Bestiary

The many-handed, many-faced entity known as Mask hovers in the shadows of his mage’s perceptions, floating slightly above the ground and stretching his slender limbs into impossible lengths and contortions. His ever-shifting features recall African “false faces,” indigenous medicine masks, stone gargoyles from western Europe, painted noh and kabuki faces, leather masques from Renaissance Italy, plastic monsters, and sculpted glass. Eerily thin and apparently boneless, Mask urges his mage onward with eloquent gestures and whispered instructions. Occasionally, he mocks his human host, chiding that person for cowardice or timidity. Most often, though, Mark simply watches, silent, with a vague air of disapproval.

Never will Mask reveal himself in bright, clear light. Instead, he moves within shadows, emerging and melting back into darkness. Although clearly masculine in form, Mask

achieves inhuman proportions of height, mass, and flexibility. Like smoke, he seethes, restless even when his limbs remain still. The mask faces from which he draws his name merge and melt into one another, presenting three, five, a dozen faces all surging and bleeding into one another, settling into a consistent form, and then melding again into some other vivid guise.

Despite a decidedly sinister appearance and uncanny atmosphere, Mask prefers to encourage, not intimidate, his host. Once you get used to him, he can seem almost friendly in an ominous way. Mask revels in creativity, too; his hosts are always artists of one sort or another. His protean form encourages a mage to seek new possibilities and reshape her world. In Seekings, Mask bends the landscape into bizarre and haunting vistas wherein nothing feels safe, comfortable, or complete. Like the Primordial energies he embodies, Mask reflects endless potential and shifting possibilities — recog­ nizable yet ultimately mercurial, too fluid to be bound and yet too solid to fade away.