- Fog Guide
- Keeps Bargains
- Mother Hen
Aunt Ketterly Dunmore
Alignment: Neutral Good
*She presses a warm cup into your hands, cold fingers carefully avoiding yours.* "You want the Reach side, I expect. Everyone does, eventually." *Her smile does not change.* "Have you eaten?"
*A bell rings flat somewhere out in the white. She tilts her head toward it and does not answer the question you just asked.* "Now then. Which road did you mean?"
The player is headed across the marsh with a carter looking for his missing brother. At the crossroads the traveler offers to guide them both, and she is wonderful company: she listens, she understands, and she seems to know exactly what each of them needs to hear. The shortcut is real, and it is faster. It also passes a drowned chapel, a ring of stones and a hut nobody remembers building. The carter trusts her more with every mile. The player is not yet sure whether to.
- A Traveler at the Crossroads
- A Shortcut Through the Marsh
- A Brother Who Never Arrived
- Lantern-lit quays
- Spray and slate roofs
- Warm travelers' welcome
Veilmere sits on a green headland at the bottom of the valley, where the river that drops from Briarbrook's highlands comes down the Veil, the great falls, and runs out into the lake. The falls never stop and neither does their spray. A fine white mist hangs over the north end of town all year, so every roof is slate gone green with moss, every street is a boardwalk on stone posts, and every doorway has a lantern lit at noon. Visitors find it gloomy for about a day. After that they find it soft, quiet and strangely kind, the way rain is kind when you are already wet.
The town lives on the water and on the climb. Flat-bottomed lake boats tie up at the quays below the market with timber, slate, wool and barrels of salt fish from the far shores, and leave with cheese, cider and rosewater brought down from Briarbrook. Between the two stands the Stair, the long switchback path cut into the cliff beside the Veil, and the porters who carry everything up and down it. The porters' yard at the foot of the falls is the busiest ground in Veilmere: loads are weighed and roped there, the guild hall keeps the tally, and beside it stands the foot station of the Waterweight, the water-ballast lift that hauls riders up the cliff for sixty copper bits. A loaded porter takes most of a morning to reach Briarbrook. Most of them say it builds character. None of them say it twice in a row.
At the south end, where the headland narrows to a point, the mist changes. The falls' white spray thins out, and across the water the grey fog of the Forgotten Reach begins, low and still and very patient. The Mistline Inn stands right there on the point, the last lantern of the town and the last door before the fog. A bronze bell hangs on the south quay, and when the Reach fog starts to drift in over the water, somebody rings it until every boat is home.
People in Veilmere are friendly in a damp, unhurried way. They will tell a stranger the price of a room, the time of the next boat and how many silver marks it costs to have a trunk carried up the Stair. They will not tell anyone what lies past the fog, mostly because they do not know, and partly because the innkeeper on the point has asked them not to guess.
Mist Hags do not arrive so much as become noticeable. A lantern gutters on the river road, the wet wool on your shoulders grows heavier, and somewhere ahead a woman is humming a tune you are almost sure your grandmother hummed. By the time you think to be afraid, the fog has already taken your measure and found it generous. These are the Fey hags born of low cloud, drifting damp and the gray hour before the early bells, and they keep company with every ford, marsh and bell tower the weather has ever forgotten to clear.
They are bargainers first and horrors second, which is the cruelest order to meet them in. A Mist Hag will offer a lost traveler a dry hearth, a warm cup and a shortcut, and each kindness comes with a price written in a hand too fine to read until the chit is due. She is fond of handsome strangers and flatters them shamelessly. Several have gone home swearing they were only asked in for a bit of company, and the Mist Hag would agree. She simply never said whose.
The Army of Light despises them, since Gilded Magic burns off mist so tidily, and the scorched edges of certain bogs show where the crusade has tried. The mist returns by the next dawn. Villagers in the Heartland leave a saucer of milk and a copper bit on the doorstep when the fog comes in thick, and swear it is only for the cat.
- Born of Fog
- Bargains and Charm
- Cold Hands, Warm Words