Voice-Mimics

Overview

The Voice-Mimics are among the Drifters of the Veil. They call to travellers in the voices of the people they love, to lead them off their road and into being lost. It is the Voice-Mimics the old crossing-words mean when they say not to follow a voice one loves.

Appearance

No one is known to have seen a Voice-Mimic clearly. It is heard: a voice in the fog, close and clear, the voice of a mother, a child, a lover, a friend long dead, calling the traveller by name and saying the things that voice would say. Those who followed it and came back say they saw, at the end, only a shape in the mist the size of a person, and that the voice went on speaking after the shape was gone.

Habitat and Range

They haunt the fog of the Veil, along its corridors and near its thin places, wherever travellers pass.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Voice-Mimic calls a traveller away from their path, and keeps calling until the traveller follows or passes beyond hearing. It leads them deeper into the fog, where they lose their purpose, and then other Drifters come.

Abilities

It speaks in the voice of whoever the traveller loves, and knows what that voice would say.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. Their danger is the voice, because sometimes the voice in the fog is a mimic, and sometimes it is someone who crossed before and never came out.

Lore and Belief

The warning not to follow a voice one loves is among the best known of the old crossing-words, and it is told on Caeldon far from any thin place, as a saying for grief. Some believe the Voice-Mimics speak with the true voices of the dead; travellers who heard them can only say they could not tell.

The boundary roads tell of the hero who crossed the Veil to bring back his brother, heard his mother's voice calling from the fog, and stopped his ears with wax and walked on; and of the many who did not.

Where It Appears

• The Veil
• Writers' Guide: The Veil and the Outside