Mother Crick

Appearance: An ancient woman made of peat and parchment, her fingers tipped with quills, her eyes blind but ink-dark. A nest of paper birds roosts in her hair. She walks with a cane made from the spine of a forgotten book.
Personality: Stern, obsessive, burdened with knowledge. Speaks slowly, as if unspooling sentences from spools of thread. Calls everyone by names they don’t remember.
Abilities:
- Name-Keeping: Knows all names—given, taken, and stolen. Can return or erase them.
- Burial Lore: Writes people out of the world by burying their stories in the soil.
- Ink-Seep: Can bleed written truths from her skin to bind or punish liars.
Domain: The Crickstack, a root-choked tower-library that runs deep underground. It hums with the sound of turning pages even when empty.
Rumors:
- She was the first to record a map of the Briar Reaches—and the realm punished her by making her its memory.
- She once tried to forget herself, but the land would not let her.