SHR Main Page | Opera Propria | Gifts from the Moon Introduction
This title contains an archaic translation. The mountain referred to here is clearly Sasslong.
A Princess who lived in the castle of Sass-Leng, was looking into her garden one morning when she saw a falcon circling one of the bushes. She thought that some small creature must be cowering there and so scared the falcon away. Looking into the bush, she saw a trembling nightingale. It spoke to her and said, "Since you have saved me, I will give you a magical power. You may become a nightingale when you wish. You will lose this power with someone's death."
The Princess did not entirely believe the bird, but the next evening she decided to test its promise. She went out into the garden and wished to be a nightingale. Finding herself transformed, the Princess flew about the garden, and discovered that her voice was transformed into the most beautiful music she had ever heard. When she was tired, she simply landed and thought that she wanted to be human again, and she was. On following days the Princess traveled far about the Alps, investigating distant places.
She discovered that she could understand the speech of birds. One day, when a flock of ravens approached, she hid in some bushes and listened while they gossiped. They spoke of a fine hunter who lived in a half-ruined castle in Gröden Gorge, who knew nothing of the outside world and had never seen a woman. Her curiosity was piqued; she decided to visit the hunter.
The man was as the crows described: a handsome knight dedicated to physical sports like hunting with his pair of dogs. The Princess enjoyed watching him but was too shy to approach. One day, while she watched him, she sang. This attracted the man's attention and he searched for the bush from which her beautiful song came. She ceased, and he begged her to continue. She began to sing again, and thereafter she always sang while she visited the man. At each visit he sat enraptured, listening to her.
The man, however, felt a deepening depression and consulted a wise old Salvan who lived in a cave nearby. The Salvan told him that "a child of the forest" could not possibly be ill, but the knight persisted. The Salvan went into his cave and returned with a crystal, which he told the hunter to stare into deeply. The Salvan then did the same.
"Ah, you are in love. You are under the power of a maiden!" said the Salvan. The hunter pointed out that he had never actually seen a maiden, and the Salvan replied that even so, his illness was the fault of a woman and unfixable. The hunter left, doubting his diagnosis, but the Salvan said that there was nothing he could do to help.
When the nightingale returned, the hunter had a flash of insight and said to her, angrily, "The Salvan was right! You are a woman!" The Princess was frightened and fled despite the knight's pleas for her to return. He waited for many days, sitting on the battlements of his fortress, hoping the nightingale would return.
The Princess continued her explorations. On one trip, as she returned home, she was attacked by a falcon. Hiding under the bush in her garden where she met the original nightingale, she met a lamb and complained to it about the falcon's behavior. "Who are you to judge the falcon," asked the lamb, "when you have caused a death yourself?" The Princess asked whom the lamb thought she had killed, and it replied that she should seek out the hunter she once visited.
Dread rising in her with every mile, she flew to the hunter's castle. She found him in the courtyard of his castle, beneath the tower from which he had listened to her sing. His dogs whimpered about his lifeless body. Filled with remorse, she fled home.
When she wished to become human again, nothing happened. She remembered the nightingale's warning that a death would remove her power. Unable to resume her human life, she lives still in the forests of the Alps, and when people hear the beautiful song of the nightingale, they know it is the Princess of Sass-Leng.
The nightingale in this folk story is an extra-ordinary animal. It is unable to defend itself from a falcon, yet it is able to talk to humans and grant them a magical power. Its gift is made dangerous by an almost prescient ambiguity. The nightingale and the lamb - which the Princess can talk with, despite only having the power to talk to birds - may be the same creature. The motive for the gift may expose the nature of the bird.
Some suggestions for the motive of the nightingale are that:
The Princess now takes the form of a nightingale and has the ability to talk to birds and the lamb. She is apparently immortal, and so may have become a faerie. The exact nature of her curse should be tailored to your saga, but her statistics are those of a small, inoffensive bird.
The Salvan is a dwarf who lives in a cave; indeed, "salvan" means "cave dweller." Those visiting the Salvan do not enter the cave; it goes inside to fetch whatever object it needs for its purposes. Its diagnostic use of a crystal is interesting for two reasons. The Salvan's power is not used directly upon the knight, but must flow through an intermediate object, which might be, in the Hermetic sense, a charm, magic item, or casting tool. The Salvan's method of using the crystal is for the man to stare into it, then for the Salvan to read the crystal. This implies that the crystal in some way records information that allows the Salvan to make its diagnosis.
It is noteworthy that the Salvan says it can do nothing about the man's love. It cannot identify the girl, give the man hope about his wooing of her, or allow him to forget his love. The Salvan does not say whether this is because it lacks a broad range of mystical abilities, or because there is something special about love that makes it inviolable.
The Transform virtue can be used to represent the Princess' ability to change shape. Transformation occurs at the whim of the virtuous character, without a dice roll. It takes a combat phase, and unlike the Bjornaer ability the change includes basic clothing. While in nightingale form, the Princess can understand the speech of birds. She can fly and sing excellently from the moment of her first transformation. The Princess is under a Conditional Curse, which reduces the cost of this package to +1.
At the discretion of the storyguide, characters with the Ways of the Woods virtue may choose to be a Child of the Forest. This prevents them from suffering the effects of illness so long as the forest about them remains well, and they retain their link by participating regularly in activities that bring them into the green realm. Children of the Forest develop illnesses when their forests are harmed, although they lack the ability to interpret their symptoms. For example, a child of the forest has no immediate method of discovering that their hacking cough is due to the poison of a magical serpent that has made a lair in the bank of a forest pool.
An alternative Children of the Forest virtue may be designed using the genius locus rules in Sanctuary of Ice.
Both of these fortresses are lost to history.
Sass-leng's garden may be an unusual place - it is there that all the major works of magic described in the folktale occur. Sass-leng may be a place that awakens the heartbeast, similar to the Covenant of a Thousand Caves in the Novgorod Tribunal. The Princess originally fled Sass-leng, but she, or her descendants, might have returned there, to build their nests in their ancestral home.
Gröden is a simple ruined fortress in a ravine in the middle of a wilderness. It may be haunted by the knight or by his faithful dogs. It would make a good place to set a saga where the storyguide wants just a pinch of Alpine folklore to flavor an otherwise original creation.
The Cave of the Salvan may contain items of interest to Hermetic magi, but the story provides no further guidance with regard to its contents. Its inhabitant is particularly wily, even for a Salvan.
Quartz is found in crystalline form in the Alps, so it is useful to assume that the crystal the Salvan used when examining the mind of the knight is composed of it. Clear quartz acts as a magnifying glass and, by extension, as an aid to magical vision.
The most powerful stones are the natural globes found occasionally. Quartz is sufficiently powerful that even folk-practitioners know that a ball ground from crystalline quartz is of great use in divination. Presumably intact crystals are more useful than balls, because otherwise the Salvan would have ground his crystal down. Balls are, therefore, made from imperfect crystals. The size of a crystal or ball seems to influence its ease of use, but even tiny quartzes can be used for divination. Smaller stones must be held closer to the eye, which is less fiddly and inconvenient for salvans than for humans (who are hampered by their greater size).
Crystal balls created with vis are treated as if they were ground from crystals, not as natural balls. Similarly, Hermetically created asterisms do not provide magical bonuses. Few Hermetic magi can explain this, although the Pillar of Hiram has some interesting theories about the role of formative influences on the magical powers of crystals that they claim explains this effect. Certain mystae have rituals that allow stones to become more virtuous and these allow some manufactured stones to become as useful as natural materials. The human-sized crystals used as the foci for rituals in some of these sects, and by certain - gauche - Hermetic diviners are created using this process.
Quartz is found in a wide variety of colors and shapes, and each of these has slightly different powers. The bonuses listed below do not stack with each other unless explicitly stated.
ClearNatural ball: +5 Intellego
Crystal: +3 invisibility, +3 divination (including seeing through illusions as noted in WGRE), +1 ice, +1 Intellego
Ground ball: +3 divination
Broken crystal or worked stone other than ball: +5 invisibility (as in ArM4), +1 divination, +1 ice
Crystal with inclusions: +5 ice
Non-crystalline: +1 ice, +1 invisibility
RoseNatural ball: +9 divination of emotions, +3 Intellego
Crystal: +6 divination of emotions, +3 gentle healing (does not include Chirurgy, for example), +3 feelings of love
Worked stone displaying asterism: +6 divination of emotions, +5 discovering love, +2 feelings of love, +2 gentle healing
Broken crystal, worked stone (usually bead or cabochon): +3 divination of emotions, +1 feelings of love, +1 gentle healing
Crystal with inclusions: +3 barriers to love
Non-crystalline: +1 gentle healing, +1 feelings of love
SmokyNatural ball: +9 divination via necromancy or diabolism, +2 Intellego
Crystal: +6 divination via necromancy or diabolism, +3 obscuration, +1 Intellego
Broken crystal, worked stone (usually really big solitaire): +3 divination via necromancy, +2 obscuration
Non-crystalline: +1 divination via necromancy, +1 obscuration
OthersWhite rough: +3 ice
Rutilated quartz: Added +3 to highest divination bonus, provided that this does not raise it above 9, except cat's eye quartz (a variant of rutilated quartz), which gives +3 to Curses
Aventurine quartz is too varied to deal with here. Amethyst and citrine are also quartzes, but have such complicated mythologies that they will not be dealt with here. Ametrine is so rare in Europe as to not merit discussion, although it should merit Hermetic awe.
Hermetic magi might consider the use of a crystal ball as an enchanted prosthetic eye. Quendalon, a pivotal figure in the history of House Merinita, had his eyes replaced with enchanted gemstones, so Hermetic magi understand the concept. Mundane artificial eyes in the thirteenth century are not worn inside the eye socket - they are painted clay replicas worn like an eye patch - and magi with crystal eyes may alarm even well-educated mundane people.
A crystal eye is a small, ground crystal ball, but it is where an eye is, doing what an eye does, which grants it extra power, particularly if it is paired with another crystal eye. In the few remaining magical traditions based on avatism - magical competence based on ritual roles, described in Sanctuary of Ice - props like these are particularly powerful, tremendously so if they have been borne since the foundation of the tradition. Paired eyes add +3 to all bonuses if of matched color. A pair of eyes may be enchanted as two tiny items, or as one small item. If enchanted as a single item, the destruction of one eye renders the other useless.
Text copyright © Timothy Ferguson 2004.