Maple

Backstory

Maple spent her life as the silent sentinel of the House of Vales, an elite battle maid sworn to protect a lineage that vanished the moment she closed her eyes for a midday rest. She awoke in the verdant, suffocating grip of the Gauntlet’s Spring, her pristine apron stained with the ichor of a predatory bloom. To Maple, the transition was not a tragedy but a professional failure; she views her presence in this impossible prison as an unfinished assignment, her iron-clad discipline and combat-honed reflexes now turned toward the singular goal of reaching the Warden to demand the location of her missing charges. She moves with the terrifying efficiency of a servant who has forgotten how to be a person, viewing the Gauntlet’s seasonal horrors as mere obstacles to be polished away. Beneath her unflinching resolve, however, lies a gnawing, surreal doubt: she occasionally finds fragments of her former master’s embroidery snagged on the thorns of the Autumn corridors or tucked into the frozen crevices of Winter. Maple fights not just to escape, but because she fears that if she stops, she will realize the House she served—and the life she lived—may have been nothing more than a dream she had before the Gauntlet claimed her.