The Miskatin

**The Miskatin** is a specific Unseelie miskatin that Mosk Manytrees and Eran Iliakambar encounter during *The Ice Plague: Book 1 - The Forest of Fire*. Pronouns used are it/its.

## Appearance

The Miskatin is a horned creature with an eldritch face and an unnaturally long and crooked mouth that has teeth like tombstones. It has a forked tongue. Its steps are shambling, strange, and stilted, with overly long arms and long claws that are long enough to slide deep into flesh. Its eyes are described as animal-bright and lacking any real emotion, with oval pupils. Its thighs, calves, and feet are covered with a shaggy fur with bits of bone knotted into it. 'Its breath smelled of fetid decay, as though it ate not only carrion, but [also] excrement. Its eyes lacked any real emotion, each tooth unevenly placed in its gums.'

Miskatin have bones in their throat that they can rub together, which create a rattling sound. The Miskatin uses this when it is distressed. The rest of the time, its voice was marked with a distinctive hissing.

## Personality

The Miskatin is a predator who hunts fae to eat them, but has the peculiar habit of calling its prey its 'friends', indicating a need to seek bonds with other fae, perhaps due to the trauma it endured. Despite being initially friendly, it is cruel, sadistic, malicious, and easily frustrated, and its eyes depict no real emotion outside of hunger.

## Life

When it was first made, the other miskatin said that the Miskatin was aberrant, and hissed and cruelly poked and prodded at the Miskatin. The miskatin then pack-raped the Miskatin to make it go away.

The Miskatin hunts prey by leaving its lampposts strategically located through a dark forest. Anyone who strays into the path of light becomes targeted as its next victim. Mosk and Eran end up targeted because of this, and are trapped by the Miskatin while they sleep. The Miskatin then takes them to the Miskatin's cavern and chains them to a giant fireplace, as the Miskatin insists they are going to be friends. It becomes clear to Eran that they are going to be eaten/cannibalised by the fae, and that this is its version of 'friendship'.

Eran uses his fire abilities to melt Mosk's manacle, which allows the Aur dryad to escape. As the Miskatin begins tormenting Eran in preparation for putting him in a pot to cook him, Mosk returns and uses the geas Olphix placed on him to access another fae's worst memories to tell the Miskatin's worst memory back to it. This disturbs the Miskatin so much that it flees, allowing Mosk and Eran to escape.

## Special Abilities

### Fae Abilities

All miskatin have the ability to create artificial light sources - almost always modeled on human made objects like chandeliers, lampposts or similar - that cast bright pools of light in their preferred dark hunting grounds. Any prey that touches the light for refuge or guidance allows the Miskatin to hunt them. The Miskatin that Mosk and Eran encounter uses lampposts that can move of their own accord.

#### Magic

The Miskatin makes Mosk's metal chain 'split into two, much finer chains', which it uses to drag the two fae along after capturing them.

## Relationships

### Other miskatin

When Mosk relates the Miskatin's worst memory back to it, he learns that the miskatin likely gang-raped the Miskatin due to it being an aberrant member of its kind, though Mosk never finds out why it's aberrant. Sex is not a normal part of their culture, and the act was profoundly traumatic: an act of repudiation. Since then, unlike other miskatin, the Miskatin in *The Ice Plague: Book 1 - The Forest of Fire* hunts alone.

## Quotations

* ‘Have you found something, my precious darlings? . . . I get so lonely in this forest, and here I have found myself some new friends.’
* ‘Yes,’ the creature hissed. ‘We are going to be such good friends. I have made so many friends in this cavern, but no one stays.’

## Trivia

* The miskatin are an invented species of fae, and do not exist in any folklore or mythology.
* Mosk says that the stories and fairy tales around miskatin never end well, indicating that fae have their own folklore about certain species of fae.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 not\_poignant. “The Ice Plague: Book 1 - The Forest of Fire.” *The Fae Tales Verse. Archive of Our Own,* 19 January 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12036105/chapters/30758403. Chapter 13: Captured.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 not\_poignant. “The Ice Plague: Book 1 - The Forest of Fire.” *The Fae Tales Verse. Archive of Our Own,* 12 February 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12036105/chapters/31092864. Chapter 14: Breaking Apart.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 not\_poignant. “The Ice Plague: Book 1 - The Forest of Fire.” *The Fae Tales Verse. Archive of Our Own,* 7 January 2018. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12036105/chapters/30419052. Chapter 12: Empty Whispers.
4. ↑ not\_poignant. “The Ice Plague: Book 3 - The Ice Plague.” *Fae Tales Verse. Archive of Our Own,* 17 December 2020. https://archiveofourown.org/works/26266345/chapters/68919276. Chapter 9: Oswal-Tay.