The Keening Women

Template:Breadcrumb The Three

Cailleach the Crone

Draoi the Matron

Mairnéalach the Maiden

The Ogress of Mná Caointe

Overview

The Three (Commontongue), also Mná Caointe (Feytongue \mɪˈnɑ ˈkwintɑ\ for keening women) are named for the fact that there are exactly three individuals sharing this Strange God throne. Like most Strange Gods, lore about The Three is rare and incomplete. The lore comes primarily from scholars who have studied the Bleak Gods and their Orisons.

The Three are the rulers of The Court of Three, and Gods of Hags. Their obsession is with numerological cardinality: how does the quantity of something reveal its truth?

History

Like all Bleak Gods, The Three came into existence when the Elves of Pelithos migrated across The Strange Sea to Arcadia in the early Dark Age.

Description

The Three have two forms. The first are as three individual women: Cailleach (Feytongue \ˈkɑˌlijʊk\ for old woman) the Crone, Draoi (Feytongue \dri\ for wise) the Matron, and Mairnéalach (Feytongue \mɑrˈniəˌlʊk\ for young woman) the Maiden. Cailleach appears as an impossibly tall and thin woman with shriveled skin and a missing eye, often depicted with a sinister replacement. Draoi appears as a squat woman with an enormous girth and a basket covering her head. Mairnéalach appears as a woman of middle height and incredibly wiry and muscular frame with a wide smiling mouth full of sharp teeth.

The second form is that of a massive ogress with heads fused together. It is dressed in tattered cloth covered in moss.

Personality

All three of the Stygian Queens are dangerously polite, every etiquette a high stakes game for survival.

Cailleach is the keeper of books. Cold, deliberate, and endlessly patient, she keeps track of all payments, whether by blood, betrayal, or bargain. She is obsessed with counting backward, keeping a ledger of the costs of the past. She is known for tending moss-covered withered bodies of her victims.

Draoi is gentle but suffocating, speaking in the warm tones of a lullaby, but offering disapproving kindness that is heavy as chains. She is obsessed with balance, one coin, one kiss, one cry is her motto. An unpaid favor is the greatest offense against her. She is known for drowning and cooking her victims in cauldrons of milk.

Mairnéalach is restless and cruely curious. She plays games with fate like a child pulling wings from butterflies. She wants to know how things will end and delights in testing her predictions. She is obsessed with promises and their relationship to the future. She tempts people into promises they cannot keep and then counts down to their doom. She is known for biting off pieces of her victim, counting as she does.

These personalities fuse into the Ogress, the three heads bickering and agreeing in turn.

Orisons

Most Orisons of The Three are Hags of Arcadia, but The Three do also form pacts with Mortals. The primary tenets of Orisons of The Three are:

• Everything has a cost: They believe strongly in the transactional nature of The Three.
• Fate can be restructured like a contract: Many Orisons of The Three seek to change their fate or the fate of others.
• The etiquette of The Three must be respected: All offerings and rituals should be numerologically correct, all debts recorded and paid.

Orisons of The Three generally believe that The Three collect records of costs paid in the universe toward some unknowable, sacred arithmetic that will solve the mystery of the universe.