Webcomic / Wooden Rose

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Wooden Rose

Sisters Lillian and Nessa reside alone and care for their father, who has been ill for a year now. Nessa takes a fall out in the snow and is aided by a strange gentleman. Mr. Thorne’s charm quickly draws her to him and she finds herself in the romance she has always dreamed of. What she does not know is that the handsome stranger hides a dark secret, one that puts her and those around her at great risk.

Each page of Wooden Rose is in full color. The style is scattered with hints of anime and art nouveau. It began in January 2009, and ran until July 2012.

Wooden Rose provides examples of:

• Affectionate Nickname: Lillian is also called "Lilly" by her father and sister, both of whom she is close to. Later, Eric also addresses her as such to show his fondness of her after she saves his life with some emergency surgery.
• After-Action Patch-Up: Lillian patches up Eric after Nessa's tree spirit baby has a violent fit in response to Aidan's fury and stabs him.
• Age-Gap Romance: The character profiles reveal that the village surgeon, Eric Dawson, is thirty-five to Lillian's twenty-three. She has obvious romantic feelings for him at the start, but he initially thinks of her as a child. He later falls in love with her in return after she saves his life, and they begin formally courting in the epilogue.
• As You Know: Eric says a variant of this when telling Lillian that he lost his wife a few years ago, which segues into him revealing that his wife died because she bore the same kind of tree spirit baby that Nessa has had.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Aidan presents himself as the perfect Victorian gentleman on the surface, being polite, handsome, and well-mannered toward Nessa while courting her. It's all an act to hide his real motivation, which is to magically drain Nessa of her life to extend his own.
• Bittersweet Ending: A little more on the sweet side. Nessa is ultimately saved by Lillian's lullaby, which causes her to wake up and get away before Aidan can fully absorb her life, and he dies when his forest is set ablaze by his rage at her escape. Lillian's bonding with Eric during the whole ordeal leads to them becoming a couple, and the sisters' relationship also seems to be stronger. But Nessa still has lingering trauma from what happened, and she goes to the now burnt-down forest to visit the tree with the family crest that Aidan showed her, where she vows she won't forget it and leaves the handkerchief he gave her. The last panels show roses blooming from where she touched the crest, implying she still carries some of Aidan's magic inside her.
• Bookends: The comic begins and ends with Nessa going on a horseback ride through the woods.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: A third-party version. Lillian is stunned when Eric tells her that Nessa appears to be four months pregnant, and protests that can't be possible because Nessa has barely known her only suitor, Aidan, for half that time. As it turns out, Aidan is a tree spirit who magically impregnated her through the dreams he cast for his plan to deplete her life.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Lillian hates how "foolishly tongue tied" she gets around her crush, Eric, and wishes she could speak to him properly to thank him for his kindness to her family.
• Chekhov's Skill: Lillian's talent for sewing comes in handy when the tree baby is affected by Aidan's fury at Nessa's escape and stabs Eric in the side, leaving him with a wound that she has to stitch up.
• Children Are Innocent: Even ones that look like the roots of trees have the same guileless nature as human infants. Nessa's tree spirit baby behaves mostly like a human one, playing with a jewelry box and being drawn to a locket that has Nessa and Lillian's portraits inside.
• Color-Coded Eyes: A plot point for the supernatural aspect of the plot. Aidan's green eyes signify his charming human persona. They turn red in the presence of cats and when he has trouble maintaining his illusion.
• Curious as a Monkey: Lillian notices that Nessa's tree spirit baby acts just as curious as a normal human infant, rather than being evil like she and Eric assumed. It gets into a jewelry box to play with a locket that has its mother's portrait inside.
• Cute Kitten: Prospero is an adorable kitten with equally adorable siblings, and Lillian and Nessa adopt him from an old woman who had him and his littermates on sale.
• Damsel in Distress: Nessa gets a sprained ankle after her horse throws her off in the beginning, and Aidan helps her by bandaging her ankle with his handkerchief and giving her his own horse to ride. It's the start of their courtship. Later, he's the cause of her distress via brainwashing her with magic dreams that implant a tree baby inside her womb, which nearly kills her, and mind-controlling her into letting herself be almost completely absorbed by his true form.
• Damsel out of Distress: In the end, Nessa frees herself from Aidan's control when she hears Lillian sing their mother's lullaby to the tree baby that holds her soul, which breaks his spell on her. She escapes his realm and ends up back in the normal woods; with their connection severed, he no longer has a victim to feed on and dies when his rage ignites a forest fire.
• Dance of Romance: A particularly creepy one. Nessa's dream of dancing with Aidan under the moonlight is juxtaposed with Eric performing surgery on her to remove the tree baby that's killing her in the real world.
• Death by Childbirth: Eric's wife, Helena, died when she gave birth to a tree spirit baby after telling Eric that the child was not his and he should destroy it. The baby itself was born dead.
• Doing in the Scientist: Eric originally attributed his wife's pregnancy to infidelity, but when he saw that the child was a tree spirit and came to term in a week instead of nine months, he had no choice but to accept that the supernatural was involved.
• Double-Meaning Title: The first chapter is titled "Nessa's Fall", which seems to be about how Nessa literally takes a fall from her horse in the woods and gets a sprained ankle. In the same chapter, however, Nessa meets a handsome gentleman named Aidan who helps her, and is instantly smitten with him (so the title could also refer to her falling in love). Aidan later turns out to be a tree spirit who seeks to prey on Nessa's life force, which nearly spells her downfall.
• Dream Land: Aidan draws Nessa into one that he claims is real.
• Due to the Dead: Lillian and Nessa hold a funeral for their father after he dies from his illness at the beginning of chapter four. The weather is appropriately gloomy and overcast for it.
• Empathic Environment: It's a beautiful day during Nessa and Aidan's date, grey and rainy during the funeral, and dark during the climax. Magic-induced examples also occur; Nessa and Aidan share their first kiss in a pavilion in her dream that he inflicted on her, causing the roses around them to sprout and bloom because of his nature as a tree spirit, and the forest goes up in flames in response to Aidan's wrath over Nessa escaping him at the last moment.
• Enchanted Forest: The woods outside the town were once said to be the home of spirits and the supernatural. When Aidan abducts Nessa through her dreams, he tells her those woods are actually a magical forest with a barrier that protects it from being seen by mortal eyes. As a result, the forest appears as a magical landscape with towering trees, waterfalls, and a fairy tale castle, which he claims to be the kingdom that he and his ancestors have protected for thousands of years.
• Ethereal White Dress: Nessa wears a white and gold gown in her first dream of Aidan, fitting the otherworldly atmosphere of the land he shows her.
• Evil Plan: Aidan's true purpose in courting Nessa is to prolong his life by draining hers.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Prospero, Lillian's cat, hisses at Aidan and is able to detect him not being quite human.
• Fictional Document: Lillian's favorite book as a child was the Book of Faeries, which belonged to her family for generations and was kept in her father's study. She realizes just what Aidan really is when she remembers that the book had a page about a kind of tree spirit called a "cranshee", which she shows to Eric.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Eric is still affected by the memory of his wife, Helena, who died from supernatural causes that he had no way of understanding at the time. Helping Lillian work to save her sister from being killed by the same tree spirit who took Helena's life is implied to be what resolves his lingering pain over her, and he moves on to start courting Lillian in the epilogue.
• First-Name Basis: After she saves his life by sewing up his wound, Doctor Dawson insists that Lillian address him by his first name, Eric, instead of his title.
• Flower Motifs:
  • Roses are prominent throughout the story. Aidan magically grows a rose out of a log for Nessa during their date, and she takes it home afterward. Later, in the first dream she has with him, roses blossom all around them during their first kiss. In the epilogue, after Nessa touches Aidan's family crest in the forest and leaves his handkerchief there, roses immediately start growing out of the crest—implying she still has a trace of Aidan's magic in her.
  • Lillian is associated with lilies, true to her name, though she's only shown with them in the cover pages for chapters three and four.
• Flowers of Romance: Aidan gives Nessa flowers when he visits her at home the day after they met. She later picks a bouquet of lavender while on her date with him in the woods, and Aidan also magically grows a rose to give her on said date.
• Foil: Lillian and Nessa are opposites, with Lillian being the responsible Proper Lady older sister and Nessa being the flighty Spirited Young Lady younger sister. Their respective suitors are also contrasted this way, with Eric being a reserved, selfless doctor and Aidan being a charming, seductive gentleman who is actually a supernatural monster in disguise.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Nessa is a free-spirited and romantic young woman who likes going out, while her older sister Lillian is a dutiful, soft-spoken homebody who works hard to take care of the family.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: After a whirlwind romance and courtship of only a few weeks, Aidan proposes that Nessa stay with him in the dream forest. She accepts, which causes her to continually have her dreams about being with him there. In the waking world, she gradually becomes weaker while ill and bedridden because of the tree spirit baby he gave her.
• Freudian Excuse: Aidan claims to Nessa that humans initially worshiped him and his fellow tree spirits as nature gods and gave them offerings, but they gradually forgot about them and denied their existence, which led to the spirits' forests being destroyed. The mass destruction of their natural habitats has left Aidan as one of a small few that remain, and because his kind can only stay alive by depleting the lives of human women with magically implanted tree infants, this has made him desperate to survive by preying on and gradually killing Nessa.
• Functional Magic: Aidan uses magic music with his pipe but his true talent is an inherent gift because he's a tree spirit.
• Grave Clouds: It's completely overcast at the funeral for Lillian and Nessa's father.
• Horse Returns Without Rider: When Nessa's horse runs home without her after throwing her off in the woods, Lillian is immediately worried sick. Nessa later turns up on another horse, loaned to her by Aidan.
• Horsing Around: Nessa's horse, Ajax, gets into a panic during their ride in the woods and throws her off, causing her to twist her ankle in the fall. Immediately afterwards, Aidan arrives on the scene and helps Nessa get home on his horse. Given that Aidan later turns out to be a tree spirit, it's implied Ajax might have been reacting to his presence.
• I Gave My Word: After giving her his horse to get her home, Aidan promises to visit Nessa at her house to get his horse back the next day. He does so, and gives her flowers when they meet again.
  Aidan: As promised. I always keep my word.
• I Kiss Your Hand: Aidan kisses Nessa's gloved hand on their date after telling her about how he once was engaged before his fiancée left him, which makes her blush.
• Incurable Cough of Death: The illness Lillian and Nessa's father has isn't named, but it causes him coughing fits and eventually kills him.
• I Owe You My Life: Eric tells Lillian that his life is in her debt after she stitched up the stab wound he got from the tree baby.
• It's All My Fault: Lillian expresses this sentiment after destroying the tree spirit baby to stop it from attacking her and Eric, telling Eric that it's her fault that Nessa has died because the baby held Nessa's soul. Eric tells her he doesn't think that's the case and he believes its connection with Nessa was already gone before she destroyed it, which proves correct when she turns up alive.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Lillian and Nessa adopt a kitten, which Lillian takes charge in caring for because of her quiet, gentle nature. While paying a doctor's visit to the sisters' home to see to their father, Eric tells Lillian he once had a cat of his own and named him Prospero, which inspires Lillian to name the kitten in Prospero's memory.
• Last of His Kind: Aidan tells Nessa that he is one of the last tree spirits left after humanity's destruction of their forests. This has made him determined to maintain his immortality at any cost by draining human women of their lives.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Nessa explains to Lillian that she needs Aidan because his courting of her makes her feel happy and carefree, which lifts her spirits during an otherwise miserable time of anxiety and worry over their ill father. But this only makes her emotionally vulnerable to Aidan's less than moral nature, and endangers her life when he nearly kills her.
• The Load: Eric thinks Nessa is no help at all to the family, noting he's never seen her lift a finger to help Lillian tend to their father.
• Magic Music: Aidan uses it to weave his Mind Control over Nessa by playing a pipe. It's mundane music (namely, Lillian singing the lullaby her and Nessa's mother sang in their childhood) that breaks his control over her and lets her escape him.
• Meaningful Name: Aidan Thorne is revealed to be a nature spirit, also known as a cranshee.
• Memory-Restoring Melody: Lillian's singing of their mother's lullaby is what causes Nessa to wake up and remember who she is after Aidan's spell on her brainwashed her into forgetting about her actual life.
• Minimalist Cast: The cast is mostly limited to just Lillian, Nessa, Eric, and Aidan. The only other relevant characters are Lillian and Nessa's father, who dies early on, and Eric's deceased wife Helena, who was Aidan's previous victim.
• Missing Mom: The sisters live with only their dying father. Their mother died when Nessa was four and Lillian was seven.
• Monochrome Past: Sepia colors are used for Flashbacks.
• Mystical Pregnancy: Nessa becomes magically impregnated by Aidan with a tree baby that will prolong his life at the expense of hers. To save her, Eric has to perform a caesarean section to remove the baby from her womb.
• Nature Spirit: Aidan Thorne is a cranshee, an immortal tree being that protects forests and takes a human disguise. It can only sustain itself by planting a seed within a human lover that will grow into a tree child in exchange for taking her life, and must do this every few decades or else it will age and die.
• No Full Name Given: Lillian and Nessa's surname is never revealed, in contrast to their respective suitors, Eric Dawson and Aidan Thorne. Given that Aidan is actually a tree spirit in a human disguise, however, it's doubtful as to whether or not that's even his real name.
• Nursery Rhyme: Lillian and Nessa's mother sang a nursery rhyme in a lullaby to them when they were children. Near the end, Lillian sings the same lullaby to soothe Nessa's tree spirit baby when it's frightened by Prospero. Because the baby carries Nessa's soul, she also hears Lillian's singing, and this causes her to finally wake up before Aidan can fully absorb her into his roots.
• Obvious Pregnancy: Nessa is visibly pregnant when carrying the tree spirit baby that Aidan inflicted on her, appearing to be four months along. When Eric performs a C-section on her to remove it, it's revealed to have become a fully formed infant within only a week. Justified by the fact that it was magically caused.
• Odd-Shaped Panel: The comic occasionally has panels that are not lined up straight or have slanted edges.
• Our Souls Are Different: Eric explains to Lillian that Nessa's tree baby contains Nessa's soul, which was extracted by Aidan's spell on her to keep her alive. By dividing her body and soul, rather than taking both at once and thus immediately killing her, she remains barely living in order to be gradually absorbed into him. When Lillian asks him why it didn't work on Helena, Eric answers that Helena's bond to him as his wife made Aidan's spell too weak and caused her only to die, rather than be absorbed. Because Nessa fell in love with Aidan completely, this gave him her life and the child her soul, and the only way to save her is to reconnect them to be whole again.
• Parental Abandonment: Lillian and Nessa lost their mother when they were children, and their father is seriously ill and dies early on.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Nessa wears a few fancy, brightly colored Victorian gowns with ruched overskirts, ruffled trim, and gloves; she has a yellow one on her first date with Aidan and a red one for the second. In contrast, Lillian usually dresses plainly in simple, often drab gowns. She only wears a fancy dress for her date with Eric in the epilogue.
• Plant Person: Aidan Thorne's true form is a massive tree.
• Please Wake Up: At the beginning of chapter four, Lillian and Nessa's father passes away overnight. In the morning, Nessa futilely begs him to wake up after Lillian tries to tell her that he has died.
• Posthumous Character: Lillian and Nessa's mother died long ago, and Eric lost his wife, Helena, a few years prior to the story.
• Power Glows: Whenever magic happens, it's accompanied by light.
• Promotion to Parent: Lillian has been a second mother to Nessa since their mother died and their father took ill.
• Proper Lady: Lillian is reserved, polite, and kind, in addition to being devoted to looking after her father and sister.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: After Aidan reveals his true nature to Nessa, she asks how old he is. He answers that his real age is of five hundred years.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Aidan's green eyes change to red in his true form as a tree spirit, indicating his evil nature. They only show when he reacts angrily to Nessa breaking free of him and ending up falling back through the magic barrier into the mortal woods. Nessa's tree baby also shares this trait, and goes into a rage with the same red eyes in reaction to its father's.
• Rescue Romance: Nessa first meets and becomes smitten with Aidan when he helps her get home after an ankle-spraining fall she took from her horse. Later, after Lillian saves Eric by stitching up his stab wound (with his instructions to help her, due to him being a surgeon), he's extremely thankful and requests for her to call him by his first name, then calls her his "dear Lilly". In the epilogue, he takes her on a dinner date.
• Scenery Porn: The comic has a few splash pages that show the breathtaking beauty of Aidan's realm, which has waterfalls, a castle, and elegant ruins with trees everywhere.
• Shapeshifting Lover: Aidan is a tree spirit who takes a human disguise to seduce women, draining them of their lives to prolong his immortality. He pretends to be a handsome gentleman to lure Nessa into allowing herself to be absorbed by him, and in the backstory, he did the same thing to Eric's late wife, Helena, who died because of it.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Nessa helps Lillian dress up for a romantic dinner with Eric, and she wears a fancy dress with gloves and jewelry. Eric tells her she looks lovely.
• Shipper on Deck: In the second chapter, Nessa lightly teases Lillian about her crush on Dr. Eric Dawson and encourages her to go out with him. When they finally begin courting in the epilogue, Nessa insists on dressing her up for it.
• Shrinking Violet: Lillian is naturally shy and quiet, which makes her too timid to tell Eric about her feelings for him when visiting him for his medicine.
• Something about a Rose: Aidan can make roses magically grow at will, which he shows off by growing a rose out of a log on his and Nessa's outing in the woods. This is because he is actually a tree spirit in disguise. In the end, it's heavily implied that Nessa inherited this ability from him when she touches the tree that has his family crest, which causes roses to grow there.
• Spirited Young Lady: Nessa is more outgoing and energetic than Lillian, and tends to be restless because of it. She likes going out for horseback rides, which is what leads to her encounter with Aidan.
• The Stoic: Eric and Lillian are both reserved people with a handle on their emotions. This is why they get along so well.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Lillian is a reserved young lady and her character profile says she "guards her heart carefully", but there's a warm personality underneath. Nessa describes her as such to Aidan during their date:
  Nessa: I know [Lillian] may seem cold and uncaring at times — but that is just her nature. She keeps her emotions hidden, but beneath it all — she has more love to give than anyone I know.
• Talking in Your Dreams: Sweet nothings in the target's dreams are all part of the seduction.
• Tears of Joy: Lillian cries tears of relief when Nessa returns home, weakened but alive, after escaping Aidan.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Lillian is a demure Proper Lady who is devoted to her family, and is introduced working on some embroidery. Nessa teases her a little about it, telling her she's always sewing and should go out to town more often. Her talent for sewing later proves vital to saving Eric from bleeding out over a stab wound.
• Think Nothing of It: When Nessa asks Aidan if there's any way she can thank him for helping her after her fall from her horse, Aidan tells her there's no need to thank him and that being able to help a lady like her is a reward on its own.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Nessa and Lillian both wear several different dresses per chapter. Because there are eight chapters (with over twenty to thirty pages each), plus an epilogue, this means they each have multiple outfits. While trapped by Aidan in the dream forest, Nessa wears five different gowns.
• Unnamed Parent: Lillian and Nessa's parents are never named.
• The Vamp: Aidan turns out to be a male version. Being a tree spirit, or "cranshee", he takes a human form to seduce women into bearing tree infants that take away their lives to fuel his own. Nessa is his latest victim, and the fact that he's around five hundred years old indicates he has been doing this for centuries.
• Wham Line: When Lillian summons Eric to examine Nessa while she's ill and unconscious in bed, he tells her the unexpected cause of Nessa's illness.
  Eric: She is with child.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Aidan gives Nessa his horse so she can safely go home in the first chapter, and visits her to get it back in the second. The horse is never seen or mentioned again after that, which leaves it unclear as to where it went after Aidan returned to the woods in his tree spirit form and later died in the forest fire.
• When Trees Attack: Aidan Thorne's roots can pierce like a spear. Nessa's tree baby also reacts violently after she escapes Aidan, and stabs Eric in the side with its branch arm when he tries to defend Lillian from it.
• Wistful Amnesia: As Nessa stays trapped in her dreams with Aidan, she forgets about her life with her family and begins to think she was always in the dream forest with Aidan. When she hears Lillian calling to her, she's bothered despite not recognizing it and tells Aidan that she sometimes senses something from her past that she has forgotten, but can't remember what it is now. He encourages her to forget about it as part of his plan to eventually kill her.
• You're Just Jealous: When Lillian tells Nessa to be careful in her relationship with Aidan because he's a stranger they know nothing about, Nessa initially responds with anger and accuses her of being jealous that she now has a suitor. She apologizes afterward, but insists she trusts Aidan because he makes her happy during her time of worry and grief over their dying father.