"Primadonna girl, all I ever wanted was the world."

Oleander was born to a large litter with many siblings, mostly brothers and one other sister, Lantana. The middle child, Oleander was neither seen as a leader nor as a dependant like their youngest brother Cycad, though she like her other siblings felt quite worried for him and was quite relieved when Snakeroot reassured her that she knew how to take care of them. Oleander was relieved and immediately offered to help, wanting to do her bit to help her brother get better! She tried to always make sure to include him in their games and thankfully all of their other siblings felt the same way and so they never really squabbled much. Lantana was naturally commanding and the rest of them were all too happy to fall into line alongside her and do as they were told. Once the kits reached 8 moons, however, the small burrow they had been living out of suddenly felt less homey and more…cramped. Oleander remembers waking up every morning and wondering how she had taken this long to notice that Rhus’s foot was always jammed into her chin when they woke in the morning, or how Sumac always rolled over and squashed her when he tried to stretch and follow Lantana outside. Oleander began to complain to her parents about constantly waking up at the bottom of the “pile” of her siblings and it was then that Snakeroot and Castor agreed the kits were old enough that the family could think about moving to a new territory.

"Don’t you worry, don’t you worry child. Cause heaven’s got a plan for you…"

A new home?? Oleander was bouncing with excitement on the day they set out, chattering her family's ears off about all the nice things she'd like the new home to have, most important of all, she wanted her own burrow so she would stop getting kicked at night! Castor and Snakeroot rolled their eyes at her complaints and gently chastised their daughter, telling her that one day perhaps some of the family wouldn't be there and she would actually miss the pain her brother's feet inflicted, being young and naive of course, Oleander doesn't believe them and scoffs, rolling her eyes. The family sticks closely together, and both parents teach the kits important life skills. Castor teaches them to fight and protect each other, although Oleander struggles quite a lot with battle training as she's not as graceful nor agile as her other siblings. With their help, some practise and a lot of patience and encouragement from Castor she gets by enough to learn to hold her own in a struggle, but fighting frustrates her and she'd rather devote her concentration to a subject that she's "better" at.

That subject in question was, of course, learning plants, herbs and healing from her mother, Snakeroot. Learning the properties of herbs and how to identify the plants they got specific remedies from came much more naturally to her, and Oleander quickly began to gravitate her attention and focus more towards Snakeroot's lessons, becoming a sort of unofficial apprentice to her mother she ran errands for the doe and helped her to treat the rest of the family's wounds, as well as doing their best to identify and then treat the conditions their youngest brother Cyad was suffering from. The herbs they gave him did seem to help a lot, and with a few small adjustments here and there, Cycad was still able to keep up with and join in the games that Oleander and the rest of the siblings played.

They moved around and changed burrows every so often if elil got too close, and for several moons life was good. Really, Oleander didn't have much at all to complain about, she had the perfect life and the perfect family, with siblings who loved and cared about her and parents who provided them with everything they needed and were even content to let the litter stay with them after they were fully grown and technically didn't need hem anymore, instead of chasing them off. Oleander began to notice that during their games or patrols they did together in the family's small territory that Cyad couldn't see as well as she could, but isn't experienced enough in healing to diagnose the condition so instead approaches her mother to bring it up to the older doe. Maybe she was just imagining things! Cycad was fine, he was healthy as he could possibly get, and he kept up with the rest of the family. He was fine, nothing was wrong. Cycad was fine.

"And if you’re still breathing, you’re the lucky ones…cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs."

Cycad was fine.

Cycad was fine.

Cycad was FINE.

If she kept repeating it, maybe it would be true. Snakeroot claimed this wasn’t the case however, for one day during one of their lessons she would pull her daughter aside to tell Oleander the truth: there was something wrong with her youngest brother’s eyes. When Oleander protested that Cycad couldn’t be blind because he played with her and the others all the time and never seemed to have a problem with seeing the moss balls, or the rocks, or whatever object was the topic of the latest game Lantana and Sumac had invented, Snakeroot protested and tried to explain that Cycad could see some things, but not others. Oleander couldn’t quite wrap her head around the explanation, but she helped her mother to prepare herbs and treatments for Cycad the same as always.

Before she could fully wrap her head around the diagnoses, and before Oleander and Snakeroot could tell the rest of the family about Cycad’s condition, the storm hit, and the family were set upon by a sly homba right as the thunder and lightning broke out. Oleander rushed to fight alongside her siblings, covering Lantana's blind spot, the pair desperately fight against the homba, trying to work their way towards Cycad to protect him. When Sumac is thrown off the homba's back, however, Oleander is torn and feels the familiar, icy cold claws of fear gripping her muscles. She goes tharn, paralysed by indecision and unsure which brother to run and help first as rain soaked through her fur and lightning crackled overhead. In the end, she can only watch as Sumac hits his head and goes limp, fearing Cycad suffers the same fate. Lantana notices her sister has gone tharn and intervenes, saving Oleander's life by shoving her backwards towards their other brothers. Rhus and Arum support her between them while Lantana blocked the homba from reaching the trio, and helped Castor and Snakeroot to fight it.

"Rainclouds come to play...again. Has no one told you they're not breathing? Hello, I'm the lie living for you so you can hide. Don't cry…."

Oleander tried to help as best she could, lashing out whenever the fox came close enough, but she remembers not being able to do much useful in that fight. For the most part, she remembers being a terrified, quivering mess wedged between her two brothers who had to support her between them just to keep her own legs underneath her or she would have collapsed from shaking so badly. When it's all over, the siblings find themselves dealing with not only the dead homba, but both their parents, their youngest brother Cycad, and Lantana's twin Sumac have all been fatally wounded in the battle.

The stench of blood and corpses will soon draw more elil to the area, and Lantana knows they have to move on if they want to survive too. Oleander however, doesn't want to leave their parents and brothers to be devoured by elil's teeth, she locks her legs and remains stubbornly rooted to the spot, screaming "We can't just LEAVE them!! They're not dead, Lan, they're gonna wake up! They're gonna wake up!". Rhus and Arum exchange an awkward look with their eldest sister as Oleander hops to Cycad's side and begins to sob loudly. "We have to move!" Lantana growled at her, a little forcefully, and when she still refused to follow after their brothers, her sister had to physically DRAG Oleander by her scruff and carry her after their brothers for a while.

"But if you close your eyes…does it almost feel like nothing’s changed at all?"

As rabbit kind often do, the remaining siblings trudged on, sticking together and doing their best to move on from the trauma of the incident. Whilst Lantana and her brothers seemed to process it quite quickly, Oleander was far worse off than the rest of her siblings and seemed to be shutting down in response. The worst of all, however, was that she seemed to be in complete denial that the homba attack had happened at all. The siblings were supposed to take it in turns to do the nightly sentry duty so all of them could have a chance to get enough sleep and be well rested for the next day ahead, but Oleander kept demanding to be put on the night watch regardless of how many times she’d already been on watch in the days previous. Oleander would always sit awake at night, staring down the pathway they’d just travelled along and all but begging their lost family members to reappear from out of the bushes, smiling and laughing and say “haha, got you! We’re here now and everything’s fine!”.

But they never did.

Arum, Rhus and Lantana try to sit her down and have a serious conversation with Oleander about accepting what had happened as real and moving on with life, but Oleander refuses, insisting that none of them are dead and they were going to come back one night soon and they would all see!! Tensions rise in the group as a result, with Rhus and Arum often quarrelling with Lantana as the three can never agree on how to approach Oleander and make her realise the truth of their situation. Oleander does little to help this growing tension, if anything she simply feeds into it and makes it worse, until eventually the four siblings aren’t just bickering anymore, they’re having full-blown arguments with eachother over every little thing. Where to sleep, whether to keep moving or to bed down for the night, who should be in charge of the group now that their parents were gone, and, most of all...whose fault it is that they’re even having to have such arguments in the first place, as clearly none of them have had proper time to process their trauma just yet.

“Collecting pictures, from a flood that wrecked our home. It was a flood that wrecked this home...and YOU caused it!!”

During one such argument, when Lantana had tried to take charge of the group and Rhus and Arum had disagreed with her decisions, wanting to spend the day resting instead of moving onward, a big quarrel broke out between all the remaining siblings. While Oleander usually stayed quiet during these fights and tried not to get involved - she had no interest in being a leader of the group or hold any of the responsibilities that came with such a title- this time, as Lantana attempted to defuse the quarrel by claiming she was the one best fit to be leader of all the siblings, something inside Oleander snapped. This time, all the grief, sadness and negative emotions that Oleander had been bottling up since the storm came to the surface and she exploded, wheeling around to stand between Lantana and her brothers, she began to yell at her sister, blaming her for the deaths the family had suffered up till this point, since Lantana had forced them to leave the bodies behind. “It’s YOUR fault they’re all dead!” Oleander cried, tears streaming down her cheeks as she began to breathe heavily, all her repressed emotions bubbling up to the surface at once, “that’s why you can’t be leader, cause then the rest of us are all gonna die too! You’re gonna get us all KILLED!”

“I got boulders on my shoulders. Collarbones begin to crack; there is very little left of me and it is NEVER coming back!”

Rhus and Arum are too shocked to react at first, but look horrified at the accusations Oleander is throwing at their elder sister, but before either her brothers or Lantana can say anything in retort, she storms off away from the group, until her legs are shaking too much for Oleander to go on any further and she collapses on the ground, crying until her eyes run dry. For a moment, Oleander considers leaving the group and striking out on her own, but she has never known the life of a solitary hlessi and quickly scares herself out of this option. If she had another encounter like the one with the homba in the storm, she knew she’d be dead without her siblings to protect her. So, she doesn’t go far away from her brothers and sister, but neither does she approach them again for a while. Oleander regrets snapping at Lantana and saying the things that she said, knowing that her words probably hurt her sister deeply. She wants to apologise for everything, but also understands that Lantana may not want to forgive her after she had been so awful to her.

So, a combination of not knowing how to approach her sister without grovelling and wounding her own pride, and genuinely not knowing how to convey that the apology was a genuine and meaningful one meant that Oleander took a moon or two longer to work up the courage to finally speak to Lantana again and tell her she was sorry. Oleander agrees that of their siblings, Lantana is clearly the most sensible and mature one of the lot - she had gotten her, Rhus and Arum out of that storm alive after all - so it made sense if they were to look to Lantana as leader. Their brothers agreed, and Oleander apologised to Rhus and Arum aswell, for snapping at them all and for causing a rift between them and Lantana because she was too petty to admit she had been wrong. Oleander swears she won’t cause another fight among the group if they allow her back in, and promises to pull her own weight. Lantana, Rhus and Arum agree to take her back into the group officially and they continue on with their lives, making a reasonable living for themselves as hlessi.

Oleander became a pseudo-healer for the group, as she had learnt the most about herbs from Snakeroot, so she was able to treat any cuts, scrapes or bruises Rhus, Arum and Lantana ended up getting by fighting off elil from their burrows or their food. Oleander was also pivotal to the siblings’ continued survival, with her vast knowledge of plants she was able to guide her brothers and sister in picking out which ones were safe to eat, which were better kept as medicine, and which were so toxic they should avoid them entirely. The group is still grieving and hurting from the loss of the rest of their family, but slowly, together, they are picking up the pieces and they are moving on with their life. Oleander notices that the stress of being appointed leader of the group after such a traumatic event seems to be having an effect on Lantana, and tries her best to offer her sister emotional support, but lacks the emotional maturity herself to truly do so properly. Still...the effort counts, right?

"Drop the ball, watch it fall far below. Suck you in, hold your breath, the undertow creeps in slow…"

Just when they had settled into their lives as hlessi and thought they would remain as such forever, the group wanders into Lan-Hraeth’s territory and are come upon by one of the patrols, taken back into the warren and invited to join by the leaders. Oleander is rather nervous about the proposal at first...she’s not quite sure what it is, exactly, but something feels off about these rabbits. As they always did as hlessi, Rhus, Arum and Oleander looked to Lantana for the final decision on what to do, as they believed she would make the decision that was best for them. So, if Lantana said “we’ll stay”, then they agreed they would stay. However strange these rabbits seemed to be, surely it would be nice to be part of a warren again, to have someone else take the pressure off having to be the only ones responsible for eachother’s lives every moment of every day. Oleander makes no protest and doesn’t try to fight her sister’s decision this time, simply agreeing to stay in the warren aswell, and she was offered to train as a Cultivator, which she eagerly accepted, since plants and their properties were what she was most interested in working with.

Oleander had not expected to be entirely separated from her siblings in order to train, however, and was a little bit shocked and disgruntled when they were given mentors and sent to entirely different sectors from one another. Oleander was apprenticed to a Cultivator by the name of Saynthlay, who had also been a hlessi prior to joining Lan-Hraeth, and therefore understood her new Pupil’s emotions to a degree. Oleander took to her training well, but each time she caught even a split second glimpse of one of the runners trying to deliver a message, Oleander would be rushing up to them and pestering them, trying to ask about her siblings’ whereabouts and find out how they were doing. The runners, of course, were unsympathetic to her queries and instead simply became quite annoyed, as they had far more important to attend to and more urgent messages to deliver.

“Don’t go cryin’ to your mama, cause you’re on your own, in the real world…”

Saynthlay chastises her for continuously bothering the runners, and sternly tells Oleander that she has to stop and turn her focus to her training instead. This was quite the culture shock for Oleander to get used to, as when she had lived with her siblings they had always worried about the safety and wellbeing of the group as a whole before worrying about themselves individually. But, she did her best, struggling especially badly with the religious aspect of Lan-Hraeth’s teachings. Since the storm, Oleander had considered herself to be quite the “realist”, not sure if she believed in any form of the valley’s gods. After all...if there were gods, what good had they done for her and her family, by killing half of the rabbits they had loved most? None.

When she witnessed her first Sacrifice, Oleander was horrified. They called this a religion? This was madness! Still, like all members of the warren, she was forced to participate and bear witness to the barbaric practise until the Sacrifice was over and they were dismissed. Before Oleander could act out too much and call attention to herself, or worse, get in trouble with the higher ups for it, Saynthlay yanked the doe aside into the gardens and found a secluded alcove where she could force Oleander to sit and breathe deeply until she calmed down. Saynthlay reminded her that she didn’t have to like he warren’s religious practises at all, but that was how things were done here and she would have to at least suck it up and learn how to get good at pretending to agree with it if she didn't want to be the next one on the wolf's jaws.

Terrified, but having no idea where any of her siblings were and unwilling to even consider making a run for it without them, Oleander could do nothing but agree, begging Saynthlay to help her. Thankfully, the Cultivator agreed, and with her mentor’s patience and a few moons of hard work, Oleander eventually managed to knuckle under and get good at pretending to believe in the Omnis, as well as familiar enough in her duties that she was allowed to rank up from Pupil to Cultivator.

"If it’s not real, you can’t hold it in your hand. Or feel it with your heart, and I won’t believe it!"

Oleander moves from sector one where she trained, to sector five and settles into her own burrow there, trying her best to make a few friends within the warren, and keeping an eye out for any sign or word of her siblings. They had to be here somewhere, right? And now that she was a fully-fledged Cultivator, she was afforded a bit more freedom, able to move between sectors without Saynthlay accompanying her, without looking too suspicious. Whenever she had to bring herbs to one of the novices in another sector, she searched for her siblings, and finally after many moons, Oleander’s heart lifted as she thought she had glimpsed Lantana through the crowd as she was running an errand in sector two one day.

Though she didn’t get a chance to go up to her sister and speak to her yet on that day, at least she now knew WHERE Lantana was, and she hopes to be able to meet up with her soon. Maybe Lantana knows where Rhus and Arum are, too, and she hopes to ask her sister if she’s seen either of their brothers the first chance she gets. Oleander still doesn’t believe in the Omnis, nor is she fond of the sacrifices at all, but Saynthlay has drummed enough sense of self-preservation into her former Pupil that Oleander knows better than to say so publicly. She’s terrified by the thought of the wolf’s skull, and will play any part she has to if she can avoid meeting the same fate, but secretly hopes to reunite with Lantana and find their brothers so they can get the hell out of this cultish warren before yet another one of her siblings perishes.

"..."

tba