Solyn Strone

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Solyn is nearly two years old and appears to have arrived in the world with a very specific set of instructions about what she was going to look like, all of which she followed without deviation from her mother's side of the family. Her hair is a vivid copper-orange, the same shade as Briar's in the same direct sunlight, and has come in with the same cheerful disregard for order: a full, springy mass of curls that frames her round face and floats around her head when she moves, which is constantly. Her eyes are a bright, clear green, wide and alert with that specific quality of infant attention that takes everything in without the filter of learned disinterest. Freckles are already appearing at the bridge of her small nose and across her cheeks, which delights Briar and which Merriel has made several careful notes about in his personal journal, describing them with the precision he applies to everything. She is small even for a Sun Dwarf toddler, which is to say very small, solid and sturdy in the dwarven way, and almost always dusted with a fine coating of flour.

Solyn has been gravitating toward the kitchen since she could pull herself up to standing, which she accomplished with characteristic dwarven stubbornness at an early age and has not stopped doing since. She has a small rolling pin that Briar cut down to toddler size for her, and she uses it with an earnestness that her father finds both deeply charming and faintly alarming in its implication of inherited vocational destiny. She reaches for anything on a counter with the confident conviction that it belongs to her and she should be the one working with it. The fireplace warmth, the smell of baking, the sounds of a busy kitchen: these are the things that settle her when nothing else will, which everyone in the household finds either very sweet or very predictable depending on which parent they are.

Solyn was not planned in any formal sense. Her parents were still in the careful, tentative early stages of figuring out what they were to each other when Briar discovered she was pregnant, and the question of what followed was complicated and important and ultimately resolved in the particular way it resolved: with honesty, and eventually with a wedding that Briar insisted on choosing herself, in her own time, for her own reasons. Solyn was born on Goldenleaf 26, 1304, into a household that had just found its footing and was still finding it, and her arrival did not simplify any of that, but it made all of it feel considerably more worth doing. Merriel held her with the careful precision he applies to things that matter very much and do not forgive carelessness. Briar held her with flour still on her hands from the batch she had been finishing when labor began, which is either very on-brand or simply inevitable, depending on how well you know Briar.

Solyn spent most of her first year in the shop, because Briar spent most of her first year in the shop, and Solyn was where Briar was. The regular customers of The Sweet Spot know her on sight and have since she was a few months old, and she has grown up treating the shop as a natural extension of home, which it essentially is. She learned to pull herself up on the display counter legs before she could walk. She learned to walk by traveling between the prep table and the oven. The first word she said with clear intention was not Mama or Papa but something that everyone in the shop recognized as a very close approximation of "cookie." Briar wrote it in the shop ledger with the date, between two entries for ingredient orders. Merriel has a copy in his personal records with several footnotes.

Merriel came to fatherhood with the thoroughness he brings to everything, having read extensively on child development in the months before Solyn arrived and prepared himself as one prepares for something important and irrevocable. What he did not fully prepare for was how quickly she would become the most interesting person in any room he shared with her, a quality he recognizes from her mother and does not entirely know what to do with. Solyn cannot yet appreciate that her father is a Heaven-contract lawyer with a silver pocket watch blessed by the divine and a reputation for precision across multiple cities. She is, however, absolutely fascinated by the watch, which she has been attempting to acquire since she first noticed it, and which Merriel lets her hold under close supervision on quiet evenings when there is nothing that can be spilled. He reads to her from books she is too young to understand, because he believes she is absorbing the cadence of language, which she may well be. She listens with her whole body, the way she does when something earns her real attention, which is the most Briar thing she does in the most Merriel context.

Solyn's world so far is the shop, the house, and the wide and varied settlement of Goodberry with all its faces and languages and extraordinary people who stop to talk to the small copper-haired toddler at the confectionery counter. She does not know this is unusual. She has no reference for what less extraordinary looks like. She accepts adventurers and craftspeople and the full population of a remarkable settlement as simply the texture of the world, and approaches all of them with the same cheerful openness she applies to everything. She is nearly two. She is already known by name by most of the market district. She is, without question, her mother's daughter.

Solyn's most immediate and earnest goal is to use the rolling pin correctly, by which she means the way Mama uses it, with that specific fluid motion that produces a flat even sheet. She has been working on this. Her results so far are enthusiastic and imprecise, which Briar assures her is exactly how everyone starts, and which Solyn receives as encouragement to continue immediately and with more effort. She is making progress. The dough outcomes are improving. Merriel keeps a record.

The pocket watch is silver, it catches light beautifully, and it makes a small sound when opened that Solyn finds extremely compelling. She would like to hold it. She is sometimes allowed to hold it. She would like to hold it more often and for longer. This is a goal she pursues with the quiet strategic patience of someone who has learned that direct attempts are supervised and that the better approach is to simply be very endearing during the approach. She is very endearing. This is working gradually.

Solyn is nearly two years old. Her father is a Heaven-contract lawyer of considerable reputation and her mother is the most gifted confectioner in Goodberry. She has her mother's warmth, her father's capacity for focus, the natural dwarven constitution that Sun Dwarf children carry from the start, and a deep and already evident love for the kitchen that suggests the lineage has made a very clear decision on her behalf. What she does with all of this is genuinely not yet known. What is known is that she is happy, she is in the right place, and the flour situation is going to be ongoing.