TERM · ENTERED S05

Yalwī al-ʿAql

The Mól name, out of children's stories, for a twister of minds: a thing that reads and compels rather than charms

STANDING: LORE · TERM · MÓL, FROM THE CHILDREN'S STORIES

Yalwī al-ʿAql is a Mól phrase, and it comes out of the stories told to Mól children rather than out of any scholarship. It is not a title anyone claims. It means twists the mind.

What the stories describe is not a charmer. It is something that reads a mind outright and compels it, which the tales hold to be a different order of thing from enchantment altogether. They are also firm about the remedy: serpents hunt them, and will run one down.

Lady Talia Salahaudhi put the name to a living man in S5E64. She had felt the bald operative at the Color Stay go through her own mind, and told the party that what they were dealing with was a yalwī al-ʿaql: not enchantment, not magic, a demon of the sort she was raised on. The party killed him there the following dawn, because Rheem was walking the city in a lieutenant’s face and a mind-reader would have stripped it off her the moment they crossed paths (S5E65). They would not go as far as Talia had. Mikhail had watched him cast without a word, a gesture, or anything in his hands, which is a punishing art and a rare one, and they called him a mage and nothing else.

Venros is the only person anyone has ever called one.

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SOURCE: HAND OF THE GM