Tamsin Toombs
Divine Traits
Alignment: N
Portfolio: Balance, duality, forests, the circle of life
Domains: Earth, Plant, Repose, Sun
Subdomains: Growth, Light, Stone, Souls
Favored Weapon: Quarterstaff
Holy Symbol: A tree that is half blooming, and half dead
Tenets
1. Thou shalt not disturb the natural order of life and death, creation and destruction.
2. Protect the world from those who would exploit it.
Followers of Tamsin Toombs
Her priests are often druids with a deep connection to earth, but she is worshiped by every farmer hoping for a good crop, and she is called upon at almost every funeral.
Tamsin's religion has no central location - any forest or stretch of natural landscape is a holy place for her. As a result, her faith is spread evenly across the globe, but more concentrated in less urban environments. Some particular sites do serve as places for pilgrimage, however. The most famous of these locations is Skyreach, a great tree The Green Soul dwelt in for the better part of a century, and which eventually grew to almost four hundred feet in size.
Relations
Tamsin is closely allied to the rest of the Six, as well as the rest of the Elemental pantheon. Her closest ally is Kerah Firehawk (with whom she shares both pantheons). Earthbreaker tolerates Tal'tyela in spite of their occasional competition and conflict, and occasionally allies with her against those who would corrupt nature.
Like Tal'tyela, she opposes Greyfather above all others, viewing the Father of the Fog as everything wrong with modern progress. Her church has also clashed with Gwydion Jarlath's at times, and fights against the abominations created by Yxterre.
Stance on Necromancy
While Tamsin opposes corrupting the natural cycle of life and death, her stance is softer when it comes to Alethea's trade in undead. When she and her church was asked to put a stop to the pressure on Alethea's impoverished citizens to sell their bodies for "indefinite postmortem service", she instead invited anyone seeking to flee the institution to stay in her new housing. When the pervasive use of necromantic energies created a surplus of negative energy in the environment, Tamsin pressured the Alethean government to invest in priests with healing magic, in order to create positive energy. Rather than trying to stomp out necromancy, Tamsin acknowledged that negative energy was as natural a part of the universe as positive energy, and strove to create a balance between the two.
Mortal Life
Tamsin never knew her parents. She was raised by her uncle, in a small cabin a half dozen miles east of a village too small to have its own name. Her uncle was strict, but not unkind. They had plenty of food, and books to read. Everything she needed to know about the world she learned from books or from her uncle. She wanted for little but companionship.
She had one friend in the village, who was too far away to see often. Her only constant companion was nature around her, and it was in nature that she found comfort, knowledge, friendship, and power. She studied flora and fauna, the weather and the stars, the earth, the sea, the sun and moon. She learned everything she could, drawing the knowledge and magic of nature around her like a cloak. She learned she could channel the energy of nature itself, to heal or harm, to make plants grow or to summon fire. And she could draw it into herself to change her skin.
When her uncle passed, she gave him a no-nonsense funeral, and set about sorting through his possessions. There she found letters to him from her birth mother, about her father. He was not a human, but instead an oread, someone with a deep connection to elemental earth.
She put her uncle's affairs in order, locked the door, and left. She burrowed beneath the ground as a mole and a badger, she ran across the field as a wolf and a deer, she swam as a fish, and flew as a bird. She followed whispers in trees and rumors spoken by birds. She learned of the ancient ruins that housed the Trials of Earth, and took part. When she had succeeded, she demanded information about her father. All the earth oracle would tell her is that the next ones to complete the trials would lead her to her destiny.
And so she waited, hunting desert mice as a hawk, until the Exalted came. She followed them, and watched as they completed the trials. One of their numbers had been turned to stone by the gaze of the gorgon, a simple fix for an earth druid such as Tamsin. She restored life into Calista's limbs, and joined the Exalted on their journey. Calista, meanwhile, was still heartbroken over the loss of Minerva, and left their side.
In recognition of her services to Heigarth, Tamsin was gifted a boon by the crown. She asked that Lowboar create a housing initiative for all the city's homeless. While the initiative started smoothly, eventually the nobility started balking at the soaring costs, so Tamsin took over the project herself. She wrapped living trees into new homes, raised stone from the earth itself to shape into multi-floor housing, and simply paid out of pocket for all the rest. When she was done in Lowboar, she repeated her process in Highboar, Cyrilla, and Algieth, then she flew across the sea and started again in Erema. While initially offended by Tamsin simply creating housing with no zoning applications, the governments quickly began to capitalize on the new housing, realizing that they were a boost to local economy in two ways. First, fewer people on the streets meant a more orderly, clean city. Second was the fact that people would come from miles around to behold the strange, living architecture Tamsin created, which meant an influx of customers for merchants to sell to (and an increase in tax income).
And so it was that Tamsin's housing became freely available for those too poor to purchase property. While no one will forget how she guarded the forests against corruption and exploitation, or her awe-inspiring display of power during the War of Blood, it is this kindness that serves as her greatest legacy. Even still her priests make periodic visits to these homes, using their powers to fix any cracks or holes that appear, and ensure that the living-wood homes are still healthy.
While it seems that everything Tamsin achieved was for the best, she also learned the danger of her interference. In 22 EU, the painful consequences of Tamsin's frequent manipulations of the weather was revealed. While she frequently used her powers to create rain where she wanted or needed it to be, she had failed to consider how moving rain to one location deprives another of it. The great drought of 22 is largely believed to have been caused by Tamsin pulling away rain to combat a forest fire in southern Edeir. Crops were ruined and farmers impoverished, and many blamed Tamsin. Since then, she has avoided directly manipulating nature in anything but the biggest of emergencies, and even then only if she knows how to balance out her changes.
Death
Two hundred years and more of leading her church, and Tamsin looked the exact same as she always had. She'd grown in wisdom and power, but had not visibly aged a day. And yet, just as she could intuitively tell the health and balance of nature around her, one day she intuitively knew her time had come. She packed up a few of her items, and passed the rest onto her head priestess. Then she walked up to the great tree that had been her home and church for a century, stepped into it, and was never seen again.
Mental characteristics
Gender Identity
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