Baba Iliana is the herbalist of Estellara, kin to the Romani merchants and one of the few who can walk through the mists and return. She carried a message from Caladan to the Seekers of Ardis Vala.
| Type | Character |
| Chronicle | AV |
| Spanish entry | Baba Iliana, la herbolista de Estellara |
Description
Villagers greet her warily and call her atadora de hombros y de profecías (“binder of shoulders and of prophecies”): she sets dislocations and reads what has not yet happened. For half a century she has asked every stranger about a lost band of musicians. Variant: Baba Ileana.
History
The night five roads crossed, at the inn of the painted boar, she told the newcomers: “It is no coincidence that tonight is a night of full moon and mistletoe.” At midnight, in her hut, she did not read their fortune but transmitted. A panther had brought word from their “dark friend”, “who calls the shots here”: they carried something belonging to the land, a little red crystal (RAJ-750), and must choose. Life is planting the seed; death is not planting it, death having a center, a name and a one-mile radius. The Seekers kept the crystal but left for the ravine that night, in freezing rain. The seed was finally planted at the Arcanum Forge.
The land that came
Of the mists:
«No es que vinieron. La tierra vino. Vino con gente. Pero había otros que ya estaban. Y otros que vamos y venimos.» (“It’s not that they came. The land came. It came with people. But there were others already here. And others of us who come and go.“)
Those who come and go through the mists of Valakhan carry the messages of those who cannot leave.
Open questions
- Lady Deino, who made beast-men of the lost cohorts, serves Baba Yaga, so the old-woman-of-the-hut archetype predates the mists in Ardis Vala. Whether Baba is just the Romani word for old women or the same lineage is open.