and travel across the planes. To fit this with the later use of planeswalkers' sparks, one can ascribe the wizards who did manage to become planeswalkers by spells inately possessed sparks that were flared by the spells they cast, even if they did not know of these sparks or their role in becoming planeswalkers. It has later been explained that Greensleeves lost her spark when she restored the island of Lat-Nam.[7]
On Greensleeves' mana
Greensleeves demonstrated the use of all 5 colors of mana. However, given her title of Archdruid, she was principally skilled in green magic and disliked harmful magic.
- White mana: Disenchant, Wall of Light, Wall of Swords
- Blue mana: Air Elemental, Counterspell, Invisibility, Juxtapose, Teleport, Unsummon
- Black mana: Nightmare, Quagmire, The Abyss
- Red mana: Ball Lightning, Chain Lightning, Earthquake, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Wall of Earth, Wall of Fire, Wall of Stone
- Green mana: Aisling Leprechaun, Camouflage, Craw Wurm, Durkwood Boars, Elvish Archers, Fire Sprites, Force of Nature, Fungusaur, Giant Badger, Grizzly Bears, Hurricane, Killer Bees, Living Artifact, Regeneration, Reincarnation, Rust, Shanodin Dryads, Timber Wolves, Tranquility, Tsunami, Wall of Ice, Wall of Wood, Wall of Brambles, Wanderlust, Winterblast, Wolverine Pack
- Artifacts she used: Clockwork Beast, Jade Statue, Nova Pentacle, Yotian Soldier
Story appearances
Planes visited
In-game references
- Represented in:
- Depicted in:
- Quoted or referred to:
Gallery
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As human, from the cover of Whispering Woods. -
As human, from the cover of Shattered Chains. -
As human, from the cover of Final Sacrifice. -
Card art of Giant Badger.
References
- ↑ a b c d Clayton Emery (1994) - Whispering Woods, HarperPrism.
- ↑ a b c Clayton Emery (1995) - Shattered Chains, HarperPrism.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Clayton Emery (1995) - Final Sacrifice, Harper Prism.
- ↑ Jay Annelli (December 22, 2023). "My thread on desparked planeswalkers.". Twitter.
- ↑ Roy Graham (September 1, 2022). "The Legends You'll Find in Dominaria United". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- ↑ Ethan Fleischer (August 28, 2022). "THE MARO-SORCERER MEGATHREAD". Twitter.
- ↑ Jay Annelli (December 22, 2023). "My thread on desparked planeswalkers.". Twitter.
