Jevirelle

Jevirelle is an important character in Elyrian folklore (HOLD for specific tribe / religion?). She is main character of the story 'The Marsh Mother'. This story is provided below in its entirety.

The Marsh Mother
Ref.: Click here to show the full story. On the shore of the Evenmere, there was once a prosperous village of fisherfolk. Jevirelle, though an outsider from afar, had joined the village as the new wife of a fisherman and was welcomed into the community. Sadly, Jevirelle had lost her husband to the surrounding marsh and its hazards within a few short years of joining the village, and before she and her husband had started a family of their own. She suddenly found herself alone in the grand house at the village’s edge that she and her husband had built. In the autumn of that same year, the banks of the Evenmere flooded, destroying the village’s pier, the waterfront, and shattering the families of the fishers who lived there. It broke Jevirelle’s heart to see so many suffer as she had, so she opened her home to the immigrant children, outsiders like herself, who had lost their families to the flood. Soon, she found herself the Matron of Evenmere’s sole orphanage, an institution she would operate until the night of her death, many years later. It began in the afternoon, as the Eye appeared in the sky for the first time in generations. Three boys from Jevirelle's orphanage were walking home through the moors after spending their day foraging for truffles. Just a few yards from the outskirts of the village they came across a hole dug into the moist loam and, partially buried within, the body of a woman, still warm, its blood oozing into the peat at the bottom of the hole. The boys understood that something foul was afoot and immediately ran to the village to alert the magistrate.

Jevirelle expected her boys home for supper that evening, but as the afternoon wore on and the shadows grew long, she began to suspect trouble. Wrapping herself in a shawl against the evening chill, she set out to find them, fearing – rightly – that they had fallen into trouble somewhere in the village. At first, she saw no sign of the boys. Indeed, it seemed as if most of the town was absent from their usual haunts. As she made her way to the town center, and she realized where the villagers had gone, Jevirelle’s concern grew. She found her fellow villagers assembled in the village’s market square. The throng surrounded the mayor and Jevirelle's three lost wards. The crowd was a din of shouted accusations and anger that Jevirelle could not make out, but as she pushed her way through the crowd, their words became clear. They killed her!

I always knew they were trouble!

We should have sent them back to where they came from! Jevirelle pushed through the last of the crowd, seeing her boys in detail at last. They had been beaten. Scratches and sick purple bruises covered their faces. Their hair was matted with their own blood and the dirt of the road. Though they offered no resistance, they were being held tightly by three of the village’s strongest fishers, like common criminals. The mayor stood before the crowd, his arms outstretched. Perhaps, her fears better under her control, she would have seen his efforts to calm the crowd, but to Jevirelle he seemed to be indulging the mob, stoking its anger and exalting as that rage roared to life.

Against such fury, she felt calm reason impossible and so she simply pushed past them, mayor and all, stalking towards her children. So palpable was her determination to free her children that the men holding her boys blanched, releasing their holds. She pulled her boys from their now loosened grips and pushed through the crowd once more, having never spoken a word. Behind her, the crowd erupted into screams and howls as she pushed her wards back through the village to their home. Though no one stepped forward to stop them, it was clear the crowd had not had its due. The confrontation was far from over. They followed Jevirelle and her orphans all the way back to her home, screaming accusations and insults the whole way. As Jevirelle tightly shut her door, they were gathering on her property, ignoring propriety completely. Jevirelle summoned all her wards from about the house and gathered them in her hall. Hugging each one in turn, she assured them that she would see them through this. Jevirelle vowed that she would protect the children, no matter what it took, but Jevirelle would be unable to fulfill that vow.

At first, they assumed the smell of smoke had come from the sputtering torches and lanterns of the villagers outside but, as the smoke started to collect along the ceiling, Jevirelle knew that the villagers of Evenmere, her friends and fellows had done the unspeakable. The angry cries outside became cheers and chants. Surrounded by the mob, with nowhere to turn, Jevirelle and her children burned in the remains of the house she had built with her husband. When the smoke cleared and the embers cooled, the villagers found the remains of Jevirelle and her wards in the hall, huddled together in a grim embrace. The bodies were a black mass, but they were surrounded by a halo of light gray ash that streaked all the way to the door. In that ash, the villagers saw clearly dozens of footprints, as if someone had walked through the ash and out the front door That village no longer stands on the Evenmere. They say that its population died out, each generation born there smaller than the last, until finally, its final denizens left to find their destiny elsewhere. But, those with lineages that reach back to that ancient place tell a story of its demise. The children of the village, they said, were called to the Marsh Mother. The ghost of Jevirelle that even now wanders the marshes and moors whenever the Eye looks down from its perch in the night sky, in search of children to join her orphans, forever under her care. Click here to collapse the full story.