Lena

Lena is a farmer of Elm in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"). She lives in the house beside the well and the great plane tree and works her own field. She keeps her sheep for milk but would sell them at a fair price. She has lost her husband, without saying how, and has two children, a boy and a girl.¹²³

The visit about the sheep

Max learned her name from Liam and came to her field on the pretext of buying sheep. She talked with him about the flock and her children, and asked him to come to her house two hours later, as she was busy. When he asked about her daughter, saying he wanted to buy her a toy, she grew uneasy and said she knew of no toy-seller in the village. Meanwhile the companions chose not to open the box until they had spoken to her.⁴⁵

At the meeting Liam was in the house, helping her settle a price, while the children played at the door. Bold sensed movement in the bushes, and Max brought the children in as though their mother had called them. Then words of magic were heard outside, and Lena, Liam and both children fell asleep; only Jonathan River and Max stayed awake, and a stranger appeared at the back door.⁶⁷

The box under the bed

The stranger, Zarama, said that he had searched her house in secret and taken her for an old witch working magic without papers, because of the old magical things he found there, though he had never seen her cast a spell and did not think her the cause of what was happening. The box that Jonathan had taken from under her bed held only hand-written notes on simple rituals, such as sensing magic and bringing sleep, learned by ear or by nature, with dust and bone in place of a focus. Jonathan judged them as simple as what children learn in theory at the Archon, and far from able to cause the village's strangeness.⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹

The evening at the waterfall

That evening she refused, without giving a reason, to let her two children go to the waterfall, and kept them inside. Seeing this, Jonathan turned away from the idea that she was knowingly sending her daughter to her fate. When she sat away from the hearth, he put her to sleep in secret, and the children, finding their mother asleep, slipped out to join their friends.¹²¹³

Spoiler: Elm's fateRevealSpoils: Zincirsiz #26 · Say what you have read

When the companions returned to Elm much later, the village had been emptied and lay rotted as though it had stood under water, and some of the dead found there had drowned. Lena was not among those recognised, and there were fewer bodies than there had been villagers; her fate is not known.¹⁴