Mother Marrow

Mother Marrow is a hunched, leathery old woman, brown-skinned and clad in hides, leaning on a twisted staff. She looks small enough to be harmless, but her skin is parched as if from a merciless desert sun, though no sun shines in the nightmare realm; perhaps her own malice dries her. Through the dream plane she knows many languages, all spoken in a voice dry as mummy wrappings. She is among the busiest members of the court of nightmares and feeds on fear.

She prefers to join wanderers in disguise, using illusions to pose as a wizard lost in the mists, then feed them falsehoods to grow fears she can harvest in their dreams. In a fight her hands stretch into long claws, striking twice per round for 2d6 each, though she prefers to let spells or servants do the killing.

She casts as a 13th-level wizard, instantly and with no material, somatic or verbal components. She does not memorize spells; instead she draws them from the dream web, refilling her selection in one hour by touching her relic in a safe place in her slums, which gives her victims a short respite. She can pick any spell of her level, but usually holds magic missile, chill touch, burning hands, hypnotism and change self; spectral hand, scare, ESP, blindness and alter self; slow, delude, fireball, hold person and protection from good, 10' radius; fear, confusion, black tentacles and polymorph self; chaos, shadow magic, summon shadow and distance distortion; and invisible stalker and permanent illusion. Ennui, arcane heads, golems and other creations serve her.

She rules her ever-shifting slums in the dream city, a roving district whose streets are part of the witch herself. Her workshops there birthed the arcane heads and other horrors, and the failures that turned out differently from her plans still haunt the alleys.

Fear sustains her, and her dreamscapes are grim, frightening places. In the dream borderlands she endlessly seeks new wanderers to fuel her magic.