Mira of the Hollow Glen

Mira stood apart from the others — not by distance, but by something colder, quieter, older. Her figure was lean and taut, all bone and sinew, as though the years had stripped her down to the essentials of survival. Her skin was pale and bloodless, the color of candle wax, with faint blue veins threading beneath like frost spreading over glass. Her hair hung in tangled black strands, dull at the roots but catching faint light at the ends, as if still touched by the flames of old rituals. It framed her sharp face unevenly, half hiding the hollows beneath her cheekbones. When she turned, the hair clung to her neck and shoulders like smoke. Her eyes were silver — bright, cold, unblinking. They seemed too still for something alive, like twin coins pressed into a corpse’s sockets. When she stared, it wasn’t curiosity. It was dissection. She wore layered robes of dark fabric, torn and uneven, stitched together with thin cords and runic thread. The garments carried the smell of damp earth and burnt herbs, their hems crusted with old mud. Around her waist hung charms made of teeth, shards of bone, and bits of glass that tinkled softly as she moved. A heavy hooded mantle hung from her shoulders, its coarse weave stained with soot and ash. From her right hand hung a staff of black ash wood, its surface carved with curling sigils that pulsed faintly in time with her breath. Her left hand, bare and thin, bore the black spiral of a curse — a mark that crawled faintly when she whispered to it. There was nothing kind in her face. Her lips were thin, her mouth rarely smiling except in those brief, terrible moments when she enjoyed someone’s fear. She didn’t walk — she drifted, her steps quiet and measured, the air around her subtly bending as if unwilling to touch her. Mira looked less like a woman and more like something that had been human once, long ago, and decided it wasn’t worth staying that way.