Shamans

Original Race: Unknown. Female.
Familiar: Unknown
Rooting: Unknown
Affiliation: Albweiss Mountain Guild / Independent
First mentioned: [B1.C15] Encountered by Yu in the Albweiss Mountain Guild
 

As of [B1.C15], the shaman resided with the guild for eight months. She is about to depart.

APPEARANCE

"The shaman’s face bore the hallmark of their kind: a smooth, pale mask, featureless except for the faintest indentations where eyes should have been. But unlike any shaman Yu had heard of, this mask was faintly translucent, like a frozen lake in the dead of winter. There was movement though, something slow and shifting that lay submerged just beneath. Shadows, that pooled in the depths where the waters still ran."   [B1.C15]

"Within the greys that were her hair and scales, it remained of the purest white, unaffected by the warmth that filled the room, as if someone had cut out a piece of the world and left it blank."   [B1.C18]

"From the mask’s edges, thin, wispy strands of grey unfurled — not quite hair, not quite smoke. They curled and drifted in the air like breath in the cold. These strands covered the shaman’s head and cascaded down the back, shifting weightlessly as if caught in an unseen current, with tips that frayed and dissipated like mist. All of the shaman’s mask and hair was coloured in white or greys, and so was their body. It was draped in thousands of layered, scale-like folds, shifting in muted hues of ash. They were not scales in the way a beast might have them. No, these seemed softer and incredibly thin, curling at the edges like millions of petals that had begun to unfold. They rippled with every motion, as if they were breathing. Yu could not tell in how far inwards these scales reached, nor see the body beneath, with all the layers.

All the shaman wore was a long, tattered cloak draped over their shoulders, woven from something that shimmered like moth wings but draped heavy, absorbing rather than reflecting the orange light of the fireplace and the orbs. The cloak covered most of the shaman’s arms, but their hands showed as they walked. Their fingers were long, tapering into fine, curved points — not quite claws, yet not meant for anything gentle either. The shaman’s feet were bare, the only part of them remotely beastlike. The layers of scales thickened at the ancles and then split subtly at the soles, like the roots of a plant seeking purchase in the stone."   [B1.C15]

When initialising her reading in [B1.C17] and taking substance from the selder in [B1.C18], the shaman's scales flattened, lost their silver-white shimmer and turned ashen instead. They are also shown to shift, for example to reveal the hidden maw that runs shoulder to shoulder along her upper body.

VOICE

"It was a voice that did not belong to sound but to sensation. It reached Yu both from outside and from within his head. It was not loud, yet carried through the entire room. It was gentle, yet he felt it in the marrow of his bones. And from there, it went straight into Yu’s ever-growing mental archive of unnatural voices.

Yu had heard witches whisper and mountains sing. He had heard rivers, buildings, and things that did not exist. This now — this was ice. Not the sharp splinter of shattering frost. Not the brittle cracking of a frozen lake in the morning sun. No. This was the moment ice began to form. That first, imperceptible shift when the river was still water, but when you pushed your wing in and then pulled back, your feathers gleamed with the tiniest shards. Where ordinary water would roll away, these fragments sank between the barbs, melting only when they touched skin. That was when you felt them, when they were already right on your skin.

The voice felt like those shards. It sounded like them. Too slim and light to be noticed at first, but lingering like an afterthought."   [B1.C15]
"They were almost perfectly cut, and almost perfectly aligned; those distorted fractures of sounds that should have long fallen apart, and yet they formed all of her almost perfect words."   [B1.C18]

THE MOUTH-MONSTER

"The orange glow of the orblight covered her tall frame into warm shadows that promised compassion, but carried none. They were deceiving, like a glimpse of sunshine might suggest comfort on the peak of a deadly glacier."   [B1.C18]

Outside on the guild platform in [B1.C17], Yu's perception of the shaman's strange beauty first shifted:

"Beneath the smoke-thick rafters and the soft lie of orblight, she had seemed adorned in frost-blossoms. Out here, beneath black dome of the Albweiss sky, that composed illusion collapsed. The silvery shimmer was still there, but it was the shimmer of blades. What cloaked her was no floral mantle but interlocking scales; the sharp-edged armour of a predator. And though Yu had no name for what she was, or had once been before turning shaman, he could feel it now, coiled in the hush that followed her.

He had not seen it before, or had not been ready to see, but he had heard it — faint, buried in her speech; a first trace of something much grander; that splintering edge in her voice, not sound but substance. But where he had heard all but the faint crackle of ice, he now recognised something strong and ancient in her. It was not in her appearance, nor in her presence alone, but in the negative space around her. He heard the quiet that contoured her form. He heard the mountain storm recognise her. She was terrifying in the way glaciers were terrifying, still and silent, hauntingly beautiful yet powerful beyond understanding."   [B1.C17]

Watching the shaman during the shamanic reading in [B1.C17], Yu for the first time sees the grand maw hidden below the scales on her upper body. It is revealed as her scales shift back; a mesmerizing process: "The soft rustle of it seemed to steal the sting from Yu’s ears. With each rise and fall of her chest, the soothing whisper swelled. His eyes filled with the rhythm of it. In its ebb and flow, the horror was hypnotic." [B1.C18] She reveals the mouth again when taking substance from the selder in [B1.C18]: "It opened without teeth, exposing layered folds of flesh that glistened with moisture and twitched like tongues. They grew inward, curling up into her throat and down into her chest."

Hearing the Vourae King demanding her to draw more essence, the shaman becomes the "harbinger of Mountain King hunger". 

THE MOUNTAIN BEAST

For an instant, Yu believes to see a grand beast hiding within her form:
"It did not stand where the shaman stood. It was where she stood. Not beside her, not looming behind, not instead of her — but inside her. It wore her. The beast was too vast to fit her body, yet it wound itself through her silhouette with unbearable elegance. Its immensity did not break her form, it bent through and inhabited it. By silence. By permanence. Its stillness mimicked her shape."   [B1.C17]
THE  
The Queen is the hidden identity within the shaman, revealed not as echo of the Vourae King HUNGER [B1.C17] but as its origin and command. What Yu had thought to be the Albweiss Mountain’s eternal voice — the tremor in caverns, the breath in storms, the current beneath all sound — is unveiled as her essence. Her presence presses beyond sound into thought, breaking Yu to his knees in awe and terror: “She was not echo but origin, not shadow but substance; the true measure of PRIDE, the living essence of POWER, and PURPOSE that underwrote any will or fate.” [B1.C18] Her presence overwhelms, commanding devotion so absolute it verges on annihilation.

ABILITIES

▪  [B1.C17] shows the shaman deflecting Imbiad's ice magic with a powerful pulse.
▪  She then conducts a shamanic reading where she extracts blood and essence from travellers through needle-like artefacts. She thereby swallows these needles.
▪  She also uses her needles on the unconscious selder's sevrants in [B1.C18], though it is not clear whether she extracted harmful substances from his body, as she claimed, or whether she took essence or blood from him. 
▪  In [B1.C18], she seems confident to treat injured travellers with potions and salves.

HER PERSPECTIVE ON THE PURPOSE OF POWER