Age: 37 years old

Country of Origin: Dafarzi

Current residence: Towerlot

Appearance: The Queen of Towerlot is noted for how she has aged gracefully. She does not look so different than how she looked when she was sixteen and brought to the attention of the world. In fact, she looks far better now. These days she is seen in fine royal robes and elaborate earrings from her native Dafarzi. Her skin is a beautiful, warm brown and its texture is silken, when once it had been ashen gray and malnourished. Her black, slowly graying hair is in dreadlocks, and she can not bear to have it longer than mid-back, and usually it is hidden by a veil or headscarf. Wearing a crown brings her discomfort, and so she doesn’t. Her eyes are hazel brown, and although they are lovely, they betray her age the most. They are tired and always downturned and sad, always carrying an old hurt that won’t go away.

Personality: Rapunzel is a good queen and a good mother. She is well-read and skillful at numerous crafts. But if not for her children, she knows that she would have given into despair and would have been lost forever. So she lavishes her attention on them and does all she can to make them well-rounded and happy. To almost everyone else, she can be distant, forbidding even. Sometimes she needs her space. She is a woman with a stoic veneer, and yet haunted by old phobias: locked doors, circular rooms, and anything that goes near her hair.

History: Rapunzel was born the daughter of the King of Dafarzi, but her mother was not the Queen, but the Queen’s jealous sister. She had relations with the King, became pregnant, the affair became public, and then she was exiled from the kingdom. She was shunned where she went, and called witch because of her use of Dafarzian herbs and protection charms. She went far, until she reached the kingdom of Towerlot, where finally no one had heard of her and would accept a pauper of a Dafarzian woman, trying to raise her daughter in peace. But the woman still had fear that she would be caught and ostracized again, for as she watched her daughter grow, she saw how she resembled her father and bore an air of regality. And young Rapunzel was maturing early, and it so pained her mother to see men already eyeing her. To protect her daughter, she hid her in a tower, which was once part of a monastery but had since been abandoned, and forbid her any contact with men, for they would surely ruin her life just as hers had been ruined.

But Rapunzel rebelled, and she let down her locks for a young man who caught her eye. She would later find out that he was Graemund, the crown prince of Towerlot, soon to be crowned king. He swore he would rescue her, and marry her. But before he could do so, at age sixteen, Rapunzel became pregnant. Her mother found out, caught the prince as he entered the tower, and pushed him out the window, where he fell and was blinded by bramble thorns.

Rapunzel’s mother convinced her daughter that the prince had been making her empty promises, and she took her on the long journey back to Dafarzi and told her who her father was. In a hovel a few miles from the palace, Rapunzel gave birth to her twins, and found that her mother had abandoned her, for fear of being caught. For a time, Rapunzel was dirt poor and scrambled to raise her babies by herself. These were some of the hardest years of her life. And then, when she had never expected to see him again, she saw the King of Towerlot, still blind but led by two pages, and her own father the King of Dafarzi, riding to her hovel to meet her. Graemund had traveled far and heard the stories of Rapunzel’s mother and how the King of Dafarzi had an illegitimate daughter named Rapunzel who had been whisked away. He went directly to the king to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, for he was the father of her twins. And it was done: Rapunzel became Queen of Towerlot, and once her twins came of age and her father passed, they were given rule of Dafarzi.