Fauna

Fauna is a native guide of Canarque in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). A twenty-two-year-old woman of the Inran, she often leads the hunters of Aquila's Yaban Gezer guild along the roads and hunting grounds around the city, and she joins a band of adventurers working for the Coalition of Enlightenment.¹²³

Family and people

Fauna belongs to a tribe she calls the Lobolar. Her mother is a healer known in the tribe, who also keeps certain sacred objects bound up with the tribe's own history; her brother is Karom Lobo. A relative of hers among a community called Argol keeps an Alaztaşı, the Fire Stone, in their house.⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸

Her faith is that of her people: a sacred tree of her culture, whose name means something like grace, is tied to an almost single-god belief in the Amber Light. When the tree dies it turns hard and almost indestructible, and rare healing herbs always grow at its foot. She once learned from an old Inran that the Geroni city-states were long ago united under a shared faith before turning to reason and setting their gods aside.⁹¹⁰¹¹

From her people she knows that the Geroni trade with the tribes but let no one who is not Geroni into their cities, and that tribespeople they take are sometimes released unharmed while others never come back.¹²¹³

Gifts

Fauna changes into animals. She has been seen as a deer, a great bear, a horse, a dog-sized animal, an ape, an ordinary cat and a giant hyena, and once as a man-high creature with small arms and a long tail that she had seen on the continent, one of the rare beasts that people of the Empire liken to big chickens. When she becomes a deer a green light shows, and the deer carries a brand-like mark at the neck and small green spots at the base of its hooves and antlers.^1415161718

After a short trance she came to have a cat's eyes. Changes that grow on the body of one like her as her power deepens stay with her in animal form too, unless she means to hide them, so her cat's eyes showed even when she was an ape. Coming back from an animal shape takes rest and focus, and when a blow broke one of her shapes, earth rather than blood spilled from the wound.^19202122

She speaks with animals and plants, touching a dog's brow to understand it or questioning badgers along a trail. By pressing earth in her hands and speaking words of power, or by asking the powers of her homeland to hide her friends, she makes branches, wind and leaves cover their passing and their tracks; this is cooperation with nature, not mastery of it.^23242526

A hawk named Kuzgun goes with her. In Aquila she later trained a young dog, Hobo, together with a rat named Remy, and had a pocketed collar made so that the rat could ride on the dog.^27282930

The fox-handled sickle

Travis gave her a sickle with a fox-shaped handle and a dark, stone-like curved blade, in which nature magic can be felt; he called it the heirloom of an old druid from the Empire's lands on the mainland. Its secrets are said to open when certain rare plants are gathered in the right order. One is the Moon Lady, a white flower that blooms in the light of the full moon on a hill where a lone traveller died. When Fauna picked it, a flower sign formed on the sickle's grip and the blade grew stronger.^3132333435

With the Coalition's band

Fauna first joined Miro's errand to the Alaztaşı mine as a guide, complaining of the city's noise. She warned hunters which local grounds must not be entered and not to hunt young gazelles, and at the mine she said that entering without leave was not a matter for her alone, as she had relationships to answer for.³⁶³⁷³⁸

In the mine the dying mother of the Darkness panther cubs pushed her young towards Fauna. Fauna took the living cubs to her people's contacts, with a young native guide who led her to his family's fishing camp, and later left them with someone she trusted.^39404142

The tribe's object

The professor who led the Coalition's work asked for an object that people of Fauna's tribe had found, and offered in return to work towards having the tribe's hunting grounds declared a research area. Fauna did not know what the object was, but since it was to come from her own tribe she agreed to take part.^43444546

The band camped in the hollow of a great tree she had used before. On the second night her brother came with wounded tribesmen and a heavy chest wrapped in hide. He told her that their father had brought the object to the tribe on the night of the red moon and that their mother had objected; as he embraced her he slipped her something that the others saw but could not make out.^4748495051

Spoiler: After the fightGösterAçık ettiği: Yeni Dünya #3.5; Yeni Dünya #4 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

In the fight that followed, Saga fell. Since no one knew Saga's faith, Fauna led a rite like a local funeral beside one of the sacred stones or totems on the old roads that she knew: the body was burned and the ashes buried in a bundle with flowers.⁵²⁵³⁵⁴

The professor later said that he had found the object underground in her family's hunting grounds and that her parents had agreed to help him after talking it over. Worried for her family, Fauna left in the shape of a dog-sized animal and came back to the city about a week and a half later, her family unharmed.^55565758

Her father told her the object had been found on a Geroni who had met with an accident; the family were on good terms with the Coalition because it gave free medicine to the children of nearby tribes, and they did not want trouble with the Geroni. They had kept it for about a year. She shared these things with her companions.^5960616263

Vaults and ruins

In a garden of thorny hedges that moved like a maze, she sensed the plants bark and growl at her touch; when she asked them to be calm, they settled and let the band through. In a flooded vault she held back the rising water for a while with a wall of wind, and when a lion statue was shattered she alone felt a sourceless wind whirl and leave the room. In a Geroni ruin she read aloud a last note pitying those who cast their gods aside for the sake of progress, and for a moment she alone heard the distant sounds of a living city. She took a native-style gold-worked neckpiece and a carved wooden wand from one vault.^6465666768

When she heard of the curse said to be poisoning Aquila's governor, which turns skin and organs to wood, she knew it from legends and stories, and as far as she knew no Inran living in this age should have the power to cast it.⁶⁹⁷⁰

Among the Geroni

Among the Geroni she refused to present her people as allies of the Empire, saying she could not make so large a promise for her tribe. Speaking in the Geroni tongue, she said that she had never seen the Empire's mainland and knew only Aquila, with which her people trade for what each needs, and that they would look for ways to survive without being crushed between the two sides.⁷¹⁷²⁷³

She later suggested reaching, through her tribe, the Inran healer who had attended the governor when he first fell ill.⁷⁴

In Aquila

Back in the city, Fauna questioned a clinic's dog by magic, which described a bald, cloaked man with a small scar under the chin as the one who took a painting. She asked her hunter acquaintances near the Wheat Gate for news, and went with Finli to the high judge's house, where they gave Professor Galevan as their common friend.^23757677

A note said to come from an employer spoke of being born of a war god and of carrying horrors that were not one's own; Fauna came to understand it as choosing the war god's path and holding a key that could release dreadful things beyond control, but she kept the reading to herself.⁷⁸⁷⁹

The northern road

For a journey north she reminded Ragor, a hunter of the Yaban Gezer whom she had once helped by striking a bargain with the forest's snakes, of the favour, and borrowed horses from him. On the road she scouted a fishing settlement as an ordinary cat, and healed a wounded mage without laying hands on the wound.^80818283

In an ambush by magical Geroni hounds she unravelled the magic holding two of them together, so that their eye-stones cracked and their bodies collapsed. A heavy sword blow tore the muscles of one of her arms, and she fought on as a giant hyena and then as a grizzly bear.^8485861687

When thick smoke rose from one or two nearby Inran settlements, she left her companions at once to find out what had happened, out of duty to her people.⁸⁸

Spoiler: Later eventsGösterAçık ettiği: Yeni Dünya #27 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Fauna was next found with Finli, Bruno and Sticks in a shared dream of a quiet village, where she had a plain wooden cabin in the forest, tended the townsfolk's animals and seemed to have brought them better harvests. When the dream broke, the others saw a diseased tree where she had been, and the four woke together in a laboratory.^89909192

Asked her greatest fear, Fauna named her tribe being drawn into these events.⁹³