The Gatherer "Nefkauptari"

The Gatherer (Nefkauptari)

“She is the blade, the hand, and the toll.”

Role in the Cult of the Píslarvottar

The Nefkauptari is not a priestess, but something older, a vessel of ritual, chosen to harvest death. Appointed to serve for seven years, she is the only member of the Píslarvottar allowed to handle the poisonous flora used in the kynslóð's final sacrament. Her purpose is sacred: to gather and craft the Gatekeeper’s Tribute, the poison used in the mass ritual suicides of the devout.

Selection & Preparation

• The Nefkauptari is chosen at age 5 ár (32 Earth years), a sacred number tied to the fifth breath of Leann’s lost children.
• She must be of pure blood, a direct descendant of one of the seven surviving Witnesses who first interpreted the Gatekeeper’s words.
• Once chosen, she undergoes ten weeks of bodily silence, consuming only bitter root-water while being tattooed with the Thrice-Bound Knot across her spine, symbolizing silence, service, and sacrifice.

Appearance

• Hair: Shorn entirely on selection, regrown naturally and uncut, her hair is never touched by hands or tools. It often reaches past her hips, unbound and ash grey from the constant exposure to alkaloid steam and smoke.
• Eyes: Clouded slightly from exposure to aconite vapors; described as “seeing beyond but not within.”
• Skin: Pallid, marked by faint blue veins from years of handling toxic substances.
• Marking: A line of deep scarification down the sternum, called The Toll Line, believed to mark her as already “half beyond.”

Personality & Beliefs

• Speaks rarely, often through a ceremonial scribe or in recited scripture only.
• Believes herself to be a servant of balance, not a killer, each life taken is a weight lifted from the world’s debt.
• Maintains ritual purity by never touching food, books, or people directly. She eats with ivory chopsticks, sleeps on bare stone, and prays by pressing her face into ash.

Duties & Rituals

• Harvests the Four Plants each midwinter at the high crescent of the Dark Moon, barefoot and robed in winter black linen.
• Mixes the poison under guarded conditions with her own hands, never using tools for binding, her flesh must touch the extract for it to “receive the soul.”
• Leads the kynslóð into the sanctuary chamber, recites the Veil Verse, and delivers the final libation herself.

End of Service

1. Voluntary death: many choose to drink the poison themselves.
2. Chosen by the Gatekeeper: those who show signs of madness or prophetic vision are “taken into the earth,” entombed alive beneath the House of the Toll.

Symbolic Role

To the Píslarvottar, she is the toll paid in flesh, the bridge between life and the Gatekeeper.
To outsiders, she is often viewed with horror. A woman saturated in poison, whose hands are death, whose breath carries myth.

“She does not gather flowers. She gathers moments, each one sharpened to a fatal bloom.”

Gathering Rites

• Dawn of the Dark Moon: the Nefkauptari leaves the village to the grove where the four sacred plants grow in near-mythic congregation.
• Before harvesting, she performs the Ritual of the Trembling Hand, reciting:
  “Gatekeeper, whose scales weigh breath and bone, accept these blossoms as coin for the lives given to us by her mercy.”
• Each plant is cut with a ceremonial silver blade, laid in individual silken pouches, and returned to the temple house by midday.
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Aftermath

• She begins the alchemy process for the communal poison: her palm smear binding the soul of the substance to the cult itself.
• For the next two days, she fasts and remains under guard until the first kynslóð in the year performs their final rites with her concoction.
• Once the last sip is administered, she leads the burial chants that close the door on their lives and feed the legend of the Gatekeeper’s Stern Bargain.

The Gatekeeper’s Tribute (Sjárhausinn): a ritual poison

Ingredients & Mythic Significance

1. Larkspur (Delphinium draconis) – blossoms symbolize the “drifting between lifetimes.” Their petals are the poison’s bitter base.
2. Aconite (Aconitum noctis) – “Death’s whisper.” A small amount creates the core neurotoxin.
3. Clematis (Clematis mortis) – tendrils represent entanglement with fate; they amplify paralysis and slow the heart.
4. Hydrangea (Hydrangea umbra) – petals used to bind the other poisons; they also deepen the color, stained like dried blood.
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Ritual Preparation

• Harvest Timing: All four must be foraged at dawn on the 7th day of the Dark Moon in midwinter, when Leann’s gateway is weakest and the veil between “this time” and “not time” is thinnest.
• Initial Infusion: Larkspur petals are steeped for seven hours in distillate of spring thorn water.
• Sequential Decoction:
• Add carefully measured aconite root shavings, stirred counter clockwise with an obsidian rod.
• Next, clematis vines are slowly simmered; the brew turns viscous.
• Binding & Blessing: Hydrangea petals are smashed into a paste and kneaded in by hand, bearing the gatherer’s branded palm imprint, while chanting the Gatekeeper’s name in Old Nektarefni.
• Rest: The final mixture rests for three cycles of moonrise in a sealed jade urn.
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Effect & Use

• Taken willingly by each kynslóð at age 7 ár (~45 Earth years).
• Causes gentle paralysis followed by cardiac arrest within the hour, seen as a passage to “the place out of time.”
• Leaving the body unmarked preserves the soul to pay its dues at the threshold.

This poison and its gatherer embody the Píslarvottar’s most extreme devotion: enforcing silence, sacrifice, and tiny sacrifices of their own flesh to appease a cosmic debt in the name of strict orthodoxy.