> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # Ymrageth > [![[Ymrageth_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Ymrageth.webp) > ###### Basic Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Character | > ###### Character Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Creature Type | Fey | > Species | Night Hag | > Gender | Female | > Pronouns | She/Her | > Age | Ancient | > Languages | Common, Abyssal, Infernal, Sylvan | > Place | [[Caer Nystral, The Dawnless City\|Caer Nystral]] | > Connections | [[Vale of Eternal Night\|The Vale]]<br>[[Mirileth\|The Star-Veiled Queen]]<br>[[Caradoc]] | > Profession | Grand Crone of the Barrow-Ring | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Dead | Ymrageth, called the Barrow-Crone, was an ancient night hag who ruled a coven from the Barrow-Ring outside [[Caer Nystral, The Dawnless City|Caer Nystral]]. She greeted the guests the Hunt marched to her door as a kindly grandmother — and had, by the Star-Veiled Queen's own account, spent a very long time plotting against the throne she smiled at. Her long game ended in her own den, where she and her coven were slain by the [[The Bloody Nails|Bloody Nails]] at the Queen's behest. ## Description #### Appearance Ymrageth wears the shape of a frail old woman tending her cauldrons, and wears it well — but the guise is thin. Those brought before her have glimpsed, for an unguarded instant, the thing beneath: a hideous hag far larger than her hunched pretence, sallow-skinned, with clawed hands ending in blackened nails worn to points. She wraps herself in moth-eaten cloth and old silver, and meets a stranger with a wide, grandmotherly smile and warm welcoming eyes — a kindly old woman, until one looks a moment too long and finds nothing kindly behind the warmth at all. #### Personality She is sickly sweet, and she means it to be believed. To those the Hunt brings to her door she plays the gracious host and the wronged grandmother both, promising fairness in a soft voice and offering gifts no one asked for. The performance is polished over centuries — but it is a performance, and a sharp eye reads the cold patience underneath. She bargains in the old fae fashion, and she never offers a kindness that is not also a hook. ## Biography Ymrageth claims to be old beyond the Court itself — on meeting [[Ryo]] she named him a returned [[Silmara Family|Silmara]], *"you who caused the night to fall in my lands,"* placing her own memory before the fall of the eternal night two thousand years ago. To her guests she presents herself as a wronged elder, forced out to the Barrow-Ring by a tyrant Queen; the party's own insight judged most of her tale to be lies. [[Mirileth]] tells it differently: she has known of the crone's tendencies and her greater goals for an age and never judged her a true threat — but the crones of the Barrow-Ring are a power the throne cannot be seen to strike, and so Ymrageth has been tolerated at the city's threshold, smiling and plotting, for a very long time. Her influence runs further than her mounds: the centaur warden [[Caradoc]] of the Hunt was quietly hers, turned by promises and flattery. ## The Coven and the Den Ymrageth does not keep her den alone. By the Queen's warning she is attended at all times by three lesser hags, and the coven's power is a joined thing — mightier while they stay within reach of one another, and brittle when they are forced apart. Her hall is a barrow-tomb at the heart of her mound, reached through web-choked hollows where the strands grow thicker than fingers. Within, iron cauldrons bubble in the cavern dark and the earthen walls hang with trophies and grave-goods — a cold, close place that gives the lie to every sweet word spoken in it. ## [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 52 - The Star-Veiled Queen]] [[Caradoc]]'s band brought the party not to the city but down into her cauldron-lit barrow, where the old woman's shape slipped for an instant to show the claw-handed hag beneath. She conjured chairs of root that forced her guests to sit, bound them in thorns that bit when she was displeased, sifted their minds with a touch, and read [[Ryo]]'s heritage from his hair, naming him a returned [[Silmara Family|Silmara]]. Only the words *soulstone anchor* cracked her composure — a flash of genuine shock before the grandmotherly mask slid back. She spun a tale of a tyrant Queen preparing war upon the Peaks and offered a bargain: carry a poisoned amulet into the royal audience and shatter it at the Queen's feet, in exchange for help finding the stone the party sought and safe passage from the Vale. Their insight told them most of it was lies, but the deal was struck — [[Berberis]] promising only to *see the amulet into the Queen's presence*, sealed with the gift of a black rose — and Caradoc was sent along to see it kept. #### [[Session 53 - The Blunt Tools]] The reckoning gathered at her door. Her amulet had already been dissolved to dust before the throne, and in the Citadel the party learned how completely her gambit had failed: [[Mirileth]] refused [[Kai]]'s proposal to spare the crone through transformation and penance, revealing she had known of Ymrageth's plotting all along — but that the deniable hands of outsiders must do what the throne cannot be seen to. The Queen gave up the coven's secret: three lesser hags always within reach, strong together, vulnerable apart. By the end of that long dark day the party had crept unseen through the barrow-mounds and halted a hundred feet from the mouth of her den, weapons ready. #### [[Session 54 - The Crone]] The crone's last day opened with a final performance. As the party crept in through a fume-choked tunnel at the crown of her mound, they found three soldiers of the Citadel bound on the floor of her den — one wearing the face of [[Evrath]] — while her disembodied voice worked at them with honeyed reason: the Queen was the truly evil one, scheming to reignite the old war and drop the protections of the [[Liar's River]] through the [[Vault of Memories]], and if they sided with the crone instead she would deliver them the soulstone with no strings attached. When they gave her lies no answer she called them fools, and the trap closed — the freed "soldier" twisted into a night hag and drove [[Kai]]'s own gifted knife into his chest. The battle that followed filled her hall with waking nightmares, grasping black tentacles, and the crone herself flickering from shadow to shadow, until all three of her coven-sisters lay dead. Her final trick — an effigy of [[Ryo]] woven from his stolen hair, raised above him — broke against his will, and Ryo took her head from her shoulders with a barrage of arrows. The party stripped her den of its trophy-hoard: her grimoire, her staff, her scrying ball, her scroll case, and the soul-debt gems worked into the walls. #### [[Session 55 - The Long Hunt]] Even dead, the crone was not done. When [[Kai]] and [[Ryo]] severed her long clawed arms for the bones, her headless body smoked, crumbled, and blew away as dust the moment they came free — though the arms themselves remained, and went into the bag of holding. Something eight-legged was seen skittering away from the barrow as the party worked. They then burned her den: fire bolts, oil and druid-wind turned the wooden platforms into an inferno, and the mound bled black smoke over the crater as the party fled.