Flora

Late in her long life Flora presents as a gray-haired woman with blue eyes and a calm, gentle bearing. She can cast off that apparent frailty to take on a blazing, youthful shape, and once she dies she persists as a spirit able to rise up inside the minds of others. Her dwelling stood deep in the green of the spirit-tree mansion she guarded.

Kindness ran through everything Flora did. She helped strangers without hesitation and, in earlier days, drifted from town to town to do just that. Though the Holy See's growing reach taught people to dread and despise mages such as her, she carried no grudge against its faithful and always spoke with grace. Her tie to Schierke was tender and motherly, and she would let the girl nap against her in a pool of sunlight or sit with her over afternoon tea; at the end, what pained her most was knowing she would never look upon her pupil's bashful smile again.

An old companion of the archmage Gedfring and a friend to the Skull Knight, Flora once waited upon the priestess who tends Elfhelm's cherry blossoms, until a broken taboo following an occultation rite got her banished from the isle. She settled near Enoch Village and roamed the area to teach and to heal, until the Holy See's advance turned the locals against her and pressed her back into the spirit woods. There she built a home at a spirit tree, keeping watch over the Berserker Armor and in time taking Schierke as her apprentice, all the while holding rare understanding of both the God Hand and the beherits. When Guts' company forced its way into her sanctuary, she welcomed them warmly, agreed to help clear the trolls from Enoch Village, and fitted them with enchanted gear while sealing the Brand at his nape and schooling them in the Astral World.

Her magic ran deep and her years stretched unnaturally far. She could quiet the cursed Brand with a talisman, send her thoughts to others with no catalyst at all, and set mud golems to guard her grounds. After his ascent, Griffith reckoned her dangerous enough, as one of the wardens set over a spirit wood that feeds the World Spiral Tree, to dispatch apostles such as Zodd and Grunbeld to kill her unbidden. They torched her mansion with her trapped inside, yet she steered Schierke to the cellar for the armor Guts would need and raised golems to swallow Grunbeld's cannon fire. When the armor devoured Guts' sense of self, her urging lent the faltering Schierke the resolve to pull him back. For her final act she threw up a soaring wall of flame that even Grunbeld, the Flame Dragon Knight, could not breach, covering her friends as they fled, then soothed her heartbroken student through her thoughts, telling her their time together had been the calmest stretch of her long life.

Past death her being becomes that of a daimon. She rises again within Casca's dreamscape as a shard of Schierke's memory, once more swelling into a giant of fire to shield the two witches, and later comes to Guts inside a stupa to reveal that the manner of his birth left him native to neither the Astral nor the Physical World, a thing of the interstice much as Griffith is.