LORAGELLA | Level 7
The Woman With The Eye
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She was born in the high passes of the Dunrock Mountains, in a settlement so old the stones of it had grown into the roots of the trees rather than the other way around. Her people called it Veilhome: not because it was hidden, but because the mist never fully left it, even in summer. She grew up learning to read weather, track game, and sit in silence long enough that the forest forgot she was there. But where her kin found peace in stillness, she found questions. She was always looking down at the valleys below Veilhome and wondering what moved through them. Her father, Elder Mosshen, the settlement's most revered druid and the quiet architect of half its decisions, understood her better than she understood herself. He never discouraged her curiosity. He simply told her that the right door would open when she was ready to walk through it.
When she was twelve years old, she followed a wounded elk deeper into the Dunrock range than any youngling was supposed to go. She was curious (she always was) and the elk moved like it wanted her to follow. She tracked it for two days before she realized the forest had gone wrong around her. The trees were the same but the birds had stopped. The insects had stopped. Even the wind felt held. She found the elk dead at the center of a clearing where nothing grew. And something was there with it. She never clearly saw what it was (her mind won't hold the shape of it) but it looked at her, and she felt it reach. Her father's voice arrived in her head a half second later, sharp and certain: don't move, don't speak, close your eyes and think of home. She did. When she opened them she was at the treeline half a mile away with no memory of crossing the distance. She never told anyone but her father what she saw. He never told her what it was. That silence sits between them still.
Elder Bryndavel, the oldest of the settlement's council and the one who first sensed the coming imbalance decades later, looked at her strangely after that day, like someone checking a map against a landmark. She noticed. She filed it away. On her right forearm, half hidden by her bracer, is a scar that appeared the morning after the clearing: a branching mark, pale against the grey-blue of her skin, shaped less like a wound and more like frost on glass. Her father looked at it for a long time and said nothing.
When the elders finally called her to the council stone and told her something was wrong in the world beyond the mountains (wrong in a way that moved through the roots and the deep water and the old ley lines) they spoke as though delivering a verdict. She received it like a key. She had packed light, said goodbye to her father in the particular silence they share, nodded to Bryndavel, and descended the mountain before the mist had burned off the morning.
She has always felt a draw toward the outside world and has always believed there is a reason. She believes she was chosen for this. That she has a purpose to fulfill. And that what she saw in the clearing at age twelve and what the elders are sensing now are the same thing, seen from different distances.
Somewhere in the valleys below Veilhome lives a traveling herbalist named Corva Tindell who passed through the settlement three years ago and spent a week trading stories with her for plant samples. She was the first outsider Loragella ever spoke to at length, and the reason she learned that curiosity about the world could go both directions. She intends to find Corva when the road allows it. She suspects the road will not allow it for some time.
