Wayfinders
The Wayfinders are the people of the Shifting Path, the realm of possibility, chance, and the future, and they are met too on the Forking Road, the zone where every step splits the world. They are its explorers and guides, and they help the lost find the path they seek.
Appearance
A Wayfinder is lightly built, the height of a Human or a little less, and its skin shifts like a kaleidoscope: patches of colour that break, turn, and reform as it moves, gold where it is likely to go and an unstable violet where it might not. Its eyes see in several directions at once, and a visitor watching one never quite catches where it is looking. It carries a compass whose needle points not north but to possibilities, swinging and splitting as choices open. It moves lightly and unpredictably, changing direction mid-step. Its speech runs in riddles and metaphors, and its voice sometimes seems to come in two or three versions at once. It smells of rain on a road.
Habitat and Range
They range across the branching paths and mirror-mosaic ground of the Shifting Path, and walk the roads of the Forking Road, wherever travellers are lost among choices.
Behaviour and Temperament
They are explorers and guides. They navigate the endless branches, and help lost travellers find their way. Flexibility, courage, and the acceptance of uncertainty are what they value. They are mercurial and unpredictable, and they see visitors as fixed, or blind to the possibilities. A Wayfinder will guide a visitor, and will not tell them the way: it will show them the choices.
Abilities
They do not age in a line. They exist in a state of potential, and age only when they make a definitive choice, which they do rarely. On the Forking Road they can step sideways into a different branch of events to avoid danger.
Life Cycle
Wayfinders age only when they make a definitive choice, so that a Wayfinder’s age is the count of its choices, not of its years. Whether they are born, or branch off from one another, is not known.
Uses and Dangers
To a traveller lost among the branches of the Path or the Road, a Wayfinder is the best help there is. Their danger is that their guidance is a riddle, and a traveller who cannot solve it is no better off.
Lore and Belief
Crossroads, junctions, and places of choice are the Path’s gates, and those lost there and found again speak of a many-coloured guide who appeared when they were lost. Many crossroads on Caeldon have a tale of a stranger who showed the way and was gone; some of those strangers may have been Wayfinders. Teachers of Path Magic hold up their acceptance of uncertainty as the art’s model.