Yar Viranna

I have never seen Yar Viranna, and I intend to keep it that way. What I have are accounts, the few that survive being near her, which is not the same as surviving her. That, and a name the people who died at Murkmoor did not know to be afraid of. She is the queen of the deep cold places: the murk-sinks, the drowned pits, the sealed water under the moors where the murk pools and lies still, black and unbothered. She keeps them. She does not, in the ordinary run of things, come up.

She is the sovereign the murk wraith answer to, and she is worse than all of them, because a murk wraith at least has a shape of sorts and a question to ask you. Yar Viranna has neither. She is murk-will with nothing to hold it, and the only way a thing like that climbs toward the light is through the minds in reach. Break open a sink she is in, dig too deep, crack the seal, and she begins to climb: down the hivemind that binds the denizens together, into one mind and then the next, drowning each in her own long cold and casting for the one after when the first will not bear her weight.

Here is the part you need. If you are on the hivemind, she can take you the way she took the cutters at Murkmoor. And if you are a denizen or a jellyhead, you are on it. She reaches down the channel, rolls her cold against whatever you have left, and on the second failure you are ridden: still breathing, chest moving, nobody home, while she wears your attention like a held breath and reaches past you for the next. What she wants most is the one thing she cannot reach: a quiet, off-hivemind mind, a Netherlander's. A clean empty channel is the foothold she has been drowning for. To everyone else she is a flood. To a Netherlander she is a flood that wants to hold your hand.

She cannot be killed. I want to be plain about that, because people get ideas. No blade, no precision, no murk, no Soulprint reduces her; she has no place in which to be wounded. The most anyone has managed is to subdue her: collapse the sink and drown her back into it by main strength, sever the hivemind channel she climbs, or meet her cold with your own and drive her under. Subduing her only sends her back down to the cold she keeps. She remembers it. She remembers the mind that drove her back. The murk above a sink she has drawn from reads wrongly thin, drunk-down rather than thick, and that backwards stillness is the only warning you get. It is the measure of her thirst, not a kindness.

Field note: if the moor goes quiet and the murk reads thin where it should read deep, you are already standing over her draw. If you are on the hivemind, leave. You cannot win the cold on her own axis, and you will be ridden before you land anything. Carry iron and a lit snough torch if you must stay: iron softens her grip every round, while a torch or a murk-salt threshold buys you exactly one. And do not go looking for her to test any of this. She does not need finding. She needs only an opening.

Sign-up to see the Foked Stat blocks

Free eBooks & Games

COMING SOON

NEW

NEW

NEW