The fae on the whole are very old, and the ones in Lethe are still just fledglings compared to those in the Otherlands. They are fickle by nature, but with age comes boredom and a straight path from there into utter apathy. Know the rules of the game, but don’t waste your own resources to win it. Winning is too much of a risk in the fae realm for the high and mighty to use anything but a pawn or a paltry knight to gain power on the board. It is a place where power attracted power and the simple folk who found themselves under the power of one greater suffered for it. What is it to immortal beings if their pets slaughter each other for a minuscule amount of affection? Briar was one such pawn, or at least she was intended to be. She was too young to know this when she was taken from her pod miles from the shore and deposited her into a living hell by certainly not through the fae that snatched away, let alone her own origin story. The fae Morrigan did not care to share it either. Their attempts at gentle care for the children they stole ended when a child could stand, when a child could fight. Then it was only won by success in whatever endeavor that particular fae favored most, and Morrigan was a warrior through and through. So, torn from her birth family, the stolen child threw herself into that pit far younger than most seeking the affection she was starving for. It was in a fight against another fae in her youth that earned her a name: Briar, for the thorn bush that had been the final weapon used in her first victory. It was that single minded fire in her soul that made Morrigan hold her above all the others, even her own blood, as well as the callous disregard Briar had for anyone that stood between her and winning her own safety. A pet too beautiful to kill, and too entertaining to let starve, and if that’s what it took to make it through the day then Briar would use it. She played the dutiful daughter, the bloodthirsty pet, the strange selkie, whatever it was they asked of her.
Her fellows could call her a traitor, willing to fling even an ally under fire to save her own skin, but Briar has always considered herself a survivor. If that meant knowing few, and trusting even fewer, then she accepted it as a boon rather than a loss. Often people tried to leave the Otherlands by besting her in combat, to use her experience and her reputation to aid in their escape, but Briar had spent one too many years kissing the feet of people who kicked her to try. Her loyalty was not to Morrigan, her keeper, nor to anybody else in the Otherlands. Her heart she knows better than to trust to people who change their minds on a whim. She had seen the consequences of those who try to flee, and for many years she had no wish to be one of the fallen. But she grew weary over the years and it only took one story of a realm outside their own where supernatural beings of all kinds lived in harmony to break the spell. Still, to leave she needed to play the game too. A hint here, a threat there, and before long she had a plan and someone gullible enough to become her pawn in turn. They wouldn't succeed without losing their life for her chance, she knew this beforehand, but the part of her that should have felt guilt for dooming the pawn lay quiet. The distraction was ample opportunity for Briar to flee, following the trail of a fae on his way out, and the only one she had.
Lethe was not her exact choice of destination, per-say, but fae magic is as fickle as the Fae themselves. Her arrival was a long drop into the Quinault and an hour long struggle to reach the shoreline. It was luck, really, that the first town she came across was the supernatural haven rather any normal place who might have flung her into a cell for her erratic behavior. She was not used to the way any town operates, let alone one like Lethe, and she initially regarded the town with an intense distrust. It only took a week for her to feel the difference freedom made in her life, and so she decided then and there that she would stay in this flawed place. Rather than focus on Lethe's problems, Briar has come to think of the town as it was intended: a safer place to live than the one she left behind. She fears the town crumbling, or the council casting her aside like an unwanted pet, and she's an adamant supporter to keeping the town as it is. Anything is better than the Otherlands, even a town filled with disasters, and she refuses to return there. She has no qualms with the Riverborn, or the many failed events in Lethe's history, and indeed she never gave the town's citizens a thought at all. It never occurred to her that her true family might be somewhere in its depths, lurking just below the surface.