Saskia

"A so-called sky witch, said to control the winds and the clouds" — named to the Adept Magi Arcthelion Vaust in 1339 by a party of natural philosophers surveying the coastal flora below Brineward Tower, who "spoke highly" of her. She is, on the record so far, a single line of hearsay from eighty years before the campaign's present — but a line dropped into the exact journal entry where Vaust began mapping invisible air currents, which is unlikely to be coincidence.

(Source: "Observations of the Atollian Coastlines — Books 1–5," the journals of Arcthelion Vaust, Book 2, GM handout, 2026-07-26.)

What the entry actually says

1339 – Newspring. Natural philosophers arrived on Vaust's stretch of coast to catalogue its plants. They introduced him to glasswood, which when burned "produces smoke revealing invisible currents in the air." Vaust began mapping those flows, and noted the thing that has bothered every reader of this passage since: "The patterns shift with the moon and with strong emotion."

In the same breath, the philosophers spoke highly of a so-called sky witch, Saskia, said to control the winds and clouds.

That is the whole of it. Vaust does not record meeting her, does not say where she lives, and does not say whether he believed the claim.

Why she is worth a note

• She is a wind-worker in a world where wind is a named hazard. The Rivallonian study of air currents, shear and orography describes Orathos as the only obstruction in the path of the Western cloudwall of Mireland, the Eastern maelstrom's displacement currents, and the Northern icecap chillwinds — producing wind shear violent enough to cause "loss of aircraft control if unanticipated." Someone who genuinely commands winds and clouds over that island is a strategic asset or a strategic problem, not a curiosity.
• She sits beside the glasswood. The one entry naming her is the one entry establishing that air currents on this coast are visible if you know how to look, respond to the moon, and respond to strong emotion. Vaust spent decades mapping them. A "sky witch" is the obvious person that technique was pointed at, or the obvious person it was learned from.
• The witch question. Orathos's native religion is the Church of the Witches — the twelve-or-thirteen witches who traditionally vote the island's ruler, each associated with a domain (the Night Witch Rhiannon, the Witch of the Lake, a Life Witch, and others unnamed). Whether "the sky witch Saskia" is one of the Thirteen, a local hedge-practitioner given a grand title by admiring scholars, or something else entirely is not stated anywhere in the record. She should not be assumed to be a Covenite witch until someone in play establishes it.

Open questions

• Is Saskia one of the Thirteen? The naming pattern fits ("the sky witch" alongside "the Night Witch"), the era fits, and the witches are described as predating everyone — but no vault source connects them.
• Is she still alive? The witches of the Coven are not ordinary mortals, and Arcthelion Vaust himself is going strong eighty years after this entry. Nothing rules it out.
• Did Vaust ever find her? He mapped air currents for decades and his last entry advertises knowledge of "currents both oceanic and political." Whether any of that came from her is unrecorded — the multi-decade gap in his journals (1364–1393) swallows the question.
• Where? No region is given. The philosophers were working the north Rivallonian coast when they mentioned her, which is suggestive of nothing in particular.