Auntie Marrowveil - The Green Hag
Every bargain in the Gloomden crosses her bog eventually. She's still waiting for you to notice you already owe her something.
Everyone in the Gloomden owes Auntie Marrowveil something. Most of them don't know it yet.
Role in Its Society
The Gloomden is the one part of the Ardent Woods the Leafwatch Sentinels don't merely caution against — they mark it forbidden outright, the only spot on their maps that earns the word. Marrowveil is a large part of why. She keeps no court, flies no banner, and answers to nothing the Sentinels would recognize as authority, but every hamlet on the Gloomden's edge knows her name, leaves offerings at the boundary stones out of habit rather than belief, and tells their children exactly one rule: never bargain with Auntie Marrowveil for anything you aren't prepared to actually give up.
She isn't hidden. Desperate people find her easily enough — smugglers who need a debt collected quietly, oath-breakers looking to renegotiate terms with whatever they betrayed, and more than one warlock hunting a patron who's gone suspiciously silent. Marrowveil hears them all out. She has never once turned away a bargain worth having.
Appearance Description
At a glance, Marrowveil is a stooped, kindly grandmother in a moss-green shawl, mending a coat by a bog-fire that never seems to need more wood. It's a very good disguise, and she rarely bothers dropping it unless provoked, insulted, or genuinely interested in being seen. Underneath: skin the grey-green of standing water, joints that bend one degree past comfortable, a mouth that holds more teeth than a smile should need, and eyes the sallow yellow of an autumn long past its color. Her hair is real moss, and things live in it.
Backstory
Marrowveil haunted the boggy hollows of the Gloomden long before anyone thought to give the place a name, in a stretch of forest where the veil between the material world and the Feywild has always run thinner than almost anywhere else in Eldervast. She has made her living off that thinness for longer than any hamlet on its border can date — every bargain struck in the Gloomden eventually crosses her bog, one way or another, and she takes her cut.
What exactly she's promised, and to whom, over the centuries, she's never told the same way twice — smugglers' debts collected on the other side of the veil, oaths renegotiated with things that don't keep mortal hours, favors owed and repaid in currencies with no name in Common. She keeps her own ledger of it all, and finds the subject of any single bargain faintly tedious to revisit once it's settled: old news, old debts, already collected in full.
She'll insist, if asked, that she's never once forced a door open that wasn't already ajar — she only ever named the price for walking through. Whether that's entirely true depends on how much you're willing to pay to find out. Even Marrowveil, by her own rare admission, treads carefully around whatever still wears antlers and walks the deeper hollow past her bog. That isn't a story she tells for free. Judging by her face when the subject comes up, it isn't one she enjoys thinking about even when she is.
