Runeweaver

A Runeweaver is one of the Wanderers. Its core is long released, and a heart demon holds the empty place. It comes out of the Mist each Turning and works for whoever pays. Its kind serves in Bloom, the affinity of growth and living ground that Virenna, the Greenmother holds.

It strikes with magic from a distance. It is easily wounded, but it grows stronger the longer it serves. In time, before each battle, it cuts a rune into one of its employer's companies, selected by chance, and that company strikes truer and harder. Later it helps the kingdom's artisans turn up more works. The card shows what each stage adds.

Guild artisans make lesser works during the Turning, using the method of Tellan, the Keeper of Tallies. Those works hold no Core. Now and then the same guild work brings up a relic. Runeweavers say a rune is only a lesser work cut into a blade instead of a bottle, and that artisans who watch one being cut learn the method faster.

They also make a claim nobody can check. The Greenmother's Ox was made by a Bloom artisan, who bound an old shard into an ox built to tend fields, and no one knows who that artisan was. The runeweavers count the Ox's maker as one of their own.

It costs geld and mana to keep, more as it grows, and it leaves when the pay stops.

Those of its kind say the demon wants to write itself into a made thing, to be carried instead of carrying. Whether a runeweaver can be freed that way, or any way, is not known.

Player-visible facts