Oread

An oread is to a mountain what a dryad is to an oak grove. Always female and lithe, she has skin matching her peak's stone. One might be tawny and smooth like sandstone or limestone, another a speckle of black, white and red like granite, another sharp-edged and dark gray like gneiss. Her eyes are clear as gemstones, and her lichen-like hair may be whitish green, pale gray or dusky yellow-brown. Winter turns her hair and shoulders white.

She wears loose black, gray or gold gowns and loves finery such as waterfall-white ribbons, jeweled gold crowns and rainbow-casting shawls. Her speech is a dialect of the dryad tongue, understood by dryads only with effort, and they also know the tongues of dwarves, satyrs, korred, galeb duhr, and stone and mountain giants.

Peaceful by choice, oreads turn furious when miners, quarrymen, woodcutters or builders intrude. Stony fists deal 1d6, but magic is their real weapon.

Her daily song of stone is a sound like a racing brook, wind in branches and tumbling scree all at once. Every listener must save vs. spell at -3 or be charmed into a year of service. Dispel magic and remove curse cannot break it; only limited wish or holy word will. The servant would gladly die for her. Most keep one servant at a time and may let a pleading family ransom him early.

As a 9th-level caster she can use stoneskin, stone tell and stone shape once each per day, and she may dimension door to any point on her mountain thrice daily. Melding into stone is at will; once inside the rock she may simply emerge when the meld ends, or glide through solid stone as easily as a fish through water and surface elsewhere, leaving no tunnel or trace.

Favored tactics are ambushes on a foe's regular paths: the oreads hide in the rock and leap out as he passes, surprising on 1-7 on 1d10. Mountain goats, mountain lions and snow leopards visit them as free companions, and the lonely oreads defend them to the death.

Each oread is bound to one peak, free to roam it but never more than 500 yards past its foot. A mountain cannot die, so she cannot die with it, but mining, logging and magical erosion hurt her.

Up to four, usually related, may meet in a valley ringed by peaks, which natives of the plane of passion say is why neighboring mountains are called sisters. About once a century an oread may raise a daughter by an indifferent satyr or korred father; the girl looks like a korred until puberty at 19, when her wild hair and goat hooves fade. Sons are satyrs who grow up fast and leave.

Oreads eat minerals, especially clear gems like quartz, topaz, emerald, sapphire and diamond, and boldly ask visitors for stones they fancy. Metal jewelry pleases them, but they never eat metal. They get on well with satyrs, dryads, korred, galeb duhr and most faerie folk, and loathe every mining race, chiefly dwarves, gnomes, goblins, pech and xorn. Teasing sylphs are their rivals.

Snowhair are legendary elder oreads freed from a single peak to guard whole ranges, keepers of the race's lore with white hair, craggy faces and bodies stooped like eroded hills. A snowhair has 12 Hit Dice and casts earthquake weekly, while dig, animate rock, earthen grasp and part stone (part water, but for earth) are hers at will.

If gravely threatened or angered, usually by miners who ignore her warnings, a snowhair can petrify with a touch. A successful save makes the victim permanently immune to that snowhair; failure turns him into a boulder of about his size, curable only by stone shape plus stone to flesh.

Because they carry daughters off to their future peaks, snowhair are seen as bringers of sorrow, yet they are also the mountains' last defense, struggling to hold a peak in place when a planar shift threatens to drag it across a boundary. Serene and chatty, some act as proxies of the powers, and seven ancient snowhair reputedly guard the mountain realm of the gods.