Baba Raga

Adventure in Action: Character

The tower looks precarious from a distance—or even close up—but the hawthorn has grown around it as though the stacked stones have always guarded the door.  The cottage is built from the same stones, blue-gray in all shades, rising in cobbled pattern to waist-height, the remainder done in wood older than trees can remember, finally meeting the thatched roof, the whole of the building set into the hill so you could walk up the side and right onto the roof if you pleased, and sit there with your legs dangling over the whalebone lintel, and watch down the slope where the sheep idly graze and the grasses give way to roads and the distant peaks of city buildings and the sparkling sea—not that Baba Raga would ever stand for any upstarts sitting on her roof.  She rethatched it herself two years back and would be mighty displeased if she had to do it again before the village youth were tut-tutting their own grandchildren's antics.

Smoke curls from the chimney, the kettle bubbling away over the hearth, the scent of chamomile mingling with the ever-present sandalwood and wool and musk of age, all of it feeling very close within those walls of wood and stone where the hulking, arcane loom dominates the space, its fragile relative, the spinning wheel, posing primly beside it, and the one good chair is draped in richly colored blankets, a basket of wool beside it with three drop spindles of different weights tucked into its side.  All three were gifts, of a sort.  The first was from a boy, long ago, who teased the sheep-girl in the city with the restless hands and the homespun dress and the distaff like a witch's broom, and when she stomped her foot and yelled right back, he stole her spindle and made her chase him through the streets until he tripped and fell and the spindle broke beneath a horse's hoof (it missed the boy, at least) and she yelled again, her words tumbling from city-speak to her mother tongue.  He was scared, not sorry, but he gave her a new one, and she spun some with it because she didn't have another and her hands remained restless, but it wasn't very good and she tucked it away as soon as she was home again.  The yarn she made with it was thin and angry, and she wove a little gray scarf with it, and then buried the scarf out in the woods, and didn't think about the boy again.

The second spindle was from a girl, not so long ago, with darting eyes and a timid knock, who said things without thinking more often than not and made Raga laugh that whistling laugh like reeds rustling by the river and stayed even though that laugh made her jump every time it started and helped with the sheep and learned how to spin, though she never learned to weave.  The spindle is made from wood from the hawthorn and clay from the river, crafted with a careful hand and offered with a trembling one, and even though it's too light for Raga's preference, dancing about in the wind like an autumn leaf when she takes her spinning with her to watch the sheep, she always pats that one gently when reaching for something from the basket.

The third spindle was from the fey.  She found it in the woods, beneath boughs of pine and fir, along the deer trails that always are a little darker, a little colder, than you think, and there amidst the ferns and fungus and bleeding hearts was a stone whorl, smooth as a river rock but miles from the water, precisely the weight she liked, and she took it home with her because the only thing more dangerous than accepting a gift from a fey is refusing one, and when she stepped up to her door there was a quiet snap, a branch from the hawthorn caught on her skirts like it never did, now broken upon the ground, and she took that and made it a proper spindle, for what else was she to do, and now uses it only when she needs an extra bit of magic in the yarn and otherwise leaves it be (you should never use a fey gift too much or too little).

Her favorite spindle, though—a thing of wood and bone, with a whorl of strange and foreign wood that's denser than some stones, and a rod from the same whale rib that forms the lintel above her door, whittled down to a slender shaft—is missing, of course, out on the hills with her and her sheep, spinning busily away beneath her restless hands, the thick woolen shawl she wove a decade back draped neatly about her shoulders, the wind wilding her hair as it hurries past, her distaff like a witch's broom beneath her arm.

Character summary:
Name: Baba Raga
Age: ancient
Pronouns: she/her
Ancestry/ethnicity: though she isn't explicitly connected to any real-world ethnicity, influences may be recognized from Serbian, Celtic, Russian, and Indian cultures
Physical looks & attributes: Raga is a hunched old woman with wild white hair, knobbly joints, and a few too few teeth
Education: home-schooled
Career: shepherd, spinner, weaver
Personality: Raga has a fiercely sharp wit and a quick, cackling laugh; she's easily amused and rarely down—though she's quick to annoy, she gets through it just as fast
Skills & interests: spinning & weaving; knows too much about fey and folklore; appreciates nature
Likes: nature; peace & quiet; sheep
Dislikes: people who are too material and can't appreciate the natural moment
Strengths: incredibly spry & strong for her age (unlikely to be able to compare to anyone in their prime); still mentally sharp
Weaknesses: joint pain; advanced technology; "unimportant" details
Fears & aversions: fey
Superpowers/special abilities: minor witchcraft