Miray
Miray Ruba Mata Biru, Miray as she is more simply called, is a halfling woman grown and a druid, who goes about in the guise of a young boy the better to lose herself amongst the thronging streets of Constantinople. She has given herself over to the protection of the children of the Undercity, where she is known as a guardian who stands against the evil eye; and of so friendly a temper is she that she will speak freely of her charges, in words that betray a keen sense of vigilance and of duty.
In that protecting office she is celebrated besides as an alchemist, a woman of deep communion with nature and no small magical gift. She carries a quarterstaff quickened by the spell Shillelagh, which lends her the greater force in a fight, and she draws upon her druidic powers — chief among them Moonbeam, a radiant mist that deals grievous hurt to her enemies. In a recent affray she closed first with an undead priest, striking at it with her empowered staff, though the blow told but partially; she then called down Moonbeam upon an armed man to considerable effect, and, as the fray grew hotter, shifted the beam onto a vampire that had risen, so working at the last its destruction. Her wanderings have carried her too into a hidden chamber, where she knew a viscous black liquid for a potion of necrotic resistance and confessed an interest in scorpion parts for her alchemical labours; and having quit the underground place, she lent her hand to appraising the company's plunder, confirming the worth of sundry artifacts and items.
There is in her, moreover, the whole spirit of a Turkish urchin of ten years, one Ahmet by name — a courier for his family's laundry, who threads the city with a mingling of innocence and ambition, fired by the valour of his father and his elder brother. Ahmet dreams of becoming a Janissary, an ambition that troubles his mother, Fatima; his adventures have brought him to a dig site in the Dardanelles, where he turns his hand to menial tasks and rises to the graver moments with a resourcefulness beyond his years. Of late Ahmet fell to investigating disturbances at a cemetery in the close company of Sidra al-Najjar, where he showed his knowledge of folklore in the matter of the Scavengers, those mischievous fae who deal in small troubles; he parleyed with the Scavengers and confirmed them for the very "evil spirits" the gravekeeper had come to dread. Having discovered the fae's cache of wine, Ahmet and Sidra fell foul of an Invisible Attacker, and in the fierce battle that followed he put his fighting craft and his tactical sense to the guarding of his companion and the undoing of the threat.
Ahmet's singular look and quiet feet let him melt into any company, and he is forward to take a hand where circumstance demands. His druid's art has shown him now as a black fox with a blue shine in its eyes, all agility and stealth, and now as a great monitor lizard fit to cross the rooftops. Among his labours was the healing of a young tiefling named Shehrazat, stricken with the blood rot — though a rebound in the working loosed a burst of fire upon him and upon others present. He means to seek out other druids for their aid, and has named in particular Cyrus, a dwarf and bead-craftsman, and Deniz, a druid known only in the shape of a goat, who tends an oasis of the Undercity.
In one notable turn, Miray inhabited a runaway girl at a campfire, where an older boy came and heard her out as she owned to having been cast out for her magic; he pressed a square of paper into her hand and bade her use it to reach him in the city before he departed into the dark. Come the morning, the group compared their dreams, and Miray drew the sigil from memory, contriving a convincing likeness of it. At Osman's Library she covertly cut the string about the neck of Ashraf the tortoise to get at a small key, and re-tied it so deftly that he never marked the theft. Later, whilst examining a Coastal Manor Garden, she summoned a storm and called the lightning down upon two shadowy, half-corporeal Janissary soldiers, wounding both; and in that fight she restored Gizem with healing magic and stanched the slow bleeding-away of her strength, then raised her again after a shadow's draining stroke had overcome her.
More recently still, Miray studied a soldier's likeness in a submerged mirror and knew it for the look of a warrior of the Mongol age. She glimpsed a Bichura that vanished when Sidra slapped at it. A weakened boardwalk gave way beneath her and dropped her into spiked water, yet she came clear of the spikes, struck back afterward from the platform's edge though she failed to connect, and crossed the broken stretch to safety. When a remaining Merrow came at her with a harpoon, she loosed discordant whispers that wounded it and drove it off; she then wild-shaped into a crocodile and plunged toward the mirror, slipping past two marrows, and though mauled hard enough to break the crocodile's shape, kept her head above the shallow, drained water and struck the fleeing Merrow once more with those same whispers. She was badly burned besides when a cursed keyring caused a door to burst apart in Greek fire.
Through all these trials Miray Ruba Mata Biru continues to embody the double nature of a protector and a curious young wanderer, given at once to the safeguarding of the innocent and to the exploring of the mysteries of her world.