Billy's Mom
A fae-animated mushroom person and matriarch of a small family living in a root-framed warren beside the eroded stone tower 8 miles north of Ponterford, on the war-severed road into northern Rivalon. She stands about 4 ft tall and 2.5 ft wide with a wide, flat little face and dot eyes; one arm is a bristling cluster of mushroom growths, the other a crude two-finger-and-thumb claw that grips an oiled torch-staff (a walking stick wrapped to be set alight). She identifies as her and — not grasping naming conventions — calls herself Billy's Mom and her child Billy's Mom Junior. She is not the cave-dwelling fungal matriarch Mush Mother; these forest mushroom folk were ordinary mushrooms brought to walking, speaking life by passing fey magic, not born of spores.
Her people are the quiet casualties of Laewendas's war machine: the "checkered men" (the Ponterford sawmill's lumberjacks, who all wear checks) come most days to fell the trees, and burned others of her kind in their fires. Her family survives only because of the Guardian of the Woods, the mutated treant that hunts anyone carrying wood — "the dead bodies of its kin." Because she is fae-touched, any promise made to her is magically binding, which makes bargaining with her a delicate, high-stakes thing.
Session 38 (met)
- The party finds her warren during Thalia's Primeval Awareness sweep (she and Junior read as bordering on a third fae presence). Magra opens diplomacy; Billy's Mom will help locate the Guardian only if the party can guarantee the checkered men stop coming to kill her people.
- She sees through half-measures: Magra's "we just want to talk" reads as deception, and Lash's sincere "I'll stop them or die trying" still isn't a promise she'll risk her family on. Thalia warns the group that promises to the fae are binding — so no one offers an empty one, and she urges them to go home.
- Diplomacy fails; the party lures and fights the Guardian without her aid. She remains the face of the lumberjacks-vs-nature thread the Reclamation must somehow resolve (magical tree-farming, sparing the warren) if it wants the forest folk as allies.