welcoming...
DINAH JUNIPER CARROLL
you’ve always longed to be helpful. you want to scoop the world into the palm of your hand and stop its hurting. but you’re too clumsy for that, the constant reaching and falling over yourself in a desperate attempt to make others feel needed. even now, when they need you more, you seek out their approval, set up a store front, plead with the universe for just a small crumb of the love you grew up surrounded by. but you’ll never feel that way again.
NAME: dinah juniper carroll AGE: twenty-four BIRTHDAY: october 22 PARENTS: alexandra and edward carroll SEXUALITY: lesbian OCCUPATION: owner of aroma magic PROS: amiable, curious, hard-working, optimistic. CONS: cautious, perfectionist, pragmatic, restless.
BEFORE…
Dinah’s parents had always put their daughter first. They just wanted their child to reach a better station, pushing her in every way they could to try to get her a better life. Unfortunately for them, their child took after them, aching to create more than move upward. Dinah found herself constantly drawn to her mother’s side as she prepared potions and salves for customers of their small shop. Some days she’d follow her father into the woods to find herbs and other plants her mother required. She longed to be as helpful as them, to make people feel safe as she worked on something no one else could provide.
She found herself at 10 begging her mother and father to teach her their crafts, to give her a fraction of the family business. They reluctantly agreed, seeing at this point their child was too much like them. She memorized plants, spells, recipes, devoted herself to making them almost indistinguishable to her parents’ work. She helped her mother gather, create, and deliver potions throughout their village. Dinah became just as known throughout the village as a healer as her mother was. Perhaps that was more of a nicety, a sort of way of desperately trying to keep themselves in the good graces of those who could hurt just as easily as they could heal. But it still made Dinah feel wanted, needed, indisposable.
By eighteen, the Carroll family noticed a shift in the wind, the way the herbs they cultivated and foraged for seemed to gradually disappear, as if the universe was trying to snuff the small village out. Her parents seemed on edge, ever closer to the existential anxiety that comes with the perceived end of the world. Then her mother fell ill, succumbed to something neither dinah or her father recognized. No potion or salve or tea seemed to heal her. Dinah threw herself into her mother’s dusty old books that had been in the family for generations, praying for an answer, a solution, anything. That was where she first heard of Ahtohallan. She told her father her plan, hugged him around his neck and promised she’d return soon, with answers and solutions they couldn’t seem to find at home.
Throughout her trek, she heard whispers of Ahtohallan in places that reached far beyond what her parents could ever dream of. She sold simple potions and salves at marketplaces, occasionally finding herself summoned to houses of nobles to tend to an ailing child. She pinched pennies the best she could, stealing herself for the ferry price and anything she’d possibly need in her time there. She was only going for a couple months after all.
NOW…
Dinah found herself staying much longer than she ever intended. Three weeks became six months. The months became years. She wrote her parents daily until she received news of her mother’s death. Dinah intended to leave right then but her father urged her to stay, form a life there. There were whispers of royals tucking themselves away, a feeling of growing unrest in their village. He told her she’d be safer there, and she couldn’t argue with the last family member she had left. So she straightened her spine, pulled herself together and, eventually, opened Aroma Magic with a small selection of potions for those in need of them. Over the past couple months in her third year, more people started coming to the island, forcing her to acknowledge her father just might have been spot on about the shift in the air. She dedicated herself to expanding her stock, preparing for the absolute worst that will hopefully never come. She couldn’t do much, but what she could, she did well. Time will only tell just how good it will be.
