Eriza

An air of sorrow hangs about Eriza, a fair-skinned young woman with brown eyes who moves through the world wrapped in her order's black habit. Melancholy shadows her manner, and after the mandragoran infection takes hold within her she can shift into a monstrous plant shape to defend the tree in her care.

At her core Eriza is tender and motherly. She doted on Niko, a village outcast whose knack for staying cheerful through hardship she quietly revered, and his death cracked something in her, turning her bitter toward the cruelties people visit on one another. Even once the mandragora rooted itself in her flesh, she went on prizing those who lived in peace and stood up for the infected villagers as blameless souls who struck back only when goaded. Violence, prejudice, and bloodshed sickened her, and she held that the people who could voice their wants through nothing but violence were the hardest of all to redeem. Her hunger for a kinder world, though, warped into delusion, and she came to accept letting the infection twist others into monsters against their will, so long as it left her village safe and content.

Eriza made her home in a hamlet on the edge of Balzac's domain, doting on the boy Niko in spite of the burdens he carried. When he collapsed on the road to the church one winter night and died, it shattered her. When Balzac caught wind of the mandragora, his soldiers recovered no more than half the heart. Long afterward he went after what remained, this time enlisting Guts, who reached the village in the company of Dunteth and his band of rebels.

Guts was left to watch the mandragorans slaughter Dunteth and his men the moment a rebel wrenched one of the plants loose, and Eriza came to still their fury by settling the mandragora back into the earth. When her plea that she and the creatures wanted only peace failed to sway Guts, she withdrew beneath the church and took on her mandragoran form to guard the tree. Guts cut the heart from the trunk, and Eriza tried to escape with it, only to find Gyove and Balzac's soldiers putting the village to the torch and its people to death. Sickened by the endless wheel of killing, she ran back into the blazing church as it fell in around her, and the beherit Niko had gripped in his dying moment came at last to Rita.