Madame Wormwood

Madame Wormwood asks little of her worshipers. She has no dogma save for "Enjoy yourself, but do no harm."
She has no cult or any other form of organized church, nor does she have a religious text.

However, her worshipers often include artists, writers, and those in the sex industry.
These faithful souls have created The Malachite Record: personal correspondence with the goddess, documented, preserved, and often shared between worshipers who happen upon one another.
After sharing a moment of passion, they often share their stories of the goddess. While not compiled, The Malachite Record is sought after in all its many forms. The Malachite Record includes photographs, printed pages of internet forums, words on napkins and matchbooks, and occasionally manuscripts with her graceful and calligraphic handwriting in the margins, written by writers with her collaboration. While these examples are valuable and each worshiper seeks to grow their collection, no gift is as grand, nor piece of the record more valuable than Sage Letters.

Madame Wormwood takes great pleasure in leaving sage colored letters, sealed with beeswax that she dyes green and always accompanied by a lipstick stain on the front where she kisses the envelope next to the recipient's name. This stain is her holy symbol, and she leaves it everywhere she has an encounter. Every letter comes with a ribbon, usually worn in her hair or around her wrist at the time of writing. The contents of these letters include poems, biographical stories, and transcripts of her talks with the recipient that are written verbatim from memory. Sage Letters are often left behind when she inevitably disappears. Perhaps one excuses themselves to use the restroom at the bar and when they return the strange woman is gone, a sage letter left under her glass. Perhaps one takes her to a hotel and finds themselves alone the morning after, a sage letter on the pillow where she slept.

Many Sage letters tell of Madam Wormwood's history particularly her creation, making her unique among the divine, who keep such information hidden.
Her story centers around an elderly farmer who recently lost his wife in an age long before modern recorded history. The farmer buried his wife not days before, and began seeing her everywhere he went. His crops were dying due to either neglect or a plague that was spreading among the fields. He prayed to the gods but much like the modern-day this was a time where gods rarely listened. He looked up and saw his wife standing there, an image created by a broken mind. He then prayed to her, thinking he might as well, as no god would listen. While the image of his wife was not truly there in any way, shape, or form, the hallucination never ended. Any time the farmer went out to the barn he would find his wife sitting there. He brought her offerings and prayers, gave her praises designed specifically to make the other gods jealous. He knew he was losing his mind but latched onto the image as much as he could. One morning, many months after crafting his personal goddess of green and rain, he rose from his bed and found his fields green, his crops full of life, despite the dying crops surrounding his land. He rushed out of his home and found his wife sitting in a rocking chair outside the door, the same one she used in life. He dare not speak but simply stared wondering what caused this change to happen. What started as a fleeting fancy, a fantasy created out of the pain and sorrow of a broken man, grew into something extraordinary: a Young Gods was born.

While she had no memories of his wife, having only adopted her visage, she looked at him with love. He gazed into her eyes with fear and wonder and simply dropped to his knees, his mind, his body, and his soul belonged to her and her alone.
As Time passed she grew quite fond of her sole worshiper. Though their relationship remained platonic, she often muses on how life would have been had she said something. He was but a man, however, and was destined to nourish the earth he tilled. His passing brought her grief, the very first time she felt the emotion. The details that occur after his passing differ from letter to letter but are never contradictory.

Likely the series of events that occurred are all accurate but recalled at different times due to whatever stimuli exists in the vicinity when Madame Wormwood writes. Some letters claim she traveled, seeing the world and all its splendor falling in love with its pleasures, hence her current status as a goddess of pleasure. Others say she resided on the farm for eons until a more modern age came about, namely the 1800s when she attached herself to the term Green Fairy, used to personify absinthe.

Madame Wormwood began to develop her following. World War 1 saw a decline in worshipers, so much so that she began attending the parties of the roaring twenties in an attempt to surround herself in urban legend. She became particularly popular during the Great Depression, a time of hardship for all.
She brought joy, wealth, and other pleasures to those who worshiped her but maintained her focus on living life outside of religious requirements. She refused to require her worshipers to attend a church, and became somewhat of a sex symbol, as many of her followers were prostitutes, an occupation that at the time, recently became illegal and more dangerous than before.

In World War Two, she followed the men into war, swearing to not forsake her worshipers to another slaughter. She developed a new form, The Emerald Nurse, who adorned the sides of planes and decorated the helmets of soldiers in classic pinup fashion. According to those who believe, praying for aid from The Emerald Nurse could bring protection from the storm of bullets that came your way. One story that traveled the front lines was that of Sgt Daniel Ambrose, a skeptical man, who prayed to her and swore his worship if she saved him. He did this as German troops lined him and other POWs up before a firing squad, and the bullets missed their marks. Within a fraction of a second, a flash of green mist appeared, and a woman dressed in a green nurses uniform appeared, holding Ambrose in a firm embrace and glaring at the German soldiers with a special kind of rage. She spoke, and they understood despite the fact that she didn't speak their language, "Each of these men are husbands and this one is a father..." a fact that Ambrose wasn't aware of at the time.

Other avatars have been seen as decades came and went. She is still active and her following grows slowly to this day.