Datura Solanum

Datura Solanum served as a Reaper of Thanatosfrom 99 to present.

Description
Standing above 6 ft, Datura is an awkwardly tall young woman, with deceptively strong muscles hiding under chainmail armor and a long, black shroud. Her dark violet eyes stare out somberly from under her hood, long flaxen hair framing her slender face when it is not hidden behind a birdlike skull mask. She carries a large scythe with a beautifully crafted bone snath, as well as a delicate black iron pocketwatch, her Holy Symbol of Thanatos. Datura is known for being laconic, punctual, and for her particularly dry and morbid sense of humor.

Family and Childhood
Datura was the third child born to a wealthy family of servomancers in Eastgate. At age 4, she was an eyewitness to the violent murder of her parents, Torvum and Violacea Solanum, at the hands of biomancers, while she and her two elder siblings were left untouched. She never discovered the reason for their murders beyond the general assumption that they were victims of shadow wars between the Wizard Towers. Her brother Viride mysteriously disappeared soon after their parents’ deaths when he was only 8 years old. Her sister Belladonna now works as an apothecary in Eastgate and remains very close to her younger sister.

Datura's fascination with death began the night a barn owl flew into her bedroom and awoke her with a shrill scream and flapping. She ran to get her parents, and upon opening their door, witnessed their last moments as three cloaked figures brutally killed them both. After the dark figures disappeared through an open window, she turned to find the owl percheed on the grandfather clock in the hall. It seemed to look at her, gave a low rasping call, and then silently soared past her out her parents' window. Dreams and visions of the flapping owl and its shrill cry haunted her for years after that first encounter with death.

As she grew older, Datura became more and more interested in death: how people die, what happens when they die, and especially the living's reactions to and relationship with others' deaths. She researched death in medical texts and literature, attended public executions, and developed an odd friendship with the local undertaker and gravedigger. Her morbid fascination in the subject became near-obsession, at which point her caretakers, worried for her health, called in a doctor when she was 10. After a long, private discussion, the bewildered doctor declared that she actually had a rather healthy outlook on death even if her curiousity were highly unusual, that she was no danger to anyone, and that she was the very picture of mental health, though very eccentric.

Calling: Return of the Owl
One afternoon when Datura was 15, as she was walking home, she passed an older gentleman in the street who suddenly suffered a heart attack. As a small crowd gathered around the dying man, she looked up to see a barn owl perched on the chimney of a nearby building. When the owl took flight, Datura followed it in a trance-like state, out of Eastgate and up a small, quiet country road. Finally at dusk, the owl flew under the roof of a small, secluded burial site at the top of a hill, and Datura found herself at the entrance to a shrine of Thanatos, face to face with one of his clerics.

Datura spent the next three years preparing for her ordination as a priestess of Thanatos. Her skull mask is humanoid with particular avian features, resembling the heart-shaped and mask-like face of a barn owl.