Muse-Spirits

Overview

The Muse-Spirits are among the Phantasms of the Dreaming Veil: manifestations of longing and creation that inspire whoever they touch and grant visions of art or invention.

Appearance

A Muse-Spirit takes the shape of what the dreamer most wants to make: a figure woven of half-finished music, a bird whose wings are drafts of a building, a dancer whose steps leave paintings in the air. Its colours are bright and changeable, and it is always moving, never still enough to see whole. Laughter in the Dreaming Veil sounds like wind chimes, and a Muse-Spirit is accompanied by something like it. It smells of fresh paint, cut wood, or the night air at an open window.

Habitat and Range

They drift through the Dreaming Veil, drawn to dreamers who long to make something, and gather where many have dreamed the same work.

Behaviour and Temperament

They act on instinct, like all Phantasms. A Muse-Spirit drawn to a dreamer circles them, shows them the thing they long to make, and goes, and it does not care whether the dreamer is ready for the vision. It cannot be summoned to order.

Abilities

It grants visions of art or invention: a melody heard whole, a design seen complete, a solution to a problem worked on for years. The vision may be carried into waking, though it comes back reshaped.

Uses and Dangers

Artists and inventors come to the Dreaming Veil for breakthroughs, and the Muse-Spirits are what they hope to meet. Their danger is obsession: some who have had one vision spend the rest of their lives trying to have another, and some lose the line between the dream and the work.

Lore and Belief

Many crafts on Caeldon have a saying about the night the idea came, and some of those nights may have been Muse-Spirits. Some faiths give the credit to a god of art; the Muse-Spirit is a being of the Dreaming Veil, not a god.

Where It Appears

• The Dreaming Veil
• Writers' Guide: The Planes