Shiora Rill

Race

Nymph (Alseid)

Kind

Shee-show

Title

Fairy of the Hidden Bell

Born

n/a

Died

n/a

Aliases

Shae

Shortie

Family

The Mee-Maw

The Gran-Maw

Racial characteristics

Plant magic, tree-like features, long life

Sex

Female

Height

102mm — four inches, the height of an oconee bell in flower

Weight

7.2g

Hair

White

Eyes

Green

Bound species

Oconee bell (Shortia galacifolia)

Range

Deep shade, moist forest floor, rocky slopes and stream valleys of the Holler

Season

Crowned mid-March through April; bare-headed the rest of the year

Affiliations

The Holler

The Tribute (the 33rd)

Shiora Rill is the shee-show of the Hidden Bell: a four-inch Alseid of the Holler, born in an oconee bell and bound to it for as long as it grows. She is shy, watchful, and extraordinarily comfortable with being overlooked — a diplomat by patience rather than by presence, who keeps the peace among the creatures of the crick largely by being present at conversations nobody knew she was attending.

The oconee bell was lost to the wider world for the better part of a century. People went looking; the bells stayed exactly where they were. Shae has always liked that story. Now prospectors are cutting survey lines across her mountains and blasting the tops off them, and she has volunteered for the 33rd Tribute — to walk every road, endure the Trials, and ask the Queen for the one boon that matters: that the humans be stopped before there is nothing left of the Holler to hide in.

Appearance

Four inches tall, which is to say exactly as tall as her flower.

Her cloak is an oconee bell leaf — round, glossy, dark green, crossed by pale veins that look like tiny rivers. It turns with the plant: as the cold comes on, the green goes bronze-red at the edges and then throughout.

From mid-March through April she wears the bell itself as a crown, a drooping white flower of five petals whose edges are fringed and toothed, torn-looking rather than cut. The rest of the year she goes bare-headed, and without the white flower above her face she is very nearly impossible to pick out of the leaf litter and the shade.

Personality

Shae does not regard being unnoticed as a deficiency. It is her ordinary condition and, most of the time, her preference. She has disappeared from outsiders before and sees no particular reason she could not do so again.

She is slow to speak and slower to make an entrance, which the louder half of her acquaintance finds maddening. She is not timid. There is a point past which helping becomes another kind of damage, and Shae learned where it is earlier than most.

Powers

The Hidden Bell

The cove Shae keeps is a cool, moist hollow of the Roan — shaded slopes, stream valleys, rocky banks, leaf litter, rhododendron thickets and old growth. Every layer of it has somebody in it, and Shae knows most of them.

Main article: The Hidden Bell

Her core company, by what they are for:

History

The Century of Hiding

For most of an age the outside world had no record of the oconee bell at all. Collectors came through the Roan and went away with nothing; the bells were never anywhere but where they had always been. Grandmother Stone is one of the few who remembers those years from the inside, and Shae is one of the very few patient enough to wait out an answer from her.

The Gray Dust

Main article: The Hidden Bell

It began with a seep going dry above her patch, and a drift of pale gray grit in the mud where the water should have been. Following the creek upstream, Shae was nearly eaten by Gullet, learned that the minnows were gone, and found the first of the survey stakes — bright ribbon, black numbers, a line of them running through a forest that had never recognised those boundaries.

Beneath the Mountain

The line brought her to Bront's pond, and the pond was going down. Shae went into the hole under the bank after the water and was seized almost at once by people she had not known existed: the Grindylocs, whose roads run through the inside of her mountain and are marked in cultivated weed.

The misunderstanding did not last, because both sides had come to the same disturbance from opposite ends. Veyr-of-the-Black-Run showed her the route-map cut into the passage wall, and the fresh slash somebody had added to it with gray grit still in the groove. To the miners, the mountain contains rock. To the Grindylocs it contains roads. The alliance began from necessity rather than trust, and is still mostly necessity.

The Tribute

Being hidden is only useful when the thing looking for you wants to find you. The men cutting the mountain open do not know about the bells, or the black roads under the pond, or the seep — and not knowing has not made them any less thorough.

So Shae left the Holler, which she had never had a reason to do, and put herself forward for the 33rd Tribute: three heroes, one of each Faerie race, to carry the will of the Faeries to the roots of the World Tree, and each of them owed one boon of the Queen in exchange for everything they have. She knows what the Tribute costs. She has already decided what to spend it on.

Quests Completed

The Bullfrog and the Catfish

Two first meetings on the same bad day, neither of them mediation. Gullet tried to eat her, failed, and moved straight on to conversation without visible embarrassment; Bront attempted to charge her rent for walking past his bank and could not work out why it wasn't taking. Both of them, having no idea what was wrong with the water, were the first two witnesses to say so — the grit came from up, and the minnows were gone. Shae got no dispute settled and did not try. She got the direction of the damage, and two creatures who now have a reason to care about the same thing she does.

Beware of Boggarts

An infestation of discordant Boggarts nesting in a hollowed sycamore silenced the local songbirds and threatened the harmony of the whole upper creek. Rather than force, Shae wove a grove of night-blooming honeysuckle whose numbing pollen quieted the boggarts' screeching long enough for the local Pooka choir to work an old calming heartsong. With the hollow cleared, the grateful birds have kept an aerial warning network over the Holler ever since — which is how Wrenkin came to consider himself part of it.

Experience: mastered Plant Growth

The Black Blight

A disease moved through the Holler, taking plants and animals alike. Shae traced it to a rare fungus carrying a curse older and nastier than anything that grows on its own — blight-work, deliberately seeded, and never satisfactorily accounted for. She found a way to unpick the curse and heal what was still standing. Who paid for it remains an open question in the Holler, and Shae has stopped offering her first guess out loud since learning how wrong she was about who lives under the mountain.

Experience: mastered Restoration

The Men and the Mountain

Unfinished.

Refugees came into the Holler from a nearby valley speaking of a mountain gone — destroyed, blown apart, overnight. No alliance of leprechauns and gremlins could move a mountain, certainly not that fast. Shae flew out into the unknown and found humans: dozens of them, with iron for tools and iron for machines larger than they are, drilling and blasting and hauling the stone away by the ridgeline.

She tried to raise an army out of every creature and faerie she had ever befriended, and it was not close to enough. It is the reason she is on the road at all.