Julie Ashby -- Ten Toes in the Soil

[maeglhachel]

Description:

Name: Julie Ashby
Age: Late teens, maybe early twenties
Hair: Ebony black
Eyes: Gray
Height: 5'9''
Weight: ~130 lbs

Julie is a young woman of agreeable but somewhat unimpressive appearance. If the long ebony tresses falling down to her hips don't catch the eye, she will easily be overlooked in a crowd for being neither remarkably handsome, nor really ugly, for her tendency to keep to the back, stick to walls, trees, shadows. Of course, she could only be overlooked in a crowd, if she was ever found in a crowd, first.
When need doesn't have her wear her chain armour and dark green surcoat, she tends to wear long dresses of simple wool and linen, coloured to match the season. She also typically wears flowers in her hair, or wreaths of flowers or dried leaves, berries, or whatever the forest offers at the given season. In the cold she will often be found to wrap her pale self up in a cloak, but her feet tend to stay bare ... and often dirty. Around the neck, she normally wears a leather cord with a carved, wooden pendant.
Her facial expression tends to be friendly, if perhaps a bit shy, and often rather absent-minded strolling around.


Both pictures I have, are somewhat too pretty.
I imagine her looking somewhat like the first picture (minus the make-up), hair more wavy like in the second (but longer):





Theme Songs:

// One song that's not really a theme song for Julie (more for Tari, at a time)
// but inspired the name, is this:


// More Julie, really ... Couple of Clannad songs ...
// rather difficult finding material on YouTube
// unless you can actually use this in your country of residence

• Ancient Forest (from about 4:10 in the video)
  
  
• Ri na Cruinne (no free source)
  
• Loch na Cailli (low whistle cover for not finding any free material ... you'll get an idea of the tune ;P)
  
  

[maeglhachel]

A Kingdom of Forests

She had arrived to the Forest Kingdom at long last. The small town of Greatgaunt looked like villages at home enough, though it felt weird. But then, maybe she was.

Most outsiders considered the Deepingdalesmen a little weird. And not a few, at home, thought her a bit weird, too. They certainly had not considered the young girl frollicking through the southern eaves of the Cormanthor, dawdling while taking food to her charcoal burner father and older brother very weird. Her mother had not seen anything weird in her ebony haired princess and generously forgave her spending more time in the forest than was due given the work involved in running the house that would have required everybody's contribution. Her father had been too happy to have the apple of his eye come to him each day during the lengthy process of burning charcoal, which frequently required him to stay in the forest for days, and lighten his and her brother's moods to see anything weird. But then again, nobody even suspected at the time. Nobody knew the paths she travelled, or wondered how she knew or found them.

There were many people in Greatgaunt. Not all of them were weird, some were quite nice. But there were many.

Having waited on a knight and his household near Highmoon helped with that. She would never have guessed she would ever see any good in the time spent there, when her brother walked her to the tower house one morning in the middle of winter of her fourteenth year, stomping through the snow quietly. Her brother had been barely less sick than her father, the charcoal burning having come to a complete stop for a sickness that afflicted many, killed some, bound many to their beds for weeks, like her father. Julie's time of comparative leisure came to a sudden end, when she learned to serve, learned to behave, to talk, or to stay silent. She had missed her home. She had missed her family for months until she got used to seeing them only now and then. She had craved to see her forest every day of the two and a half years she stayed. Her family never thought that odd -- she never told them. Rumours spread how the knight's son was developing a fondness of the unimpressive common girl, who had little to attract a man's attention to her but the ebony hair falling in long tresses down to her hips. Her parents congratulated her.
It was, when she ran off one day in early autumn, when the geese were gathering to leave for their journey south, that people started to see a weirdness. When she fled from the promise of a life many would have embraced as a rare opportunity, people started to consider her odd. They never knew about a promise given on a moonlit night by a lake in the forest, of course. When she fled to the forest and stayed there not just for the golden autumn that came, but through the winter, too, for more than a whole year, people thought that weird. Some remembered the small girl's stories of the old woman she would meet in the forest to travel with her, and wondered if it had been more than just a small girl's fantasy. Whenever somebody actually did see her slip from tree to tree like a shadow or a ghost, she was on her own, however. Her father and brother would find piles of berries, mushrooms, nuts or whatever the forest offered in ways of food, when they arrived at the sites of their charcoal burning, never their daughter and sister, though. Except for once, a few months ago, the day she had come to say goodbye. She had to go look for something. Not telling them more was no more weird than telling them would have been.

And now she was here. She had seen some places since, but not found what she was looking for. Gathered a little gear, but cared less for it. She had finally arrived to the kindom that was named after its forests.

Let its forests keep her.

[maeglhachel]

Unlooked For

She had gone to the woods with them without any clear idea how her little self would help with what they were trying to do. No, there didn't even seem to be any help necessary. And yet ... she had felt that urge. She had put it down to grasping an opportunity for getting out of this fenced-in place, but that hadn't been it, of course. She had been to the Bramble a number of times since her arrival here, flitting unseen from tree to tree, sleeping curled up in a bed of leaves to wake and dance through the fallen leaves in the misty twilight of early morning. That wasn't it. But whatever the tug, go she did. And she ended up lying in the leaves at her feet, tears of joy streaming down her face. Maybe, she was getting close.

Mother, oh mother, my heart calls for you
Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue
Many a summer the grass has grown green
Blossomed and faded, our faces between

(from Cathy Ryan's "Rock Me To Sleep, Mother")