Fir

You're lost.
You're lost, and you're cold, the icy wind ripping mercilessly at your hands, your face, clawing its way under your clothes. You can't feel your feet, haven't for the last half-hour, and you knees hurt and your hands burn and your joints all ache and groan. There's ice on your eyelashes, clinging to your hair, frosting the edge of your clothes. The snow reaches up to your thighs and every step is a monumental effort. You're lost, disoriented, freezing, hurting, scared, your fingers are turning a worrying shade of purple and you have no idea where you are, which way is home.

You're lost, and cold, and tired, and your head is fuzzy and your tears froze on your face, and you think, maybe, maybe you will rest. Maybe you will sit, just a minute, just shortly, close your eyes against the howling wind. Just- sit, in the middle of endless freezing white, see if your knees stop hurting so bad, tuck your hands under them and your face over them, roll up against the weather. Just a minute, a quick break before you keep fighting to get home, just a second…

Just

j u s t

. . .

Later, much later, when you're sitting in Eiche's house with a cup of grog cradled in your bandaged, frostbitten fingers, wrapped up in a blanket near the fire, you'll try to remember. Remember how you battled the wind and the snow and the harsh, unforgiving cold. Remember how you tried to find a way through the mountains, how you only got more and more lost, how you grew desperate and how you called for help. Remember how no one came, how no one could hear you in the cold and dark, over the howling wind. Remember how you thought you'd sit down, just for a bit, just for a second, just to catch your breath…
Remember, vaguely, a dark, winged shape helping you up, up, out, when you wanted to do nothing but sleep. Remember following a brightly glowing green light, and you're sure it was real even though Eiche insists you must've dreamed it up, delirious. Remember getting back. Being guided back.

You can't remember why you went out into the snowstorm in the first place, though.

Fir is some kind of low-ranking fae from the Court of Winter, and mostly shrouded in mystery. She finds people who are lost in snowstorms, and guides them back to safety… sometimes. But people die, too, lost in the snow, miles away from where they should have been, and no one is quite sure how they strayed that far from the path. That, and even those who return rarely know why they went out into the storm in the first place, their memories patchy at best, confused and dazed by hypothermia. They come back changed, somehow, with a strange fascination for snowstorms and blizzards where they should have a healthy fear of them.
So she brings people back… sometimes. And sometimes she doesn't, and it is not at all clear what the deciding factor is. She's a guide, for sure, but not one you should trust, and probably not one you should bargain with, half-mad from the biting cold and the freezing, mercyless wind.

Fir's appearance is wildly variable, and I encourage people to run with her design. Here are some general guidelines, but you don't have to follow all of these exactly.

• She's fae and moth-like, but can be more or less humanoid.
• Hides her shape in huge, tattered cloak that looks like a pair of moth wings.
• Carries a lantern.
• Cross (+) shaped pupils, when visible.