Hags of the Night
Soul-eating fae out of an old Eldamar tale, said to have twisted themselves past being fae at all and to live now in the dreams of the people they feed on
The tale is Eldamar’s and it is old. Fae who grew hungry enough, and twisted enough, began eating souls to lengthen their own lives, taking them from whoever got lost in the woods and snared in their tricks and their traps and their games. Eating changed them. What they became were no longer fae but something else, past being satisfied by the souls of the lost, and they went into the living minds of the people they fed on and made a home there, in their dreams. The word the story gives them is the hags of the night, and they go on feeding as they always did, on the souls of anyone asleep.
Nancáro is the only one to have told it. He was asked whether he knew of anyone consuming souls and raising a whole new living thing inside themselves, sat with the question for a while, and produced the hags out of the forest stories he had been carrying for centuries. He was clear that he had never met one. Asked whether such a creature could wear another person’s body, he thought about it and shook his head.
He offered them as a possible account of the ooze that Rheem was made from. Nothing has since connected the two.