Sister to Cirra of Farra
Human (island-born) — Seer — Wild, wind-bound, feared and true
Origins
Stellan of Farra came from the far islands, The Outer Winds — places wind-polished and salt-bitten, a place where names are carved into driftwood and held down with stones, lest the wind take them.
Her people lived with mysticism woven into their bones, not as religion, not as craft, but as truth lived simply. They were free, spare, sharp-eyed, tuned to the patterns of the sea, sky, and shore. And they were not welcome everywhere.
The people of Stellan’s island craft windlight fabrics, woven with silver thread pulled so fine it hums in moonlight. They dye with sea-salt mordants, wind-dried lichen, and kelp ash, making colours that shift in certain weathers. Their cloths aren’t for show — they’re worn, wind-beaten, practical — but when the sun hits them, they shimmer like distant storms. They favour blue.
Arrival
She arrived to the fens like a storm’s edge crossing still water: not loud, not angry, but undeniable. Her hair was wild, thick with weather, her skin pale as a moon half-veiled, and her presence unsettled people. Some thought she’d curse them. Some thought she already had.
She never corrected them.
She spoke plainly, said what she saw, what she felt — even if it cut.
She had always been a seer, even as a girl. Not only in vision but in pattern. She saw the deep rhythm of the world — how wind shaped roots, how desire moved flocks, how illness came like a tide. And sometimes, she could harness the forces she observed — summon rain, stir the wind, call animals — but she rarely did, and after a time fiercely refused to. Not out of doubt. Out of certainty.
She had felt the raw weight of nature’s power, coursing just under the skin of the world. It thrilled her. Terrified her. She knew what it could do — and worse, what it could make a person want to do. She believed that most people were too naive, too corrupted by hunger, too quick to twist beauty into conquest.
“We were never meant to hold it,” she said once, voice sharp as sea air. “We are meant to be with it. To move through it. Not to bend it. Not to own it.”
She didn’t preach. But her refusal was absolute.
That kind of power, she believed, tempted the ego and withered the soul.
She didn’t fear nature. She feared what humans would become if they believed it was theirs to command.
She believed in balance, always.
🐚 Her Arrival and Fennick
She was drawn to Fennick Foss’s farm like a moth to clean flame. Something about the land there sounded right, and she stood on the edge of the copse watching — not the man, at first, but the work. The rows. The listening.
He didn’t force the land. He didn’t impose. He walked the field barefoot, bent to smell the soil. Checked the warmth with his skin. Waited. Watched. Responded. It wasn’t until she sat beside him that she realised they didn’t need to speak. He brought potato and carrot soup and they ate in silence. But the silence was like the Quieting – energy fizzing around them.
They fell in love in a way that left no mark on the land but grew there anyway. She marries Fennick Foss not for power or station, but because he listens. He makes space. He is steeped in the wind and the wild, just as she is.
Over time local tongues twist the name “Stellan” to “Stellyn”.
🔮 Her Magic
She’s a star-reader and earth-watcher, there’s a sense of bridging sky and soil in her. She timing rituals, phases of the moon, migrations, sap risings — the language of change written across sky and land. Her power was not dramatic, but precise. The kind of magic that waits.
People feared Stellan. Not because she harmed them, but because she saw. She’d look at you and say something you hadn’t told anyone — or hadn’t realised yourself. Her predictions came simply, like weather reports. Sometimes wrong. Always close. People sometimes thought she caused the things she predicted.
She didn’t care for rules, or for being liked. But she had no cruelty in her. Her passion was wide-open, storm-hearted. She was a person of unfettered speech, clear sight, and fierce will. She said what others swallowed.
She once said:
“The world isn’t waiting for us to understand it. It’s waiting for us to join it.”
🌿 As a Mother
She taught her sons according to who they were.
- Tauren, open and hungry, she taught under open skies. She gave him her questions, not her answers. She showed him how to ask a plant why it grew where it did. How to wait for the wind to change before speaking.
- Harn, reserved and internal, she walked beside — never in front. With him, she taught stillness. How to watch for what didn’t belong. How to sense a change in breath, in birdsong. How to know something had entered the clearing even if you didn’t see it.
Both her sons carry pieces of her, in different ways. But neither ever forgot the way she would stop mid-sentence, stare at a storm, and smile without warmth, like someone listening to a song they heard before it was written.
Her life at Bardney Edge
Stellan of Farra never truly settled — not in the way others meant it. She stayed, yes, in Fennick’s cottage on the edge of the fens, where the wind moved like it remembered her. But her moods were weather systems: quiet one day, furious the next, then gone for three.
She would disappear without warning, walking out before breakfast with a pack and returning at dusk three days later, damp with rain and unspeaking. Fennick never asked why, but the children learned to read her like they read the sky. Some say she had unfinished business — a hurt, a debt, a memory with teeth. Others think she was simply too attuned to stay still.
As well as teaching and raising her two sons, she weaved linen from Fennick’s flax, finer than anything the region had seen, stitching by firelight with silver thread and dyes traded in quiet barters. For blue, she sometimes used woad, which she tried to grow on raised beds but mostly acquired through favours and stories.
She could have gone inland, joined scholars or seekers, but the land inside the fens was wrong — too tamed, too twisted. Going further inland felt like going indoors. She stayed where the wind still howled, where she could feel the hum in the roots. But even then, her bags were never truly unpacked.
Her departure
After Fennick died, she went. Not with anger, not even with sorrow exactly. More like the tether had been gently unhooked. Maybe she said goodbye to the boys. Maybe she didn’t.
She was seen sometimes at night, standing by the copse where she’d first watched Fennick in the field. A dark figure, hair wild, cloak twisting like smoke.
Some said she spoke to the soil. Others said she stood listening, as if waiting for a sound no one else could hear.
Orris might have remembered waking once and seeing her outside, hand on the flax stems, then gone again.
Some say she went back to Farra, some say deeper into the fens, some say the hum called her somewhere she couldn’t return from.
But she left no body. No trail. Only her silver scissors and the last spindle of thread tucked into her chest.