> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # Mirileth > [![[Mirileth_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Mirileth.webp) > ###### Basic Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Character | > ###### Character Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Creature Type | Fey | > Species | Archfae | > Gender | Female | > Pronouns | She/Her | > Place | [[Caer Nystral, The Dawnless City\|Caer Nystral]] | > Connections | [[Vale of Eternal Night\|The Vale]]<br>[[Ellesandra Silmara]] | > Profession | Ruler of the Vale | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Alive | **Mirileth**, styled the **Star-Veiled Queen**, is the archfae who rules the [[Vale of Eternal Night]] from the Dawnless City of [[Caer Nystral, The Dawnless City|Caer Nystral]]. She has held her court and the tenuous peace on Sumara's border for two thousand years. The truth of how she came to power, long faded from all but the most careful memory, was finally spoken aloud in her own throne room — and it is stranger than any legend that survived her. ## Description #### Appearance Mirileth is visually elven, but wrong in the way that archfae tend to be wrong — too tall, too still, and her eyes do not reflect light. Her long robes shimmer at the edge of perception, shifting between midnight black, silver, and pure white as though the fabric cannot decide what it is. Those who have seen her report that she does not move the way a living body moves; she is simply elsewhere, then here. In her own throne room she has been known to manifest first as drifting mist, gathering only slowly into a towering, alien figure. The wrongness has a cause. The form she wears is not her own but a borrowed elven body, and two beings look out from behind its eyes; in moments of strain a flicker of someone else surfaces beneath the archfae's mask. #### Personality Mirileth receives even welcome guests with a glacial calm, courteous and unhurried, a host who has already decided how every conversation will end. Beneath that composure lies a single absolute terror, and around it she keeps no mercy at all: she guards the existence of the [[Soulstone Anchor]] without exception, and will kill swiftly and without warning anyone who so much as learns the Anchor is real. She is a creature of bargains, more inclined to strike a deal that serves her ends than to spend the effort of an enemy — but only ever on her own terms. [[Warden Sylvaris]] of Sumara holds a measured opinion of her: that the Star-Veiled Queen does not permit loose ends, and that anything that disappears into the Vale does so at Mirileth's sufferance. ## Biography #### Background Mirileth did not begin with a body. Long ago her spirit was severed from her flesh and that flesh destroyed by an ancient and powerful evil, leaving her a discorporate thing that wandered the forests of the Vale for ages, tormented and harried by the same entity that had unmade her. Her return to power was a bargain. Approximately two thousand years ago, in the closing days of the conflict called the Long Hunt — a sustained campaign by the Vale's riding-bands against the elves of the Shimmering Peaks — the hero [[Ellesandra Silmara]] entered the Vale alone, intent on ending a war she could not have won by force. The two met, and they made a pact: Mirileth would topple the Hunt and seize the Vale, and in return Ellesandra would give up her body for the archfae to wear. Ellesandra honoured the first half at once, returning to Sumara bearing the head of the Hunt's leader, as the public legend still records. She paid the rest some years later — her recorded death in Sumara was in truth her return to the Vale to surrender her body. Mirileth has worn that form ever since, and the two have never wholly parted: the Star-Veiled Queen is two minds in one flesh, archfae and elven hero both. It is why she reads as elven, yet wrong — and why, in moments of strain, a flicker of [[Ellesandra Silmara|Ellesandra]] still surfaces behind her eyes. A living Silmara is therefore literally kin to the body on her throne. After taking the throne, Mirileth hunted down the entity that had originally destroyed her and bound it within the [[Soulstone Anchor]] kept in the Veiled Citadel — the archdevil [[Maloreth the Patient]], a being that cannot be permanently slain and would only reform in the Hells if killed by ordinary means. The Anchor is at once her greatest prize and her deepest terror, for its prisoner is patient and waits endlessly for release. ## [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 50 - A New Morning in Sumara]] Named during Warden Sylvaris's account of the Long Hunt, as the archfae who rose to rule the Vale in the aftermath of Ellesandra's solitary intervention. Sylvaris noted that Mirileth's style would not likely have permitted the Sumaran soldier [[Asha Vayne]] to simply disappear sixty years ago without purpose — suggesting his fate may still lie somewhere within the Vale. #### [[Session 52 - The Star-Veiled Queen]] The party gained their audience in the throne room of the Veiled Citadel, where Mirileth received them as drifting mist that coalesced into a towering, alien figure, her gown shifting endlessly between black and white. She knew they were coming and welcomed them coolly — until they spoke aloud of a [[Soulstone Anchor]]. The warmth left her at once: she crossed the hall and killed [[Caradoc]] and his lieutenant where they stood, for no living thing is permitted to know that word. She raised her hand to do the same to the party, then stayed it when [[Ryo]] showed her the Silmara signet on his finger. Recognising her own descendant, she revealed herself fully — Mirileth, and also [[Ellesandra Silmara|Ellesandra]] — and told the whole history of her ascension, her bargain with the young Silmara, and the archdevil [[Maloreth the Patient|Maloreth]] sealed inside the stone the party sought. She confirmed, too, that the lost [[Asha Vayne]] yet lives within her court. Rather than kill them she proposed a bargain of her own: destroy the traitor crone [[Ymrageth]] and her coven, win her entry to the [[Vault of Memories]] through Ryo's bloodline, and travel into the Hells to end Maloreth's reforming body once the soulstone is broken — and the Anchor would be theirs. #### [[Session 53 - The Blunt Tools]] With the bargain laid out, the Queen showed the party both faces of her patronage. She refused [[Kai]]'s plea to spare [[Ymrageth]] — she had known of the crone's plotting for an age and judged it no true threat, but the politics of her court forbade her own hand being seen in the killing; outsiders would do the deed and carry the blame. In exchange she armed them well: the secret of the crone's coven of three lesser hags, an illusion cloaking them as soldiers of her own court, and chambers in the Citadel for the night. She showed smaller graces too — beckoning [[Dondar]]'s river-cursed bat to her palm and stroking the grey from its fur — and when [[Eryndor]] muttered that patrons never call back as promised, a voice at his shoulder answered *"I always will,"* though the Queen never appeared to speak. Her patience was spent by morning. Hauled before her throne after being caught mid-theft in the Court Tiers, the party watched her scrub the arrest from her own soldiers' memories with a thrown rune, then received a warning delivered without warmth: *"Do not disappoint me a second time. There will not be a second chance."* #### [[Session 54 - The Crone]] The Queen did not appear this session, but her first demand was answered in full: the party stormed [[Ymrageth]]'s barrow den and slew the crone and all three of her coven-sisters. Before the fight, the crone's disembodied voice made one last bid to turn the party against their patron — naming Mirileth the truly evil one, claiming she sought to reignite the old war and wanted into the [[Vault of Memories]] so she could drop the protections of the [[Liar's River]] and destroy [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]] from within, and promising to deliver the soulstone with no strings attached if they sided with her instead. The party gave her lies no answer, and the deniable hands the Queen had asked for did their work. - She has ruled the [[Vale of Eternal Night]] for some two thousand years, longer than most living kingdoms have existed. - The body on her throne is the elven hero [[Ellesandra Silmara]]'s own — making any living member of the Silmara line literal kin to the Star-Veiled Queen, a fact that spared the party their lives. - The thing she fears most, [[Maloreth the Patient|Maloreth]], is also the trophy she has kept closest for two millennia: prisoner and prize at once. #### [[Session 55 - The Long Hunt]] The Queen kept her side of the arrangement without appearing herself. As the party fled her realm with the Hunt on their trail, she sent the pale guard [[Asha Vayne|Evrath]] after them with seven nightmare steeds and a small, dark-haired elven girl, with orders to meet them and see them through the Wall of Night. The guard proved to be [[Asha Vayne]], waking as himself for the first time in sixty years; the girl gave her name only as Ellessa, an orphan of [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]] taken into the darkness long ago. [[Grumble, The Anniahilator|Grumble]] barred the child at the [[Liar's River]] and let her pass only after a stare-down and three games of chess, calling her *"a threat, but not"* and speaking of an agreement she knows the consequences of. The party carried her up to the gates of Sumara.