Editing Elizabeth Schutzwald (section)

=backstory=

There aren't many practioners of magic in the modern world, and even fewer work on their own, especialy among those who work with plants; Cleave is powerful and hungry for talent. 

But every-now and then a natural genius goes undetected, happening on some secret lore with out tripping the larger flags.

Elizabeth was one such. She found a old and tattered book, that claimed to be written in a tongue that devils could not read. It was in metaphors and cyphers and dead tongues, but something about it called to her. Maybe it was the way it seemed to be a living plant growing slowly over time. She had studied botany, but the modern classifications seemed to be missing something, and she abandoned her college works to go back to her home and study the strange book. Her parents died and she found she didn't miss them. She kept studying, growing herbs and medicines for money. Her medicines, they worked, better then the drugstore's. It wasn't much money, but it was enough to pay her taxes, and her water bill. Everything else she got from her plants. Breeding them, mixing them, tasting them.

The years passed, and then decades passed, and she still studied, her gardens fused into the forest, and people saw her less and less.
But her medicines worked, and she paid her taxes, so no one cared what she did.

But the decades passed, and still she had not found the secret. She didn't know what drove her exactly but for every trick every potion and poutuless she could make, the was something missing. The decades passed and her beauty faded, her joints hurt, and her eyesight clouded. She sipped of her roots, of nightshade and of mandrake, and she felt that her death would come soon.

And so she started studding not just any potion, but the potions that give back youth, the ones that steal years from the reaper.

And she found them, but they needed a plant she did not have. The life blood of maidens. 

Girls started disappointing.

Until one of her targets fought back, coming out of the drugs too fast, and grabbed a shovel and knocked her out. Panicking the girl buried the old woman, under the garden she had spend so long tending.

Elizabeth should have died. That was how the world worked: People die if they are buried under ground. That was how the world should work: Murderers should be punished, and stopped.

But the world is not always right, or sensible.

Elizabeth more than lived, she breathed dirt, and found it sweet air. She was Roots, and she would live as long as there were roots within the earth!