Matthew Verde

(bio template to be added later)

Matthew Verde was once a night-spinner in service to Sallentine, a young human boy who lost his ability to age in his Sand Trial. As the laws of Sallentine go, it is considered unfair for a dream- or night-spinner to be judged on what they do in the course of their duties upon death, as sometimes they have to do some pretty terrible things for the sake and survival of the realm. To get around this, the soul of the spinner is reincarnated without any memory into Sallentine, free to live their new life free of the burden they previously carried. Matthew was no different. 

The young honey glider grew up happy and cared for in the Lost Kingdom under the care of his single father, a dark red rose named Johan. Matthew himself had some strangely reoccurring nightmares, but not often enough to worry about. He was just a normal kid, living a happy, carefree life. A kid who knew or cared for nothing beyond his small world, of him and his father. Not until others came into his circle, and the borders of his world expanded to encompass something much greater. A place where, for the first time, he started to understand that something wasn’t right.

See, Johan was a biiiit of a helicopter parent, setting strict rules and enforcing them severely - from what Matthew was allowed to eat on which day and when, what hobbies he was allowed to have, who he was allowed to speak with, all the way down to what precise time down to the minute when certain chores must be done and when they couldn't be touched. Anything you could think of, and it had an arbitrary rule attached to it. Matthew was absolutely forbidden from deviating from these rules, and as anyone with or without a child would know, the draw of the forbidden makes it far the more sweeter to do. And once Matthew met other kids and their families, watched them and realized that how he was being raised wasn't normal? Well. Matthew became jealous of the freedom the other kids had over their lives, and for the first time in his life, the rules he had so faithfully abided by began to chafe. This led to a great amount of friction between him and his father, with Mathew growing more and more frustrated as Johan cracked down on him even harder.

Now, normally, when Matthew broke a rule his father made sure to explain why he couldn't before laying down the consequences, and as a result of understanding Matthew wouldn't break it again (usually). The only issue was, the more frustrated Johan got over the years with how 'wild and disobedient' his son was being, the more insane his rules got, and the less and less he was able to provide a reason beyond 'because I said so' or 'because I'm your father'. Eventually, when Matthew came into his teenage years, it got to the point where Johan punished his son for any sort of disagreement with him at all, claiming it was backtalk and that he wouldn't stand for it in his house. It was only a few months of this before Matthew snapped. Enraged, he and Johan got into an argument so heated Matthew declared that he couldn't continue to live like this, that it wasn’t fair and he was running away. Even as he bolted, his father roared after him that he would just come crawling right back, begging for kindness he didn't deserve, before slamming the door behind him.

...That was the last time Matthew ever saw his father. Matthew was so determined not to come back that he left the garden entirely, arriving in a different one only to realize that he had nothing to his name. Too young to get a job and with nowhere to go, as he couldn't remember the way back home even if he wanted to go back, Matthew found himself on the streets, fighting to survive with the other gliders down on their luck. He very quickly learned to keep himself from screaming at night, on the occasions where the nightmares that had plagued him his entire life decided to surface. Noise gave his location away, and having your location proclaimed for all and sundry to hear was NOT a good thing. Matthew had had that lesson beaten into him time and time again until he learned to lock the shrieks behind his teeth.

It was when Matthew was nearly an adult that he met Leonel for the first time. He was getting beat up in and alleyway by three older and much larger gliders, and Leonel happened onto the fight. The witch iris glider chased them off on a whim, before asking Matthew just what he thought he was doing, getting into a fight like that. When told that Matthew had been defending a child much smaller than he was, Leonel just rolled his eyes, told him his naivety was going to get him killed, before shoving a potion bottle into his chest and leaving.

That, ironically, was the start of a beautiful friendship. Every so often, Leonel would find Matthew banged up (usually because he was trying to protect someone) while in the area making shady deals to acquire his more questionable alchemical reagents, and would patch him up, griping the whole time that this wasn't a free service and that he wasn't a babysitter. And in turn, Matthew would show up unannounced every so often to basically ding dong ditch the glider to leave a carefully-wrapped parcel of somewhat expensive herbs due to them being unable to be grown in captivity. It became a game where Matthew tried not to be caught doing so; one he failed more often than he succeeded (and even then, he suspected some of those were because Leonel LET him win). They were strange bonding sessions, to be sure, but it worked for them.

That all changed one day, when Matthew was griping to Leonel in one such healing session about how he wished there was a place where people didn't have to live off the streets, to be constantly fighting each other; a world where Matthew's kindness (more like stupidity, Leonel would argue) wasn't a strange, foreign thing. It was a well-worn complaint by now, but Leonel's response that time was not.

"Why not go make your own, then?"

Leonel regretted the sarcastic words the second Matthew's eyes lit up, and the older glider groaned. Despite protesting that he hadn't meant it literally, and how would he even start up a garden on his own in the first place, Matthew would not be deterred, going so far as making actual plans, studying geographical locations, and drafting up his best attempts at garden layout. Finally, Leonel threw his hands up in the air and proclaimed that since Matthew was dead-set on his foolishness, he might as well come along and make sure the younger glider didn't screw it all up. Leonel had connections Matthew didn't; if he wanted to get this ridiculous dream off the ground, he'd need more than just drive.

Deciding on a place took longer than Matthew would've thought; Leonel wanted to set up somewhere in the Onyx Kingdom, while Matthew was absolutely adamant about staying away from there.

(Haunting nightmares of flame and darkness, the smell of ash so cloying he could CHOKE on it-)

Eventually, the pair decided on a small, out of the way peninsula in the Rose Kingdom, just south of Death-Trap falls - which, weirdly enough, felt like Matthew had been there before? But obviously he hadn't; he'd never been that far up north before, and besides, SNAPPER GLIDERS lived up there. Which, yeah, would mean their new garden would have a bit of a snapper glider problem, the pair knew, but as Leonel said, if they wanted to make this work they needed to have a place pretty out of the way, somewhere where it would be too bothersome to send royal interference should the resident royalty take offense with what they were doing. Location decided, the pair made plans, packed up, and thanks to Leonel's many friends, were able to get a boat to take them straight to the peninsula. 

And so the newest garden of the Rose Kingdom was born. Leonel absolutely shot down the idea of naming it Sanctuary, and after some squabbling the two still couldn't come to a consensus. Unfortunately for them, the place needed a name on paper, so they just wrote it as the nameless garden until they could think of something better. Only problem was, the name stuck, so now they're stuck with it.

Just because they've established a garden, however, doesn't mean everything's all roses, so to speak. There have been several snapper glider attacks since the place was founded, adding to Matthew's already sizable collection of scars (much to Leonel's consternation). They have, however, established that for all that there are only two of them, they're hardly an easy target, and so earned themselves some breathing room - for now. Breathing room they took full advantage of to fortify the perimeter fencing and add to the rather nasty and oh so very lethal alchemical traps Leonel strung up around the garden border. 

It...probably helped that snappers as a society don't really respect anything but force and savagery, and Leonel, well, REPURPOSES the dead snappers for his concoctions. The best antidote to a poison comes from the poison itself, he says, and since the snappers have so kindly donated their corpses to the garden, well, why waste what's already there? The idea still makes Matthew pretty uneasy, but Leonel's logic is right. He just...doesn't have to watch it, is all.

At the moment, there are only three dwellings: Leonel's alchemy lab, and the meeting house in the Nameless Garden. Well, technically three and a half dwellings, but the fourth hasn't been finished yet so that doesn't count. Construction is slow, given that there's only the two of them working on this, but Leonel assures Matthew that things like this take time. They have the barest barebones of a garden set up at the moment, yes, but there are always those willing to take the risk. After all, he was there, wasn't he?

It probably wasn't the BEST idea to hug the honey glider acting as the sole support for a rather heavy oaken beam, but nobody got hurt so everything worked out fine. They were fine.

(He probably deserved that slap to the back of the head, though.)