Daisy Rampion

Daisy Rampion was Queen Consort of The Realm during Eden’s Second Age. Famous for her long blonde prehensile hair, Daisy was a kind but mischievous woman. Having spent years of her life locked in a tower, she was also more than a little socially awkward.

Appearance & Personality

Daisy was bubbly, friendly, and awkward around other people. She delighted in the company of others, after so many years spent alone in her tower, but she wasn’t so good with social cues. She loved to be the center of attention, having had only a series of imaginary friends to keep her company during her two years in the tower—all of them devoted to her out of fear that she’d forget them and they’d blink out of existence—and she got quite pouty when she was ignored. This led her to cause more than her fair share of mischief when she first arrived at court as the fiancée of the prince.

Appearance-wise, Daisy looked delicate but was sturdy as hell. She was a thin woman, but she was tough. She held her head high, kept her shoulders back, and carried herself with the pride and preparedness of a warrior. And yet, she also knew how to use her pretty face and her lovely decolletage to her advantage—and she took great pleasure in the ability of her broad smile to disarm even the worthiest of opponents.

Of course, in the tensest and most dangerous of situations, she could disarm them with her magical hair instead.

Biography

Warning: Here there be spoilers.

Early Life

Daisy was the daughter of an Earthling refugee who arrived in Eden at the start of the Second Age. That refugee, Medusa, was the youngest of three sisters—and therefore the least listened-to of the bunch. And yet, had the older sisters paid heed to the “bad feeling” the youngest had about taking shelter in a seemingly abandoned temple, much misery might have been avoided.

The sisters, each a preistess of The Faith, soon returned to the arcane rituals of their religion—including preparations for Medusa’s First Touch. But though the patron goddess of the place, Athena, tried to send them signals to stop, they did not. It was only in the aftermath of Medusa’s initation ceremony, a sexual encounter with a windswept sailor, that Medusa and her sisters got the message.

Angered by the sisters impropriety, Athena cursed them to live the rest of their lives as snake-like monsters. Their gaze, she told them, would turn any mortal to stone. And so, they had a choice: subsist on nothing but the salad greens growing in the temple garden, or risk killing anyone they encountered on the streets of the city. Athena laughed mirthlessly as she took her leave of them, telling them she hoped they lived forever in torment. But, despite all this, there was still a glimmer of hope for the sisters. Medusa was pregnant, and the baby might yet prove their salvation.

As if in answer to the sisters’ prayers, Daisy Rampion was born immune to the effects of her mother and aunts’ stares, and emerged from Medusa’s body as a normal-looking and presumably non-magical human baby. Once she was old enough, she began to venture out of the temple to collect supplies for her mother and aunts. And though it was not an easy life, the sisters and the child persevered.

In the aether where deities dwell, Athena raged. This would not do. Those who had slighted her must suffer. And so, she hatched a scheme to ruin what little happiness Daisy’s family had scraped together for themselves.

Athena sent the mercenary known as the Headless Horseman to the temple—the only person in existence who would be immune to the steady stares of Medusa and her sisters. His instructions? Behead everyone inside. But though he was efficient in his slaughter of the adults, he hesitated when it came to the sleeping child. And that hesitation, which gave Daisy enough time to wake and see what the Horseman had done, would nearly be his undoing.

Horrified by the loss of her mother and aunts, Daisy’s potential was unleashed. The surge of energy transformed her hair, making it prehensile. And though she didn’t know how to control it at first, she learned quickly. Soon enough, she had her hair wrapped tightly around the chest of the man who had killed her family. Soon enough, in her rage, Daisy told her hair to squeeze. Soon enough, she told it to kill.

It was only through the divine intervention of Athena, who used much of her remaining strength to rematerialize in the physical world, that Daisy was subdued. But as the Horseman made ready to finish his mission and kill the girl, Athena stayed his hand.

“There is a tower,” she told him, “on a remote island in the Sea of Tears. Bring her there.”

Life in the Tower

Trapped in the tower, seventeen-year-old Daisy seethed. Athena siphoned the girl’s rage as fuel to build herself a new material form, but she spent only as much time with Daisy as it took to keep herself alive. The rest of the time, Daisy was alone with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.

And yet, she had such thoughts. In fact, the power of Daisy’s imagination soon brought her all the company a girl could want—one imaginary friend after another.

At first, she imagined cute and cuddly companions for herself. But soon enough, she began to imagine dashing young beaus instead—young men as handsome as the princes in the storybooks she read day after day, and who doted on her like she was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. They sang her songs and brushed her hair and massaged knots out of the shoulders she’d kept so tense for so long, always fearing that Athena would come home to ruin everything once again—to remind Daisy of the world outside the tower, the world that she was being denied.

And yet, even they were eventually set aside. When she was nineteen and a real young man came calling at her window, everything changed.

Adulthood

After a brief courtship and a bit of unpleasant business with Athena, the tall dark and handsome prince rescued Daisy from the tower and took her back to his castle in The Realm to be his bride. And unlike several of the other couples made famous in “The One About the Woods,” they were lucky enough to live happily ever after.