Willow Ashenroot - Life Domain Cleric

Name: Willow Ashenroot
Race: Firbolg
Role/Class: Cleric Level 9 (Life Domain)
Appearance: Willow Ashenroot is large even by firbolg standards, a looming presence that somehow still feels like a shelter, not a threat. Her skin is a soft slate-blue, weathered by decades of wind and rain, with patches of pale lichen along her jaw and forearms. Her hair is a thick, wavy mane the color of ash and old bark, braided back from her face and pinned with wooden combs carved into leaf and acorn shapes. Deep-set moss-green eyes peer over a broad, stern nose; a faint web of laugh-lines and frown-lines tug at the corners of her mouth in equal measure.

She dresses in layered, practical garments: a sturdy moss-green under-tunic, a bark-brown apron smeared with herb stains and old blood, and a heavy shawl woven in muted forest tones. Her sleeves are always rolled to the elbow, revealing thick forearms corded with the strength of someone used to lifting patients as easily as firewood. A simple circlet of woven willow and ivy sits at her brow when she’s working in the clinic or standing at a bedside. Her holy symbol—a small, polished stone carved into a leaf-shaped handprint—is worn on a leather cord and often clutched unconsciously when she listens to someone speak of loss.

Backstory

Willow was born in a firbolg enclave deep within the Ardent Woods, where her people preferred to watch the world quietly from behind the leaves, intervening only when the forest itself cried out. As a youngling, she watched healers tend not just to cuts and fevers, but to the sorrow of losing an old tree, a hunting companion, or a season’s planting. She noticed that those whose hearts were left unattended often sickened again, even when the body seemed mended. That realization lodged in her like a stone.

Her first true calling came when a blight swept a nearby glade, twisting trees and beasts into pained shadows of themselves. Willow apprenticed herself to the enclave’s elder healer, learning poultices, prayers, and the hard discipline of saying “no” to treatments that offered a painless death instead of a difficult recovery. In the wake of the blight, she helped plant new saplings where fallen trunks lay—marking each one with a murmured name and a solemn promise that became her private creed: “We mend what we can and remember what we cannot.”

Years later, word reached the enclave that a small forest village—Thornbrook—had become a crossing point for travelers, wardens, and those touched by the Feywild’s strange currents. Injuries increased. Grief accumulated. Outsiders came and went carrying burdens the enclave would never see again. The elders chose Willow to go; she was blunt enough not to be swayed by flattery, and stubborn enough to keep practicing medicine her way, even when mortals wanted “quick fixes” instead of honest healing.

In Thornbrook, Willow established herself as the village’s matron-healer: running a cramped but immaculately ordered clinic, tending wounds in the field, and presiding over too many funerals. She became known for her bedside manner—firm, uncompromising, and oddly comforting. If you came to her with a broken arm and a haunted stare, she set the bone and then refused to let you leave until you’d spoken about why your hands were still shaking.

She has seen too many adventurers stagger back with more ghosts than scars. She has also seen what guilt and unprocessed grief do to a village that depends on each pair of hands. So she insists, relentlessly, on addressing both.