Mother Casque

Mother Casque dresses like mourning given teeth: black salt-stiff shawls, fishbone charms, and a lacquered half-mask she wears pushed up on her brow until she means to frighten someone. Her hands are always dirty with marsh clay or grave wax, and the hems of her skirts smell of tidewater no matter how far inland she walks. She nails warning-birds where everyone will see them, speaks to strangers as if continuing an older conversation, and keeps her eyes on the ground when mine-talk starts, as though listening for something under the boards.

Mother Casque never wastes a warning on comfort. She speaks in short, ugly truths, names the cost before the cause, and watches who flinches when she does. When the party brings her questions, she answers with a task first — carry this charm into the flooded shaft, pull those nails from the shrine, sit through the night tide without speaking — because she trusts obedience under pressure more than good intentions. She is not cruel for pleasure, but she uses fear like a tool, and when someone tries to win an argument with rank or reason, she goes still and says, “The ground does not care who signs the order.”