Arveth
Not the mountain. The mountain is where her reach touches the world from inside the Dale — and from inside the Dale, there is no difference that matters.
The Coldpeak call the mountain what everyone calls it: the mountain over there, spoken with deliberate care, without naming it. You do not name a thing you fear. The party inherited that name without quite knowing they were inheriting anything.
She communicates through images: stone, depth, patience, a thing held shut. Clod serves as her Harbinger, translating her images into language; his translations are confident and imprecise in ways that reflect his own bias. He came to the role through a brief guardianship of his own — the full account is in Session 4.
The terms are settled. Doctor Medicine carries a pebble — white striations in it, taken from the chamber walls — so that Arveth can see through it always. In exchange, she granted him one small change in the past. He accepted her as patron, committing to Great Old One before the session was out. Clod announced the arrangement with as much solemnity as he could muster. (Session 12)
Nothing will ever have been — and it didn’t have to.
Roleplaying notes
Arveth communicates through images to anyone who is awake and present: stone, depth, web, a thread plucked and vibrating through the whole chain. No words. When she speaks directly — bypassing images entirely, making contact — the recipient goes still. Comatose. The vision comes from inside. To the rest of the room they just stop. What the recipient experiences is something vast and loud, even at a whisper.
She does not experience urgency as a category. The pace of what she offers is the pace of mountains.
Since the bargain
- The second stone (Session 16). Arveth reached out to Father Joseph unasked and offered a bargain: plant a stone from the mountain in the Coldpeak camp, and the home would be safe while the party was gone. Clod delivered a plain brown pebble, and Joseph buried it at the center of camp.
- The Rethreading (Session 19). In the middle of the fight in the Elk ravine, she called Joseph back to the night before and asked him to talk to a watchman who had given up. He did, on a natural 20. When he came back, the watchman, Eyvend, had raised the alarm this time and died for it, and the Elk had started telling each other’s stories.
- Busy (Session 21). When the Elk renamed themselves the Tribe of the Weaver, Joseph went cold. Everything they said sounded like worship of her, and for a moment he saw her as a spider and a mountain at once. When he reached for her afterward, she wasn’t listening. A whole tribe’s worth of stories had just landed in her lap.