Mira of the Crow’s Eye
“You have not the faintest idea what I have seen which you never will.Theme : Lake of Tears - SolitudeKin: An old tribe to the northeast.
Magic: Mira’s magic is based on the communication with things that no usual person can. The dead, spirits of nature, and animals. She does not communicate with them in the way humans speak with each other, rather, they speak in more abstract ways, Mira can simply ask them questions of course, but it is not as easy for something in the next world. If it is a dead spirit, it may come in the form of signs pertaining to her question, or a change in the wind. Animals could communicate in more conventional ways, a dog barking, a raven cawing. If something can understand Mira, then she can understand it. Mira commonly refers to all things she communes with collectively as “Seeing Kin,” to refer to the fact that most of them regard her with familiarity, perhaps because it isn’t every day when the dead can speak to the living. The Seeing Kin have taught Mira many things over the years, such has different herbs and their uses, as well as little known wisdoms of the world, and the skill to read a person’s intentions. They don’t share everything, and sometimes they hesitate to even interact with Mira, but she is rarely ever alone, even in her travels across the land. Mira can also see into the heart of a person to see their true intentions with little more than a few moments of their presence.
You can’t lie to the dead.
Age: late 40.
Appearance : Mira’s age shows on her body, her skin is tanned from years of wandering in the day, and she has tough skin on her hands. Cold blue eyes and long, unkempt hair black as night make it clear that she’s used to being outside. Standing at roughly 5’8” and sometimes looking like she just walked through a jungle doesn’t change the fact that she’s quite physically healthy from all the walking, you can’t see much it with the big, ashen black leather cloak that has kept her warm on many cold nights. Along her arms are a number of faded scars from various things such as deep-cutting thorns or bite marks from ill mannered dogs. Ironically, she has a crows feet or two around her eyes as well.
Personality: A quiet and distanced woman with a knack for observing things before so much as opening her mouth, Mira has a sagely atmosphere around her that gives away the fact that she’s no from around here. When you get to know Mira, she’s quite a seemingly normal person, she’s relaxed and very independent, refusing to let people push her around. Mira cares little for political dealings with lands and allegiances, it’s none of her concern what the North thinks of the East, or what the leaders of the North expect her to do as a person living here, even if she doesn’t. Mira can best be described as out of place wherever she goes. She doesn’t talk the same way as others, she doesn’t act like others, or anything like that.
Skills:
Crow Calling - Mira is quite good at mimicking noises made by crows and ravens, it makes it easy for her to speak with them. This isn’t very helpful outside of using Seerism, unless a murder of crows follows her and does what crows do.
Survival and Herbcraft - There are quite a few things that Mira can do with plants for the benefits of others, such as throw together some medicine from the forest, or put someone to sleep at night when they have a fever with the right leaves. This has helped her stay fed on occasion, but it mostly helps her trade for food until she gets to the next town, or scavenge for edible plants on the way. Her forest knowledge doesn’t end there. Growing up in a tribe, she learned to make and tend to fires, as well as cook an animal. She doesn’t have any method of killing one, unless she sneaks up on a rabbit and stabs it, but she can get by all the same on her own.
Traveling - Everything from keeping directions to making accurate maps of the land. Mira has done a lot of waking over the years, so it’s come in handy on numerous occasions to keep track of her direction, especially when the Seeing Kim won’t help.
Staff - Mira’s old, sturdy walking stick has helped her fend off many wild animals and arrogant robbers on the roads and in the woods, she can’t swing it like a maniac, she’s not a ninja, but she is no stranger to clobbering someone over the head for pulling in knife of her.
Fears:
Her biggest fear is the unknown. Mira has learned a lot from her magic, but something she ponders often is what she
hasn’t yet learned. Considering some of the strange things they’ve told her about things out of her reach, what are the chances that there are things more world-shattering than she could hope to know? Perhaps they’ll tell her when the time is right. Perhaps.
Likes: Crows, forests, traveling, worldly knowledge.
Equiptment:
A leather cloak stained black with ash gifted to her by an old tribe of people she was with when she learned to understand her magic. Decorated with the shapes the moon takes. She smells like burning wood when she wears this.
A large leather satchel with multiple things inside including:
* A waterskin
* A knife
* A rather shiny rock that Mira uses as a looking glass, for specific discussions with the spirits
A tall wooden staff, with a gnarled head that stands eye level with Mira. It has been carved meticulously over a long period of time.
Biography: A very long time ago, Mira lived far from Norn, in a tribe of loosely connected people to the northwesternled by a few elders. The weather was quite cold, but it never snowed terribly. There were always whispers in Mira’s head, but the people of the tribe merely dismissed it as a little girl having imaginary friends. Everyone in the tribe pulled their own weight one way or another, they made bows or they fired bows. They gathered food or they prepared food. Living wasn’t exactly hard for the 50 to 60 people in the tribe, but they could afford to be complacent. When it came time, Mira was deemed old enough to help with the work, they told her “No more imagination, it’s time to help out.” Of course, that all changed when Mira was 13, and told one of the hunters that if he went out there, he’d die from a wolf. She begged him to stay, telling him that a big wolf would sneak up on him and eat him, this wasn’t like her at all, but the hunter assured her he’d be on the look out and keep looking behind him. Sure enough, he barely caught the wolf before it bit into him, he had just enough time to stop it, and he brought home more than a deer to eat.
The hunter thanked Mira, seeing as he really was saved by her foresight, but this kind of thing happened more and more as Mira got a little older, and the tribe finally realized she was some kind of seer. This worried them greatly. The voices in her head were real. The elders took her into privacy to ask about what she was doing. She told them she was listening to what the voices said, but mostly what she crows told her. Crows? Talking to a human? Unimaginable. The thing that really bothered the elders was the fact that some of the things she contacted weren’t crows, or even alive. They frowned upon this, and demanded she refrain from using her gift on the dead, but Mira told them she couldn’t stop the dead. They spoke to her when they wanted, it wasn’t up to her. The elders reluctantly let this slide after much consideration, believing that Mira was not trying to hurt anyone’s wellbeing, and this the spirits who move in from this world wanted to share wisdom with a little girl, so be it.
Mira was at the age where she could have gotten married, and some of the older women occasionally liked to needle her about it. The tribe wasn’t in any kind of condition where they needed everyone to reproduce for numbers, but her people believed she should think about those things. Of course, being touched by the dead put some people off, who wants to marry a crazy girl that talks to the ghost of her husband’s ornery mother? She never did settle down for a family, not out of rebellious tendencies, simply because she never found anyone for that. Mira’s place in the tribe would become a more distanced one, though a very helpful one for them, when they came to respect what she did.
Mira’s elders thoroughly advised her to take preference with crows over the dead, wherever she could. “Let the dead rest as they please, and let the foul birds do their part.” She understood what they were trying to tell her, after all, she didn’t feel terribly easy about dead voices in her head. This girl, who was only 15 at the time was aptly given a nickname in the tribe as a sign of her gift among her people. Mira of the Crow’s Eye. She began helping the tribe in her own unique way, divining the events to come. One older person in the tribe taught her how to actually call the crows, since they rarely came to her, that way she could use her gift more. Crows became her most common method of magic, and at her tent, there would often be several crows sitting on the ground or perched outside, cawing at people who approached. It was quite funny to see little children get scared by them. The tribe began to understand her a lot more, and while some people definitely feared her magic, only out of a lack of understanding, they slowly realized it was just a tool for her to help them survive, and they’d take what they could get. There would always be a few people who felt uneasy around Mira, maybe because of her crows she conspired with, or her strange gift itself, but everyone agreed that there were a lot less accidents in the tribe when Mira started hearing things.
This went on until Mira was in her 20s, the seeing kin, as she learned to call them, had given her visions of things throughout the world that she could see if she left this tribe. She lived in her own tent, and contemplated things that they told her, she did that often, and the tribesmen trusted her to tell them if it was important, that’s why she told them that there were things she needed to take a walk for. Mira told the elders about what she had seen, far away from the tribe. The tribe had grown beyond the old days, but the elders were still hesitant. They feared what would happen without Mira’s gifts, but Mira was her own woman, she had friends with her wherever she went that would only accompany her and her alone. The elder told her, “Go if you must, stay if you must. What your crows tell you is not for us to understand. If this is the last time we ever see you, know this. Though some still fear your gift, we will always be grateful for all you have done for us, Mira of the Crow’s Eye.” Mira heeded the words of the spirits, and set out to wander the world, recording everything she saw.
That was two decades ago, and now she is arriving in the village of Norn, an educated, seasoned wanderer who has seen more than most see in their lives, other seers, druids, magical healers, and much more. She can’t say whether these people will trust her, but she will find out. If this is the end of her life, so be it, but she likes to think her path has just begun. She never left the snowy lands of the north in her travels, but she has still seen quite a bit.
