Niade

Pronunciation: niah-DAY

Common Title: The Doom-Maiden

Classification: High Boziom, Reflective Class (Emotive / Rhythmic Entity)

Overview

The Niade is one of the most feared and elusive of all Boziom. It does not attack with claw or flame but rather with erosion; consuming sanity, dignity, and belonging over weeks or months until its victim is hollowed from within. Its touch makes the body feel like a tomb and the heart a drum echoing with dread.

Habitat & Manifestation

Niade are most often recorded near watered lands; riverbanks, tidal estuaries, or coastal trade routes where grief has lingered long enough to gain shape. It manifests through still water: a mirror, basin, or puddle that reflects more than it should.

The entity’s earliest reports date to the western coastal routes, where canoe-folk and caravan traders mingled with fishing villages. There, amid salt and sorrow, the first Niade was said to have risen from drowned grief; a spirit birthed by lamentation and ritual song.

Behavior & Nature

Patient and Intimate

A Niade feeds not on flesh but on the slow breakdown of mind and community. It lingers in one soul for months, savoring each fragment of unraveling self.

Emotional Legacy

It chooses victims with inherited wounds; ancestral guilt, family secrets, or the grief of the unspoken dead. It feeds upon intergenerational sorrow, amplifying it until it dominates waking life.

Rhythmic Sensitivity

The Niade moves and feeds by rhythm. When near, ordinary sounds distort: footsteps misalign, a song’s beat falters, and one’s heartbeat syncs to an unnatural pulse. This irregular throb, mournful and syncopated, is the Niade’s signature.

Symptoms of Possession

1. Personalized Doom-Field: An unshakable sense of impending calamity. Thought slows; the chest feels heavy, as though the world itself mourns through the body.
2. Hallucinatory Overlay: The afflicted begin to perceive subtle distortions: faces a shade too long, reflections lagging, doorways that seem to breathe. Reality folds in small increments until trust in perception dissolves.
3. Public Madness Signature: To onlookers, the victim appears mad; muttering, laughing without cause, weeping into empty air. The Niade feeds on this social death, delighting in humiliation and isolation.
4. Water-Mirror Trigger: A Niade first breaches the waking world through reflection. The night before its full arrival, victims often glimpse a second silhouette within their own; a faint watcher behind the glass.

Cultural Accounts

Local fishermen, traders, and song-priests along Afros’ western coasts tell of “the Maiden beneath the Mirror,” a water-spirit that steals shame and turns it into madness. Shrines to ward her away still stand on headlands and river mouths, marked with iron charms and salted offerings.

Sister Aline of the Drowned Choir (5th Age chronicler) claimed the Niade was not a demon but a “rhythmic echo of human sorrow,” an accidental creation of grief itself, born when too many mourners sang in unison to the tide.

Appearance (if glimpsed)

The Niade is never seen whole. Survivors report a hunched crone in reflection; her head crowned with reeds or antlers of salt-stone; rarely seen in the form of a young maiden standing on the shoreline, still and watching. The reflection always moves first.

Detection & Countermeasures

Water-Basin Test:

Place a shallow basin of clean water mixed with sea-salt beside the bed. If the water darkens or the salt clumps black by morning, a Niade is near. The water must then be sealed in a glass bottle, refilled with fresh salt, and buried at the mouth of a river while invoking one’s ancestors.
(Never hang these bottles in trees; the Niade escapes easily and may free other captured Boziom.)

Disruptive Rhythm:

Irregular rhythm is the Niade’s weakness. Off-beat clapping, uneven stomping, or discordant drumming disturbs its pattern and loosens its psychic grip. The afflicted may gain one night’s rest through this act.

Material Hooks:

Wearing small iron trinkets or mesin-steel amulets etched with rhythmic notches helps anchor the victim’s mind to the body. It prevents total disassociation and weakens the Niade’s influence over thought.

Ritual Practice

Rite of the Drowned Heart (Amulet of Protection)

Hold the iron in your palm until it warms with your pulse. Whisper:

Thread a black cord through the charm and speak:

Lower the charm into salted water until the ripples still. If the metal darkens or salt crusts its edge, the Niade’s rhythm has been repelled. Remove it at dawn and wear it close to the heart.
Should it ever turn cold or slick to the touch, the Niade has found your scent again; the rite must be renewed before the next tide.