Elemental Troupers

Those who use elemental magic to entertain.

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Calushar

Type: Dancer

The calushari are a secret society of dancers in Rendru, Affaria, Campurile, Gradina, and northern Burev whose dance welcomes the spring. Their dance is the “calush”.

The secret society of the calushari is ancient, dating back before any record of history. The society is almost all men. In the villages of the region, they are gathered together by an elder who trains them and leads them. They are taught the rites of the dance, initiated into the society, and asked to swear an oath of secrecy and loyalty. They swear on the flag of their society, and they seal the oath by remaining chaste for nine days after their oath.

The dance they learn starts with one of the dancers walking forward (the plimbari), performing a basic step in a circle moving counter clockwise. Others called mishcare perform a complex set of steps in place between the walking steps. Then these dancers form special figures by uniting these movements, often in a pattern that has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. They often use clubs or staves, swords, and wooden horses as part of their dance. The clubs and swords are ornate and used for pointing and gesturing during the dance. There are many extended limbs and great leaps and jumps.

Certain dancers have a special role within the dance:

• Calareth: a minor role in which the dancer uses a wooden horse
• Lautar: the fiddlers who accompany the dance
• Mireasa: a woman chosen in some villages for her dancing skill to join the dance, if she agrees to for three years in a row; always a new bride
• Mischare: the second set of dancers
• Mutamut: a dancer who remains mute for the performance and observes, holding wood in his mouth
• Nebun: the fool who leads the dance
• Plimbari: the first dancers
• Primuldansator: the elder who leads the troupe

The dancers travel the region three weeks after the first day of spring. They go to every local community they can. They focus on the small villages and dance on the weekends.

A part of their power comes from their oath, which they make to the local spring deity, a goddess known as Înflorire. They swear to treat each other as brothers, respect the customs of the society, and remain chaste for the next nine days after their oath. If they do this, they are primed to gain magic after their first season of dancing. Upon returning home, they plant the flag, and one of them climbs it and declares, “War, dear ones, war!” Once they have completed one season, they gain special abilities:

• Dance of fertility: a dance that ensures fertility in land or people if wanted.
• Warrior’s dance: a dance that gives bonuses to the warriors of a village
• Graceful leap: a specific move that allows them to avoid attacks.
• Dispelling dance: a dance that removes fey enchantments from a place or person
• Spring fairy’s dance: a dance that brings the zane to a place.
• Renewal dance: a dance that welcomes the spring and ensures a renewal of the fields or flowers.
• Dance of blades: a dance that is invoked in battle for wounding.
• Dance of clubs: a dance that is invoked in battle for stunning.
• Dance of bells: a dance that is invoked to enhance dancing.

All calushari wear white trousers and tunics, hats with colorful streaming ribbons, and bells on their ankles.

Some calushari also dance with fairies (specifically, the zane) during their rites, calling upon Irodiada and Arada, two powerful fairy queens in the region.

The calushari are forbidden by imperial law and hunted down by them in imperial lands.

PRO +2 ATH +3 STR +2 AWA +1 WIL +1 PRS -1 STH -1 ESS +1

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Mulkis

Type: Fool

A mulkis is a fool who is imbued with the power of elemental silence. Mulkisi engage in miming and silent performance to create places of absolute natural calm, drawing people in with their art, and connecting them to something deeper.

They learn from other mulkisi the arts of miming, folly, and performance, and they learn from their community to love nature. The mulkisi work in their communities as spiritual leaders and entertainers, figures of curiosity and calm who are respected but also pitied. Many are seen as strange or broken because they do not speak and often interact in ways others do not understand, but they often have a keen insight that escapes even the most respected.

Mulkisi come from Kardis, where they seek out the darkest and quietest places in the snowy winter nights. They go there, naked, and wait for the depth of dark, cold, and silence to touch their hearts, minds, bodies, and souls as they commune with nature. If they are friends to nature, to the silence, and to the world, they will find their own inner quiet resounds with nature’s, and they will attune to it, becoming untouched by the dangers around them.

After this, they are able to draw upon elemental silence in their performances to invoke specific magicks:

• Quiet of the night: a miming performance that creates an area of dark and quiet around the mulkis.
• Unspoken art: a silent performance of theatricality that stuns everyone who sees it, rendering them speechless for an hour or more.
• Silent dance: a dance with another that has no sound, but taps into their inner rhythms, giving increased awareness to mulkis and partner.
• Nature’s solace: a miming performance that protects everyone within a certain range from industrial magic and invokes a quiet only found in rarest natural places.
• Stillness: if the mulkis remains perfectly still in darkness and cold for a day and a night, they will gain bonuses to a stat, substat, skill, or innate elemental power they chose before the ritual of stillness.

Mulkisi are discriminated against harshly in imperial lands.

PRO +1 ATH +2 STR +1 AWA +3 WIL +1 PRS +2 STH +2 ESS +1

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Snowsinger

Type: Singer

The ancient snowsingers of the polar regions, these are the wielders of the elemental magic of the cold, of ice and snow via song.

In order to wield elemental snow and ice with their voices, snowsingers must have some source of it from nature, freshly fallen snow being best. They hold this in their mouths as they sing, at least at first, in order to command the cold with their voices.

Snowsingers eventually learn how to lower their own body temperatures in order to be able to always wield the cold with their voices. They do this by a series of meditations and ice baths, followed by singing sessions and wearing heavy blankets and furs. They do this over and over again for six winters, and they will, if they are skilled and dedicated enough, have mastered their own body temperatures, allowing them to live at several degrees below normal body temperature for their species.

Because their body temperature is vital to their craft, they become weak if their temperature rises due to fever. A fever can render their powers unusable, sometimes permanently. As such, they guard against disease rigorously via diet, exercise, and preventative medicines.

The snowsinger's music is heavy on words and requires no instrumentation. The special words used are chanted rhythmically, in combination with their lower body temperatures, in order to draw forth the cold and send it where their voices land. Every time they use their music, they lose some of their body cold and must restore it later. The better a singer they are, the more efficient they are with their magic.

These are the commonest powers of their songs:

• Freezing chant: cause any object's temperature to lower by chanting at it.
• Dance of the snowflakes: control existing snow or ice via song.
• Aura of frost: give others the ability to survive lowered body temperature by singing an aura of frost around them.
• Chilling air: make the air uncomfortably, painfully cold and fill it with tiny icicles.
• Deep sounding ice: make water colder, painfully so, and create blocks of ice within it.
• Icicle melody: turn the moisture in the air into an icicle to wield as a weapon.
• Hoarfrost tune: leave a rime of frost around a target.
• Hailstorm lyric: make it hail.
• Sleet rhythm: make it sleet.
• Song of snow: make it snow.
• Icy wind wail: blasts of ferocious, icy winds.
• Split ice echo: open fissures in sheets of ice.
• Polar life calls: call or control animals, plants, or fungi that live in arctic/antarctic cold.
• Coldfire thrum: create a white flame that is cold instead of hot, that freezes to the point of "burning".
• Bloodfreeze chorus: freeze the blood in someone's body, usually killing them.
• Heartdrain dirge: drain emotions from a target.

Snowsingers working in a group, singing in deep-voiced harmony, can do much more powerful things with their songs:

• Iceberg rumble: especially useful at sea, a group of snowsingers can create, control, or call icebergs.
• Blizzard symphony: creating a blizzard.
• Thundersnow bombast: creating a thunderstorm with snow.
• Coldfire-storm thrum: creating a massive area attack of coldfire.
• Frostwall blast: a wall of freezing fog.
• Winterstorm cycle: massive blizzard.
• Snowwhirl dance: creating a tornado from icy winds.
• Elemental call: call or control ice elementals.
• Fissuring echo: open crevasses in glaciers.
• Heartfreeze dirge: completely destroy a person's emotional capacity.
• Icequake depth: cause massive ice-sheets or glaciers to rumble.
• Song of the North Wind: commune with and channel the powers of the North Wind.
• Glacial low: control or move entire fucking glaciers.
• Cryovolcanic scream: cause a cryovolcanic eruption or control an existing cryovolcano.
• Winter-dawning music: bring upon the season of winter, even if only temporarily, over an area.

Some snowsingers are a special kind called carolers, musicians whose songs bring the winter. Their powers are very similar, but more of them focus on aspects of winter beyond snow. Their powers attune to the seasons and get stronger in winter and weaker in summer, and they must perform special rites and festivals in the winter to maintain their powers.

PRO +1 ATH / STR / AWA +3 WIL +3 PRS -2 STH +1 ESS +1