Mirage Wraiths
The Mirage Wraiths wandered the thresholds between the seen and the remembered, drifting through forest and fen with steps that left no imprint. Their forms were stitched from vapour and recollection, half‑shadow, half‑moonlight, and their presence was first felt as a questioning of one’s own senses. It was said they could slip between moments, appearing not as they were but as the echo of an old fear, or the fleeting shape of a longed‑for face.
Nature and Purpose
The Wraiths came to those deep in reflection, drawn by the quiet resonance of minds turned inward. To the lost, they offered glimpses of forgotten truths; to the grieving, they revealed the thread of a bond unbroken by death; to the ambitious, they sometimes showed an imagined triumph. Whether these visions were gifts, warnings, or deceptions was known only to the Wraiths themselves. They fed not on fear, as Hollow Walkers did, but on the gravity of emotion, the weight of a heart caught between desire and remembrance.
Appearance
In form, a Mirage Wraith seemed neither solid nor wholly incorporeal. Limbs and features blurred at the edges, as though cut from smoke and lit from within by a pale, wandering gleam. Their outlines shifted with the viewer’s own thoughts, sometimes appearing taller, nearer, or more defined in moments of emotional surge. To watch a Wraith too long was to risk seeing more than one’s own life, flashes of strangers, ancestors, or even futures that might never come to pass.
Haunts
They were most often found in places where stillness and silence settled heavily: winter‑bare birches in the first frost, the high glades where sunlight fractured upon drifting mist, the shorelines of lakes that remembered every reflection they had ever held. At such sites, time itself seemed to thin, and a single breath could open onto another lifetime.
Gifts and Dangers
Veil‑Casting: A Wraith could project visions into the very air, visible to all present yet drawn from each mind’s private store of memory.
Moment‑Slip: They could slide into an earlier or later breath in time, moving unseen past danger or into the path of opportunity.
Truth‑Fracture: By weaving conflicting images, they could plant doubt in the mind of a pursuer or intruder, buying themselves or others a chance to withdraw.
For mortals, such encounters could be transformative or perilous. Too much time beneath a Wraith’s gaze risked untethering the self from the present, a condition known among healers as drift‑fever.
A Remembered Incident
In the Winter of Glass Shadows, the elder Sevrin of Thalewood vanished for three days after entering the birch strand at dusk. He returned with frost upon his brows and a woven band of unknown fibre around his wrist, claiming it had been given by a Wraith who showed him the path to avert a coming feud. The feud did not occur; the band crumbled to vapour at midwinter’s end.
Relations with Other Beings
The Sentient Skies permitted the Mirage Wraiths their wanderings, for they harmed no living root or branch. The Root Guardians regarded them with mild suspicion, wary of beings who dealt in visions that might mislead the unready.