The one who walks the round
Astrid, the Smiling Snare
Huntress
“Oh good, you came! I set the snares two hours ago. Bit awkward if nobody stepped in them.”
She does not come to meet you. She decides where the ground is dangerous and then talks pleasantly until you stand on it. Traps on the squares you have not filled yet, a bow that arcs clean over the front line, and a snare for whatever moves too well. The youngest soul in the clearing — and the only one who is entirely certain she chose to be here.
The story
A girl out of the northern boughs
She is Rootbound, and unlike anyone else who stands in the Glade she is all of it — no half-blood, no borrowed line, no people she had to talk her way into. The northern Elderwood raised her the way it raises everything: slowly, and without asking. She is nineteen. She will tell you so within the first minute, along with about nine other things.
The Rootbound hear the old power the way farmers hear weather. They feel where it lies deep, where it stirs, where not to build and where never to dig. In a hunter that gift comes out sideways: she does not hear the forest so much as read where it has already been walked. Which branch was pushed aside this morning. Which moss took a foot last night. Where the thing she is following will put its weight tomorrow, before it has decided to.
So she learned the craft that suits knowing that. Not the chase — the chase is loud, and slow, and mostly luck. She lays a line of snares through the ground she has read, and then she walks it, every day, in the same order, talking the whole way. Hunters call that round a trapline. It is the whole of her method, and she has never once described it as patience. She describes it as being right early.
Ask her about home and you will get an answer that is long, funny, and somehow about the ground instead. Then she will ask you four questions in a row and answer two of them herself. She left the north following a trail she had been reading for weeks, southward out of country she had never had a reason to leave, and she is entirely certain that going was her idea.
The Amberstone
The one stone with nowhere to belong
Every other great stone in Ambryx has a country. The Emerald is of the Elderwood, the Sapphire of the northern Crowns, the Ruby of the southern coast, the Amethyst of the ruins under Mount Batir. The Amberstone has none. It is the rarest thing anyone in this world has ever heard of, and the only reliable fact about it is that it turns up where it likes.
It turned up in a snare. Not one of the good ones, either — an old set at the far end of her round that had stood empty for years, the single failure on a line she is otherwise insufferable about. The one trap that never caught anything caught the rarest thing in the world. She has a whole speech about this. It is not a modest speech.
She threaded it on a leather cord and wears it at her throat, small enough that most people miss it entirely — which, for the stone that everyone in Ambryx would ruin themselves to hold, seems to be exactly the arrangement it wanted. Amber is old resin: the sap that catches a thing mid-step and keeps it, warm and perfectly still, for longer than anyone is around to watch. Nobody who has seen her work needs that explained twice.
The trail she was following south ended at a clearing on no map, where the Law of Stones draws everything awakened. Five others burn there already, and every one of them has been given a nickname within a minute of meeting her. She is quite sure she tracked something all the way here. It has not occurred to her, not once in all those weeks of talking, to wonder which of them was doing the leading.
“One snare on the whole line never caught a thing. Guess which one it was.” — Astrid, telling it again
The voice
Heard in the Glade
Bright, fast, and constitutionally unable to leave a silence alone. She is the second talker in the clearing and nothing like the first — Aldric performs, she narrates, and everything is a story she is already in the middle of. She gives everyone a name within a minute of meeting them, and not one of them has ever managed to make her stop.
- Greeting“Oh good, you came! I set the snares two hours ago. Bit awkward if nobody stepped in them.”
- Meant kindly“Careful where you put your feet. I say that to be kind. I am being kind!”
- Setting a snare“There. That square belongs to me now.”
- Facing Harald“Fishboy! Look at you. All that iron and you still go pink.”
- Facing Skarn“Magpie. That is my name for you. You collect shiny things and you never once say sorry.”
- Facing Eidara“Gardener! Still tidying up things that were perfectly fine before you got to them?”
- Winning“Don’t feel bad — the ground did most of it. I only picked the ground.”
- Losing“Well, sh— shoot. …I’m working on my swearing. It isn’t going well.”
In the Glade
How Astrid fights
Trapline
Signature attack · 2 manaSet a Springsnare in an empty square on your opponent’s board: anything that comes to stand there takes 2 damage. It costs them nothing to avoid — they simply have to keep choosing to. She walks the same round every turn of every duel, and the board fills up with squares nobody wants.
Five words on her cards belong to her alone, and one absence shapes everything else she does:
- Trap — laid on an empty square of your opponent’s board, where it waits. The instant a body comes to stand there it springs, however it got there: played, summoned, shoved, dragged, or handed back. The ground is always visible, and a trap never blocks the square. It welcomes it.
- Hidden Trap — a Trap laid face down. They see the disturbed ground and know something is set there; what it is stays hers until it springs. The not-knowing is half of what she paid for.
- Cache — the same craft turned kindly, laid on an empty square of her own. The next friendly body to stand there finds what she left for it. Prepare the ground you mean to stand on.
- Snared — held fast: it misses its next attack, exactly as ice would hold it. One rule, two words — Aldric’s winter freezes, her snares hold.
- Ranged — her weapons are bows. The arrow arcs over the front line, so it can strike any visible body in either row, and the enemy character is always in range. She stands off, so nothing she shoots strikes back — though Retaliate and Harald’s wards answer anyway, and a Bulwark or a Thicket must still be shot first.
- No mending, no wall — she starts on 32 Health, the highest in the field, and that is every point she will ever have. Not one card in her warband heals, and not one of them guards. Holding the ground is her armour.