Who is the Shardmaiden?

Neyd mapped and named the rivers. Nebulos created the Stillmist. Gemelda was the wisest of them all and founded the Redrunners. Algared was a wise ruler; Viridia was a mighty warrior who got corrupted by Scrome’s evil eye; Iridne stood up for the orcs (in my headcanon, after Kalman Rodenfell forged Nebulos’s original circlet into Stanengist, an act of domination and challenge, and used it to enslave the orcs).

The Shardmaiden died, and her original name has been forgotten. Compared to the other elves of the Heart of the Sky, she sounds a bit rubbish.

What did the Shardmaiden actually do?

Because she’s the only one to have permanently died (supposedly), it’s can be easy to overlook what she did before that; especially as she didn’t just do one thing, like her sisters.

Raven’s Purge (p. 18) says that she decided to learn how to mould the earth (supposedly learning from the god Clay, if there are active gods in your campaign); and did so on an island. Is this someone insisting on doing everything on hard mode? Deciding that the best way to understand the land is not in the middle of a parched desert but at the border of the land’s realm, where it faces the water? Wanting to hear both sides of the story, so learning to sculpt the earth but still ready to hear what the waters have to say? Any or all of the above?

Similarly, having told Algared that her love was “too big to be shared with just one”, she set out to attract lovers to her presence, in the process singing so powerfully that she attracted an entire Kin from across the ocean. True to her promise of loving as many people as possible, she had so many children with humans that she became the great ancestor of the Elvenspring, spreading half-elves into Alderland indirectly as well, by dint of telling Algared to go and be a hostage of the humans there while they settled down.

Oh, and she taught many of them magic, so she’s also the mother of the Druids. She’s a maiden by name, a mother by experience, and if you consider how ancient and primordial she was, and how long she lived before she shattered her ruby, it’s no stretch at all to see her as a crone as well. At this point if you want her to be able to tap into ancient mysteries, maybe see the future and make prophecies, it’s very easy.

These are not the actions of someone content with her lot, happy to do just one thing. Of all the ancient elves of the Heart of the Sky, the Shardmaiden sounds like the least likely to despair and commit suicide, no matter how in love with her current human lover she was at the time.

Mermaids at Maidenholm

There is no reason to decide to learn the arts of shaping the earth and to go to an island to do so, unless at a minimum you want to see what happens to said earth when it’s exposed to the sea. To do so properly requires swimming if you’re going to observe things properly.

Consider the casual attitude towards body plasticity that all modern-day elves have. The first elves in a land, being newer and more competent than their successors (judging by the size of their rubies), would be even less wedded to a land-based humanoid form. Modern-day elves are happy with the idea that, after the cumulative ennui of a few hundred years of life, what you really need to do is ditch your fleshy mammal body and be a tree instead for a while, see if you feel better. It would be no stretch for the Shardmaiden to decide “I need a body that can swim better”.

Also: a woman sits on the shore of an island, and a boat full of people turns up, drawn by her song. That sounds like a siren to me, even before we start talking about her many lovers. (That she doesn’t drown them on sight, but in fact encourages them to spread out, parlays with a god so they can have more land, and has many children with them, just shows she’s not the vengeful type.)

So we have two independent reasons why the Shardmaiden would have made a special ocean-faring body for herself, and potentially other elf followers of hers.

(Who invented ents? Almost certainly not Nebulos, because his solution to “my everyday life is bothering me” was to invent the Stillmist. My money’s on Neyd, both because she likes trees and because she already had experience with splitting herself into many elves so she could cover more ground, then join herself back together again. This feels like someone who’s open to non-standard experiences.)

Having invented a new body type, what’s the Shardmaiden’s next challenge going to be?

The first elf with children

How about giving birth to human-elf hybrids? That feels like a proper challenge.

The trick isn’t so much making the elf and human biologies play together: humans are famously adaptive, after all, so that shouldn’t be too hard, especially not if you’re one of the best druids in the realm, and you can call on your sisters for help. (Thanks to UIOP82 on Reddit for this insight.) Making a few tweaks to the resulting biology should similarly be comparatively trivial for someone who took an elf land body type and made it work in the ocean.

Similarly, while you might wonder “where does an elf get sperm and eggs from, if they don’t naturally breed that way?”, the answer might just be “they got a whole bunch of them from humans”. And if you’re concerned that that would mean that the elf parents of Elvenspring weren’t really their parents, consider that maybe the point of making Elvenspring might precisely have been to determine how important biological parentage was compared to culture and upbringing.

And letting male elves sire half-elf children is just a matter of some minor plumbing, and letting the human mother do the important work.

No, the hard work is building an elf body that harbours and nurtures a completely separate biological organism inside it. Which isn’t to say that the relationship between a human mother and her children is always altruistic: e.g. birth happens not because the baby’s head becomes too large to fit through the birth canal, but because the baby is now leeching more energy than the mother can provide. But that’s still a radical departure for an elf who tends to think of their entire body as disposable, and that there’s no point in having new people unless they’re surprising and interesting.

Why did the Shardmaiden shatter her ruby?

Consider what elves typically do when they get tired of everyday life. They might slow down by becoming an elf; slow down even more by abandoning their body and retreating to the Stillmist; or decide to end themselves by shattering their ruby into bits and having more elves grow from the shards. (Maybe some of their consciousness travels back to the Red Wanderer when this happens, or maybe they just stop.)

Having already founded the order of Maiden Druids with her lover Morander (GM’s Guide, p. 41), we’re told she shattered her heart so each of her children / Maiden Druid followers could have a part of it (ibid. and Raven’s Purge, p. 21). This doesn’t feel like the standard heart-shattering ritual, a nihilistic moment of despair; not least because quite why do this when she had just founded an order of Druids to do stuff for her? This feels like a new chapter in her life just starting.

(She could, of course, have founded the Maiden Druids precisely because she feared that she was going to completely lose it when Morander died, and was trying to create a structure, an obligation that would make demands on her when the fateful day came, so she could throw herself into work and forget her grief for a while. If this is true in your game, and nonetheless she committed traditional ruby-shattering suicide, I suspect dark thoughts like this imbue the shards of her heart, and plague all members of the order from time to time.)

Rather than slowing slightly, loads, or stopping, the Shardmaiden chose a fourth option: happy that there wasn’t anything she particularly wanted to do for the next few thousand years, she suspended her consciousness.

There’s still a core of the Shardmaiden, waiting to see what her children do

The basic premise of elf society is that no elf is inherently better than any other (although some elves may situationally be better than others, if their skills are more appropriate, or reasoned argument shows they’re clearly right and other elves are wrong).

That’s admirably egalitarian, but it’s also selfish. We don’t notice the latter that much because (a) all other Kin we tend to think of are also selfish, and (b) elves’ small numbers make selfishness almost inevitable. Sacrificing yourself for the good of the many is a lot more convincing when the many are hundreds- or thousands-strong. It’s going to take a really strong argument to make an elf sacrifice themselves so three other elves Tomiel, Dickiel and Harriel can live.

I think the Shardmaiden, as the first and foremost elf mother, learned most intensely what it is to be mortal: that eventually you can inherently be less important than your children. Because thank you for all you did to give birth to them and bring them up, but it’s their time now.

Is the Shardmaiden going to accept that? No. Based on everything we know of her, she’s as proud as any ancient elf. But having children, each of them doing their own thing? That’s fascinating. So she’s taken her knowledge and memories and parcelled a bit of them out to each of her favoured druids. Each shard in turn accumulates her children’s experiences, wisdom, memories. They can probably talk to each other.

And eventually she’ll bring all of the parts of her heart back together again, and find out what her children have done with their lives. Now that’s interesting, and worth waiting for.

What would bring the Shardmaiden back?

Mechanically, if you found the core of the Shardmaiden’s ruby, and added a whole bunch of the shards that Maiden Druids currently stick to their foreheads, that would do it. She’d be able to talk to you if you stuck the resulting ruby conglomerate in Stanengist or any other significant artifact, and left to her own devices would soon manage to build herself a new body in no time at all.

If the order of Maiden Druids decided that there was a desperate threat that they couldn’t deal with, and only their divine founder could deal with it, you could anticipate that they’d decide that they should all give up their Shardmaiden shards and bring her to life again so they could ask her for guidance.

Similarly, if the order hadn’t catastrophically failed but heroically succeeded, they could decide that they should bring Mum back so they could tell her all that they’d done. This is less interesting as a hook for your next campaign, but it’s still something that the Shardmaiden would look forward to.

Or she could come back basically randomly. After all, time almost certainly doesn’t pass for her, or passes in a very peaceful fashion, so even if it takes thousands of years for someone to stumble across a ruby core and a collect a bunch of ruby shards, that’s no big deal for an immortal elf.

If it worked for Ferenblaud, it can work for her.