The Beast Fears Fire - Trollwives

Trollwives [Hardship 3]
Impulse - To Reach the Peaks

The Lahesians say it happens pretty rarely. Bigger settlements see it happen once a generation at most. One of the girls will start to feel a hunger and a strong sense of distraction. The hunger will grow over the course of a month or two and so will they, becoming big and strange, hard to look at directly, and hard to hear. Then the girl will head off toward the mountain tops and no one will ever see or hear from her again.

The Lahesians blame this phenomenon on the Sandrisas, and on that aspect, they are united. The question of why this happens and what becomes of the girls so taken are issues on which they are split. The older story is that they become strong and tough enough to take trolls as husbands and spend their lives in high caves birthing and rearing new trolls, hence their most commonly used name (this name is independent of belief in that fate). This story doesn't carry a lot of water given that though trolls seem to have deep voices and occasional rooty beards (and usually go by male pronous), they are sexless, and claim that no new trolls have been born in a very long time. Other hypotheses include the girls becoming dry prophets, sandrisas in their own rights, founding their own, undiscovered mountaintop communities or disappearing into the wind.

Whatever they become, by the time a girl has become a trollwife, it is very hard to perceive her directly, let alone interact with her. Trollwives look a lot like young women, big and strange and cloaked in a shimmer like convection currents off a stove. Looking directly at a trollwife causes tremendous eyestrain, dizziness, vomiting and fatigue. Trollwives don't show any interest in communicating with people or, really, much of anything other than heading toward the mountain tops. They are incredibly strong, particularly in the case of jumping and climbing, and have almost inexhaustible supplies of energy.

Harm 2/Peril [Blind] Trollwives don't get aggressive unless you try to impede their progress toward their goal or imprison them, at which point they will waste as little time and energy as they can clearing the impediment and continuing their journey. It is possible to kill a Trollwife, but there's no evidence that their fate is worse than death (unless they do become dry prophets), so attacking one seems like a matter of piling pointless tragedy on pointless tragedy. Also, their eye-stinging aura is strong protection against most things.

Watching You Without Me
When you want to keep your eyes on a trollwife, face Hardship
On a Hit, you can keep knowledge of her location.
On a Hard Hit, you can keep your eyes on her, and get +1 Hit forward on anything you attempt involving her.
On a Miss, you go blind for an hour or two and get the worst headache you have ever had.

Don't bother trying to find her
No one knows how or why this happens. In the early stage of transformation, girls with awareness of what's happening to them find the prospect terrifying. The process takes from 7 to 14 days from when it's first apparent to witnesses. The Lahesians claim there is a way to halt the transformation, early in the process, but the knowledge didn't come out of Lahey with any of its refugees. Anyone who could discover or find this remedy could stand to gain a lot of regard, if nothing else, from the families that live on the lower slopes of the mountain. Also, those who live around its base. Foothill communities have started to lose girls to the mountains as well, as the ice has started to recede and people (and things) come down from the mountain.