Anathea

The Pearlcatchers of the Southern Icefield are accustomed – some say numbed – to loss. Harsh winds and sheets of dagger-sharp frost claim the young, sick and elderly. Scarcity is normal.
So, when Anathea’s first beloved mate fell prey to the cold, she accepted her fate. After all, he had left her with a single egg. One egg clear as glass that glowed like the moon.
Anathea took her pearl and the egg everywhere with her, and constantly kept it close to her bosom.
But one frigid night, it grew far darker and colder than usual. The racing winds of the Evenfall Blizzard battered Anathea until she lost consciousness. When she awoke, her egg was cracked.
Then her clan was awakened by Anathea’s wailing. Her keen grief rivaled the dying winds for volume. Her pearlescent tears specked her body like stars. So great was Anathea’s grief that she nearly went blind.
At last, her clan met another roving clan – both on the road, seeking some place warmer. The wise woman of that clan took Anathea’s tear-soaked paw and whispered, “If you go deep onto the Icefield’s frigid plains, you may meet your daughter again.”
Anathea’s clan told her it was folly, but Anathea turned back at once, and set out across the ice.
As she wandered, she was visited by ghosts and spirits. Sometimes she thought they were her eyes playing tricks on her, weary of the diamond-glint of the snow. Other times she thought she saw a ghostly impression of her first love, leading her ever onward.
Then one night she crouched on the thick ice on the fringes of the ocean and felt it rumble beneath her feet.
A dark Spiral suddenly heaved into view right before her– one with the same eerie pale eyes of Anathea's beloved lost love- eyes that could only belong to one other.
Wresting her daughter back from the depths of darkness and oblivion, she told her daughter her name, and watched as she took her first breath; a second birth, a rebirth.
With an unfamiliar sense of pure joy rising in her heart, Anathea took the Spiral in her arms and murmured, “Let’s go somewhere warm. I don’t want to lose you again.”

Anathea's daughter Nathyrra is the most important thing in her life. Anathea might be quite distant and maudlin, seeming very apathetic at times to others' suffering since she is so used to it by now herself- their grief is accepted with a grim lack of surprise. Anathea's eyesight is poor, but she can sing (often funeral dirges) with impressive volume and heartbreaking emotion, expressing more when she sings than she does when she speaks, which is far less often.
Anathea hates winter, and ice, since it took away everything she loved. She absolutely refuses to perform ice-based magic, regardless of her bloodright, and seeing frost creep across the ground in winter gives her such severe flashbacks that she spends all of winter curled up as close to the fires of the clan's forge as she can, soaking up the warmth, glaring into the heart of the fire, blocking out all thought of the tendrils of frost creeping over sleeping eggs.

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Anathea collects and crafts candles, lanterns, sources of light. She hates the dark, and the cold. Too many memories, never enough tears.

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