Sybilla Blythe

Sybilla Blythe lives at the edge of the peat bog, three miles out from the village of Graystone. The locals call her a herbalist or "the woman by the fen," though in recent years they mostly just use her name—people learn to keep extra titles quiet. Her cabin sits on wooden stilts; the boggy ground beneath is far too soft. Beneath the low porch ceiling hang bundles of heather, yarrow, and bitter roots whose names she never reveals to anyone.

Sybilla brews decoctions for coughs, sleeplessness, and foul dreams. It is the bad dreams that bring people to her door most often, and she is used to it. She cuts her own peat, hauls water from the deep well in wooden buckets, and keeps the hearth fire lit only in the mornings, remarking that twilight glow merely muddles the mind.

Talking to her can be unsettling: one moment the ground feels steady, and the next you are sinking knee-deep. She offers no hollow comfort, yet she never tries to frighten either. She asks short, blunt questions and remembers every word you answer. If a traveler lingers until dusk, Sybilla tells them to stay until dawn—no one ever finds the bog fork in the night fog anyway.

Lately, she has hardly slept at all. She dreams of a burning manor perched on a hill, a place that has never existed in these parts. And every single night, caught amid the flames right beside her, stands the exact same stranger.