Asrai

Asrai are small, lovely female water faeries, none taller than four feet, with long golden hair that glows warmly as they glide through cool water. Their hair is alive. It never stops growing, often reaching the calves, and it coils and flexes around the body in response to mood, the way a dog's tail gives its feelings away. Since it covers them so well they seldom bother with clothes. In the water they move with breathtaking grace.

They thrive in salt or fresh water, though switching from one to the other leaves them sluggish for a few days. Along with their own tongue they know the speech of tritons, mermaids, sea elves, sirines, nixies, balaena and even fish.

Malice is rare in them. Anyone trying to net one gets bitten, but asrai would rather escape and settle the score later.

A school working together can dance at the surface in a darting, weaving pattern that acts as a hypnotic pattern spell, their hair throwing off endless glints that hold a watcher spellbound as long as they like. Entranced sailors sometimes topple overboard and drown, so sharks, giant pike and other predators shadow asrai schools. There is no friendship in it; the fish simply strike at anything near the faeries, assuming it is helpless prey.

True sunlight burns an asrai for 1d4 damage per round, though a sunray spell does not. Caught out at dawn, it can survive in any shadow, under rocks, piers or hulls. Some deep-dwelling kinds, especially those of the great planar river, die if captured or held in air for long, which may be why so little is known about them.

A few tribes on an upper plane act as fierce guardians of springs, streams, lakes and seas, punishing anyone who fouls the pure water. To coordinate their retribution they converse with dryads, oreads and their fellow nature spirits. They shoot flimsy willow bows whose strings are plaited from water itself. Range is only 2/4/8 yards, yet each arrow is coated in rotting fish entrails, and anyone hit must save vs. poison or contract a disease.

Most asrai roam fresh waters in schools much like fish. They are very bright but terrified of anything larger, so getting one to talk is nearly impossible, and the rare words they offer are mostly insults. They hide deep by day and feed only at night; freshwater kinds need dark lairs under banks, in caves or beneath logs. Ocean asrai ride giant flying fish (animal intelligence, 1-1 HD, AC 8, swim 24, no attacks) as land folk ride horses.

The biggest schools live deep in the great river that runs between the upper planes and seldom surface except on nights when the algae blooms, when they gorge and gather all they can in a frenzy.

School pilots lead, steering the yearly migration from warm water to cool once summer feeding ends. The post is respected, and young asrai compete hard to apprentice under a pilot. The best can keep a school hidden in a ship's shadow all day, after which the clan spends the night tempting the watch to desert their posts, and they find a resulting shipwreck hilarious.

An asrai lives exactly nine years. A young one has 1/2 Hit Die, and after its first year its Hit Dice equal half its age. At death it dissolves into water that later gives rise to 1d4+1 new asrai identical to their mother.

Asrai eat algae and freshwater plants and never touch meat, cooked or raw, though they swarm like fish to food tossed on the water. Their diet is part of an old pact: no deep-water predator will harm them, even under magical compulsion.

The Seelie Court and its servants count them as distant kin; they are welcome, if seldom seen, among nixies, selkies and sea elves. Whispers tell of an asrai queen hidden there in a bottomless well or ever-flowing spring, though she may be nothing but a sprite's joke grown into common belief. On the great river some asrai guide, translate for or keep company with balaena, whose songs they follow. Most other thinking races interest them only as targets for mischief.

Water fiends, chaos toads and ferryman fiends consider a live asrai a rare treat. Wicked fishers scatter kelp, vegetables and algae pellets on dark waters to lure them, then seal captives in water-filled amphorae under a darkness spell and sell them in the gray wasteland of despair and neighboring lower planes, where one brings 200 to 300 gp. Legend says asrai once guided travelers along the whole great river, as the ferryman fiends still do on the Styx, but persecution scattered them across the planes. Tales place them in the Elemental Plane of Water, the Prime Material, the aqueducts and sewers of the great planar city and beyond, none confirmed.