Karin

In her youth Karin was regarded as a striking woman, her looks nearly as celebrated locally as the flowers she grew. The one constant tied to her identity is a blue rose worn in her hair, the same rare hybrid that made her name. Decades later, age has stripped that beauty away, leaving her unrecognizable even to the man who once adored her.

Gentle and quietly devoted, Karin is driven above all by longing for her lost sweetheart. When she returns to her old town as the meek Lebi, she keeps herself small, offering help without ever pressing for recognition, content simply to be near him. That self-effacing patience curdles into anguish once she grasps how far his obsession has gone, and her final moments are consumed by grief and heartbreak over what his shallow fixation cost them both.

Karin built her livelihood in Linter Village around an unusually rare blue rose hybrid she alone could cultivate. Roughly twenty years before the story, a cart accident sent her over a cliff while she was hauling a large shipment. Her body was never recovered and everyone assumed she had died, but she survived the fall with a severe head injury that erased her memories, including any recollection of her young love Majhal. People from a neighboring settlement found her, nursed her back to strength, and she resumed selling flowers there despite the amnesia.

As the years faded her beauty, her memories crept back, and the wish to see Majhal drew her home under the name Lebi. He never made the connection, still fixated on the girl he remembered, and quietly let her assist his daily work. When Edward Elric passed through, he uncovered that Majhal's obsession had twisted into a monstrous scheme: harvesting the souls of local girls to fashion a Karin golem for himself. Realizing the horror of it, she tried to stop him, and Majhal struck her down and seized the young villager Clause for another binding. Ed helped the older woman up, spotted the blue rose in her hair, and named her true identity to the alchemist. Rather than see the truth, Majhal flew into a rage, turned his sword on Ed, and was fatally impaled on it instead. Dying in her arms, he still refused to accept that the weeping old woman was the flower seller he had loved, leaving Karin to cradle him and mourn the lust for youth that had doomed them.