Mirevein

The Mirevein is a drowned bride whose death was witnessed by a handful of coastal villages and few surviving sailors. Some stories claim she was betrayed by a ship's captain who stole her dowry and left her on the pier; other tales suggest she leapt to spare a lover from scandal. Whatever the truth, the grief of her end soured into a hunger that twisted her into an undead thing. Her haunt is tied to the pier where her life ended, and the sea that took her works as both cradle and conduit for her powers. Local shrines and superstitious piers bear offerings—coins hammered into the wood, a token ribbon, a small carved boat—to mask a pier from her attention. The scholarly society of the Black Keel (a group of maritime antiquarians) has chronicled sightings and preserved a tattered veil they say once belonged to the Mirevein; their lecturer, Master Halvor Drees, maintains that the creature can be bound with salt and the naming of her true family, though none in recent memory have succeeded. Coastal watchmen whisper of a cult called the Somber Anchors who try to harvest her grief for necromantic rites, but her tie to living sorrow resists being so conveniently harnessed.

A gaunt, human-sized female figure in a waterlogged wedding gown that clings in layers like kelp. Her hair is long and dark, streaked with algae and barnacle-like growths, plastered across a face whose skin has the translucent pallor of shallow grave silt. The dress's lace has turned into filigreed seaweed and rusted ringlets of metal; one sleeve is gone, revealing an arm where bone shows through slick, fleshless fingers that end in blackened, driftwood nails. Her eyes are glassy and pale, rimmed with salt like dried tears. The hem of her dress is fringed with small shells and fishing hooks. When she moves, a thin mist of brine and drifting feathers-like tissue hangs in the air; behind her, the planks of a pier are often slick with darkened patches of seaweed and a faint, circular discoloration where she has stood for years.