Mother Sable, the Hollow Choir

Level 6 Human Cleric (Knowledge Domain)

Available with DM subscription

STR

8 (-1)

DEX

12 (+1)

CON

15 (+2)

INT

WIS

16 (+3)

CHA

14 (+2)

Defense

Armor Class 13 (Unarmoured (robe of the scriptorium; 10 + Dex))

Hit Points 45 (6d8 + 9 +2)

Speed 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws wisdom, charisma

Skills History +3, Insight +6, Stealth +4, Religion +3, Sleight of hand +4

Features

Erasure of Scripture

custom Level 6

ritual, 10 minutes

With calligrapher's supplies, scraped originals, and 10 minutes of uninterrupted work, Sable can permanently render a written magical effect inert: a scroll is destroyed, a carved rite is scraped blank, or the Expurgated Codex itself can be silenced for 24 hours (it cannot be read aloud, and its pages refuse ink). Breaking the ritual requires dealing her damage or a DC 15 Arcana check to disrupt.

Channel Divinity: Abjure Foes

class Level 2

1/short rest

As a Magic action, Sable presents her holy symbol and targets up to two creatures (Charisma modifier, minimum one) within 60 feet. Each must succeed on a DC 14 Wisdom save or be frightened for 1 minute or until it takes damage. While frightened this way, a target can do only one of the following on its turns: move, take an action, or take a bonus action.

Dark Bargain (Blackmail Web)

custom Level 6

scene, social

Sable holds blackmail on two members of the King's council and pays Halvard Crane of Greyharbor. In any social or legal scene in Lordinium or Greyharbor, she can produce a writ, a watch sergeant, or a sealed order as an action to obstruct, detain, or expel the party. This is not a spell and cannot be counterspelled.

The Ledger of Names

custom Level 6

at will

Sable knows the name, family, and debts of every person she has met, and can recall any fact she has written in her ledgers without a check. When she addresses a creature by the full name it was given at birth, that creature has disadvantage on its first saving throw against her enchantment spells.

Mind Reading (Read Thoughts)

subclass Level 6

1/long rest

As a Magic action, Sable can read the surface thoughts of one creature she can see within 60 feet for up to 1 minute (Concentration). The target makes a DC 14 Wisdom save; on a failure she learns its current surface thoughts and can use its telepathic link to cast Suggestion without components.

Ring the Cathedral Bells

custom Level 6

1/day

As an action, Mother Sable rings the Cathedral's bells. Every member of the Hollow Choir and every lay faithful within a mile is summoned to her position, arriving in waves of 2d4 Cultists and 1d4 Priests per round for 3 rounds. Once used, the bells cannot be rung again for 24 hours.

Channel Divinity: Knowledge of the Ages

class Level 2

1/short rest

As a Magic action, Sable gains proficiency in one skill or tool of her choice for 10 minutes and has advantage on checks using it. She typically chooses Deception or Persuasion in social scenes.

Blessings of Knowledge

subclass Level 1

Sable knows two languages of her choice (Old Tongue and Concord Trade-Cant) and gains proficiency with her History and Religion skills, which she has Expertise in.

Spellcasting

wisdom DC 14 +6 to hit Level 1: 4 slots Level 2: 3 slots Level 3: 3 slots

Prepared spells = 6 (WIS +3, level 3) plus Knowledge domain spells (Command, Suggestion always prepared; Bless and Augury domain-granted). Sable keeps Augury unprepared in play but uses it as a ritual off-screen. At the scriptorium she opens with Sanctuary and Silence; in the Cathedral she opens with the bells.

Sacred Flame

Cantrip cleric

evo 1 action 60 ft. V, S

Flame-like radiance descends on a creature you can see within range. Dexterity save DC 14 or take 2d8 radiant damage; cover does not protect.

Guidance

Cantrip cleric

div 1 action Touch V, S

Touch a willing creature; it gains a d4 to add to one ability check of its choice before the spell ends.

Thaumaturgy

Cantrip cleric

trs 1 action 30 ft. V

Manifest a minor wonder: booming voice, flickering candles, trembling doors, or bells that ring of their own accord. Sable uses this to make the Cathedral's bells toll softly during negotiations.

Command

Level 1 cleric (domain)

ench 1 action 60 ft. V

One creature must succeed on a Wisdom save (DC 14) or obey a one-word command such as 'Kneel', 'Silence', or 'Approach' on its next turn.

Bless

Level 1 cleric (domain)

ench 1 action 30 ft. V, S, M

Up to three creatures gain a d4 to attack rolls and saving throws for 1 minute (Concentration).

Sanctuary

Level 1 cleric

abj 1 bonus action 30 ft. V, S, M

For 1 minute, any creature that attacks Sable must first make a DC 14 Wisdom save or lose the attack and its action. She casts this habitually before negotiations go wrong.

Silence

Level 2 cleric

illusion 1 action 120 ft. V, S

A 20-foot-radius sphere of silence for 10 minutes (Concentration). No sound passes through it; verbal spells cannot be cast inside. Sable uses it to cut a caster out of the fight, and to 'silence the codex' during her ritual.

Hold Person

Level 2 cleric

ench 1 action 60 ft. V, S, M

One humanoid is paralysed for up to 1 minute (Concentration; Wisdom save DC 14 each turn to end). Sable holds the party's front-liner while the Choir closes.

Suggestion

Level 2 cleric (domain)

ench 1 action 30 ft. V, M

A creature that fails a DC 14 Wisdom save follows a reasonable course of action for up to 8 hours. Sable phrases her suggestions as clerical procedure: 'You will want to hand the book to a deacon.'

Dispel Magic

Level 3 cleric

abj 1 action 120 ft. V, S

Ends one spell effect on a creature or object, automatically ending spells of 3rd level or lower; higher-level spells require an ability check with her spellcasting ability (DC 10 + spell level).

Spirit Guardians

Level 3 cleric

conj 1 action Self (15-ft. radius) V, S, M

Spirits of scraped-down copyists swirl around Sable in a 15-foot radius for 10 minutes (Concentration). Creatures in the area take 3d8 radiant damage on a failed Dexterity save (half on success), and their speed is halved. The spirits whisper the names of the tithed.

Behind the character

Character Information

Mother Sable is a tall, unhurried woman of about sixty, in a grey scriptorium robe with ink-stained cuffs and a chain of office bearing twelve small bells and one broken thirteenth loop. Her white hair is pinned with a bone stylus; her hands are soft, stained with scraping-knife calluses, and always slightly damp from the washing basin where she cleans her tools. She carries a ledger bound in shark-skin under one arm and a hand-bell of black coral on a cord at her belt, and she walks through the Cathedral of the Twelve the way a good housekeeper walks through her own kitchen: without looking, without hurrying, knowing exactly which floorboard creaks.

She is warm. This is not a performance and it is not a mask; it is worse than either. She genuinely likes people. She remembers their names, their families, their debts, the birthday of their dead mother, and she offers tea from a chipped pot she has owned for forty years. She will explain, reasonably and correctly, why the codex must go back into the water, why the tithe must be paid, why the word 'prayer' is a better word than the word it replaced — and she will be right about most of it, which is the horror. There is no malice anywhere in her face. She has not raised her voice in eleven years.

Her cruelty is administrative. She does not hold the knife; she signs the schedule. She believes, sincerely, that erasing the rites from every copy of the scripture is the only thing standing between the Crown Coast and the end of the world, and that feeding eleven names a month to the Twelve is the small, sad price of that belief. She is Lawful Neutral in the way a tide table is: accurate, patient, and indifferent to drowning.

If she can be turned, it will not be by guilt — she has none left — but by evidence that her erasure has failed and that Vane is performing the rites anyway, which offends her as a vandal offends an archivist.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Mother Sable was born Maren Sableis, third daughter of a Salt Quarter rope-maker, and given to the Cathedral at nine years old because her family could not feed six children on what the tide left them. She was a clever child in a place that did not know what to do with clever girls, so the scriptorium took her. She learned to cut a quill before she learned to swim, and she learned to scrape vellum before she learned to pray, and by twenty she was the finest copyist on the Crown Coast, the one they gave the difficult commissions to.

The commission that changed her life was a private one: a dying archpriest asked her to prepare a funeral text and, reading over her shoulder, pointed at a line and said, quietly, 'That one is not true anymore. Take it out.' She took it out. Then she asked him which other lines were not true anymore, and he wept, and would not say, and died with the answer in his throat.

She found the answer herself, in the undercroft of an old smugglers' chapel that the Cathedral had absorbed and forgotten: a pre-Expurgation codex, water-stained but whole, naming the tithe of blood given at every turning of the tide. She read the rites whole. She understood at once that whoever read them whole might perform them, and that the Cathedral's long, slow, criminal kindness — three centuries of scraping — was the only wall between the Crown Coast and the thing in the northern fog.

She also understood that the Twelve required eleven names a month, and that the erasure and the feeding were the same office. She has never resolved this. She has stopped trying. She tells herself the ledger keeps the price small, and the knife keeps the price written, and that a warm, unhurried woman doing terrible bookkeeping is better than a zealous one doing none.

For thirty years she has run the Hollow Choir from a locked room above the scriptorium: copyists, clerks, harbour agents, quiet women with coral bells. She owns three Crown clerks and Halvard Crane of Greyharbor. She supplies the Ashvane Concord with names and receives salt-pearls she does not spend. She trains her people the way she trains a hand of writing: patiently, gently, with tea, and with the firm understanding that the question 'why' was answered before they were born.

When Wren Quill asked it aloud, Sable moved her to a windowless room and gave her a bell to hold, and considered it a kindness that she did not scrape the girl's name from the rolls. She keeps every scraped-down original in her locked room, because she cannot bring herself to burn them, and this — the archive of everything she has erased — is the single thread by which she can still be undone.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

The broken thirteenth loop on her chain of office: she broke it herself, thirty years ago, on the day she first read the tithe whole, and she has never repaired it or explained it to anyone, and one of her copyists has begun asking why.
A letter in her locked cabinet, sealed in wax, addressed to King Soleiman in her own hand, unsent for eleven years — it confesses everything, and she cannot decide whether it is insurance or a suicide note.
Mother Ulva of the Drowned Shrine was her initiate for eleven years and left without permission; Sable has never replaced the coral bell Ulva took, and the shrine's bell ringing unbidden means the tithe is unpaid somewhere she cannot see.
Old Hask sailed north as the Choir's pilot and came back with the Choir's purse and the Choir's silence — she has an agent watching him in the Salted Eel, and what Hask saw in the fog is something her own reports never covered.
The Choir's salt-pearl payments from the Ashvane Concord have stopped arriving, three months running, and Sable does not yet know it is because the Concord has stopped paying for names and started taking them.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

She was the hand that scraped the word 'tithe' from the original funerary text of Archbishop Coran thirty years ago — her first erasure was ordered by the Cathedral's own dying primate, who wept while she worked, and she has never told anyone that the Expurgation began as an act of mercy by a good man.
She knows the Thirteenth's name. She chiselled it from the Cathedral foundation stone herself, at twenty-nine, and she has never written it down, because a written name is a copy and copies can be read. It is the only secret she has kept perfectly.
Two of the eleven names on this month's tithe-schedule are the Quill siblings — she has been saving Wren and Tessaly Quill for the schedule since the day Wren walked out with a scraping knife in her sleeve, and she thinks of this as patience rather than vengeance.

What haunts them

Fears

That someone will read the rites whole and perform them — this fear has organized her entire life, and it is the only thing that can make her hands shake.
That the erasure has already failed and she simply does not know it — that Vane is performing the rites right now, in the north, with names she supplied, and that thirty years of scraping were the vandalism.
The water — she was a Salt Quarter child who never learned to swim, and the codex's proper place, as she tells everyone, is underwater. She has never once gone down into the flooded undercroft herself.

What drives them

Aspirations

To finish the erasure — to reach the day when no copy of the Borealis scripture anywhere on the Crown Coast contains the word 'tithe', and the rites exist only in her memory and the Twelve's.
To be forgiven without ever repenting — she wants Tessaly Quill, Wren Quill, and the families of the tithed to understand, someday, that she did it for them, and she wants this without changing a single thing she has done.
To die in the scriptorium — at her desk, with the tea cold and the last original closed and locked, in the room she has kept for thirty years, rather than in a crypt or a court or the water.

Personal quest · 1

The Locked Room Above the Scriptorium

Sable has kept every scraped-down original in her locked room for thirty years — the complete, unwritten history of the Expurgation, in her own hand, with dates. She has never burned them and cannot explain why. When the party corners her with proof that Vane performs the rites anyway, she must choose: destroy the archive and the proof with it, or unlock the cabinet and hand three centuries of evidence to her enemies.

Completing this quest requires her to open the cabinet — and if she does, she gives the party the names of every Choir agent on the coast, the original pre-Expurgation texts, and a confession that will hang her. The reward is her transformation from villain to witness: she loses the Choir, the bells, and the blackmail web, and gains the only thing she has wanted in thirty years — someone else holding the weight of the true text.

Current Stage

The party reaches the locked room with proof of Vane's rites. Sable, cornered above her own archive, must choose between the bells and the cabinet — between the Choir she built and the truth she has been hiding from herself for thirty years.

Choice

Sable refuses the cabinet and rings the bells instead, drowning the scriptorium in the faithful.

The bells ring, the faithful come, and Sable dies at her desk defending the archive — the ending she claims not to want.

Alternative

Sable opens the cabinet and hands over the originals.

She becomes a witness against Vane and the Choir, and the party gains the agent roster.

Mechanical Rewards

Sable permanently loses the feature 'Ring the Cathedral Bells' — the bells will not ring for her again.
Sable gains 'The Unscraped Word' (1/day): as an action, she can restore one erased or magically silenced written effect she can see, reversing her own signature ability.
The party receives the complete Choir agent roster for the Crown Coast and Greyharbor, and the original tithe-schedules in Sable's hand — hard proof usable against the Crown's corrupt clerks.

Narrative Rewards

The Cathedral's three centuries of scraped-down originals pass to the party or to Tessaly Quill's bindery, ending the Expurgation forever.
Sable's chain of office is reforged with the thirteenth loop repaired — the only apology she will ever make.

Personal quest · 2

The Eleventh Name

The Choir's tithe-schedule requires eleven names a month, and this month one name is unfilled. Sable's own arithmetic — the contradiction she stopped trying to resolve decades ago — comes due. She can fill the name from the parish rolls, take one of her own people who has begun asking questions, or leave the schedule short and let the fog thicken over Greyharbor. Whichever she chooses, the party can interfere: they can shelter the marked name, expose the schedule, or force the confrontation that makes her say aloud, for the first time in thirty years, what the eleven names are for. Completing this quest means Sable finally faces the arithmetic she has been hiding behind, and the answer changes what she is willing to do.

Current Stage

The eleventh name comes due. The party discovers the schedule, learns who is on it, and forces Sable to choose between the arithmetic she has served and the person she has marked.

Choice

Sable leaves the schedule short.

Sable admits, in her own hand, that she does not know what the names are for anymore — the first honest sentence she has written in thirty years.

Alternative

Sable fills the name with one of her own copyists.

The Choir begins to fracture from the inside, and the party can recruit the defectors.

Mechanical Rewards

If Sable leaves the schedule short, she loses 'Dark Bargain (Blackmail Web)' — Halvard Crane, terrified, stops taking her coin — and the party gains a Crown witness against the Choir.
If Sable fills the name from her own people, she loses the Choir's loyalty: her Coral Bell Watchers will no longer obey her, and 'Ring the Cathedral Bells' summons half the listed waves.
If the party shelters the marked name, that character gains Mother Ulva's blessing (advantage on one saving throw) and the Choir's schedule is exposed in the parish.

Narrative Rewards

The unfilled name is revealed to be one of the Quill siblings — Sable has been saving Wren and Tessaly for the schedule, and the party learns she thinks of this as patience, not vengeance.
The fog over Greyharbor visibly thickens for the first time on the mainland, giving the party proof of what the names buy.

Personal quest · 3

The Web She Wove

Sable has blackmail on two members of the King's council and a payroll that runs from Lordinium to Greyharbor, and every thread of it runs through paper she wrote. When the party begins pulling threads — Crane's ledger, the council letters, the Choir receipts from the undercroft — Sable must spend her web to stop them, and each use costs her a thread she cannot recover. This quest runs as a cat-and-mouse legal campaign through the Crown Coast: writs served, watch sergeants dispatched, sealed orders produced and countered.

It ends when the web is spent or the party is expelled, and what Sable discovers in spending it is that she has been paying the Crown to look at the fog for thirty years and no one ever looked.

Current Stage

The party pulls the Choir's legal threads one by one. Sable spends her blackmail web to stop them, thread by thread, until she must choose between spending it all and letting them reach Halvard Crane.

Choice

Sable spends the whole web to expel the party from Lordinium.

Sable is exposed, arrestable, and — for the first time — honest about the arithmetic, because the paperwork that let her avoid saying it is gone.

Alternative

Sable hoards the web and lets the party reach Crane.

The Choir is wounded but alive, and Sable learns the party can be obstructed but not stopped — which changes how she fights them.

Mechanical Rewards

Each time Sable spends the web, she permanently loses one use of 'Dark Bargain (Blackmail Web)' per scene — after three spends, the feature is gone.
When the web is fully spent, Sable gains 'Knowledge of the Ages' as an at-will ability for one scene per long rest, as she falls back on the only power she actually owns: what she has read.
The party gains the two council members' correspondence — enough to open the Crown's eyes to the Choir's clerks.

Narrative Rewards

Halvard Crane breaks under pressure and gives the party the Choir's Greyharbor arrangement in full.
The Choir's legal cover in Lordinium collapses, forcing Sable into the open for the first time in her career.

Major Decision

Context

She has spent thirty years believing the originals were too dangerous to exist and too precious to burn. Vane's sealed orders, in the party's hands, are written proof that the Choir's names went north and became the tithe. Her whole architecture of justification is in that cabinet.

Choice Made

The Bells or the Ledger — when the party corners her in the scriptorium with proof that Vane performs the rites her erasure was meant to prevent, Sable must choose: ring the Cathedral bells and drown the party in the faithful, or unlock the cabinet of three centuries of scraped-down originals.

Impact

If she rings the bells, she gains the encounter 'Ring the Cathedral Bells' a second time within the same scene and the Choir fights to the death; the party must kill her to survive. If she opens the cabinet, she permanently loses 'Ring the Cathedral Bells' — the bells fall silent for her forever — and gains 'Testimony of the Scraped Hand': she can, once per scene, produce an original document that grants the party advantage on any check to expose the Choir, the Concord, or the Crown clerks. She cannot take this back.

Major Decision

Context

The Twelve require eleven names a month. The schedule is in her own hand. Every month she has filled it; every month the arithmetic holds. This month, the party has made filling it difficult, and the fog is already thickening over Greyharbor.

Choice Made

The Eleventh Name — Sable's tithe-schedule for the current month has one name left unfilled. She may fill it with a stranger from the parish rolls, with a Choir agent who has begun asking questions, or she may leave the schedule short and let the fog thicken.

Impact

Filling the schedule with a Choir agent grants her 'Choir Silence' network intact but costs her the loyalty of her own people (her agents' Coral Bell Watchers will not obey her again). Leaving it short strips her of 'Dark Bargain (Blackmail Web)' — Halvard Crane stops taking her coin out of fear — but the fog's effects begin appearing in Lordinium, giving the party a new, urgent problem that is not her fault.

Major Decision

Context

She was the one sent to chisel the thirteenth name from the Cathedral's foundation stone. She read it. She has carried it for thirty years, unwritten, because writing it would be a copy and copies can be read.

Choice Made

The Tea and the Confession — offered a last cup of tea before arrest or death, Sable may drink it in silence, or she may speak the name she has never written down: the name the Thirteenth's panel once bore, which she scraped from the stone herself thirty years ago.

Impact

If she keeps the silence, she dies with the name and the party must recover it from the Ossuary at higher cost. If she speaks it, she permanently loses her Knowledge Domain spellcasting — the Twelve hear, and take the gift back — but the party gains the name outright, granting advantage on the breaking rite at the Tide-Heart and the ability to read the Hall of Nations' sealed record without Ithra.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The party reaches her locked room above the scriptorium with the codex and blocks the stair.

Transformation

The Scraper Cornered

Mechanical Changes

Dark Bargain (Blackmail Web)

Removed permanently

Halvard Crane breaks and testifies; the blackmail web collapses when the harbourmaster's ledger is read into the Crown record.

Erasure of Scripture

Ritual time reduced from 10 minutes to 1 minute

Thirty years of practice has made her the fastest scraper alive; cornered, she can silence the codex before the party can cross a room.

Spirit Guardians

The spirits now whisper the names of the party's families instead of the tithed

She has read the party's names in her ledgers, and the Choir's dead copyists know what she knows.

Ally

Halvard Crane, Harbourmaster of Greyharbor

Relationship asset

Influence 8/10

Loyalty 7/10

Shared History

Sable recruited Crane eleven years ago, when he was a junior harbour clerk with debts and a sick wife and a talent for ledgers that made him dangerous to people with something to hide. She paid his debts, then his house, then his silence, in that order, and she did it with tea and sympathy and never once a threat. He has kept the northern losses out of the Greyharbor ledger for three years because she asked, and because she was the only person in his life who had ever treated his competence as a virtue rather than a threat.

She trusts him completely and incorrectly: she believes his shame makes him loyal, when in fact his shame makes him a man waiting for someone to give him permission to stop. The party's discovery of the tithe-schedule in his yard is the moment the permission arrives, and Sable's web — built on his gratitude — is the first thing to tear.

Potential Breaking Points

If the party shows Crane the tithe-schedule in Sable's own hand, he breaks — he is not a bad man, only a man eleven bad decisions deep, and the schedule makes the decisions real.
If the Crown moves against the Choir, Crane will trade everything he knows for a pardon and a way out of the house he cannot afford.

Enemy

Aurel Vane, the Ashvane Admiral

Threat Level 9/10

Conflict Type philosophical

Personal Stakes

Sable considers Vane a vandal, and the hatred is precise and professional: he reads the rites whole — the exact thing her thirty years of scraping exist to prevent — and instead of horror he feels ambition. Worse, he uses her own supply chain to do it: the eleven names a month she sends north in her neat hand become the monthly tithe that keeps his bloom and his wind, and she has known this for eleven months and filed it under 'the Twelve's requirement' rather than 'my doing'.

She hates him because he is her, unashamed — a man who read the true text and drew the wrong conclusion, loudly, with a crown. If the party shows her Vane's sealed orders and the Sable Queen's logbook, she will turn on him completely, because the one thing she cannot survive is being right about the danger and wrong about the prevention. Her enmity is the party's single best lever for turning her: she will give them the Cathedral's originals and every Choir agent on the coast to hurt him, and she will not repent of a single thing she did before he made it meaningless.

Possible Resolutions

Show her Vane's sealed orders and the Sable Queen's log; she defects against him and hands over the Choir.
Kill Vane without her; she never learns the erasure failed and continues scraping until the party stops her by force.

Faction

The Hollow Choir

Standing 10/10

Influence

Sable is not a member of the Hollow Choir; the Hollow Choir is the shape her thirty years took. She inherited an order of copyists and quietly turned it into an intelligence service, a payroll, and a supply line, without ever changing its stated purpose or asking its permission. Her authority over the Choir is total and paternal: she knows every agent's family, every copyist's debts, every quiet woman's real name, and she has never once used that knowledge cruelly — which is why they would die for her, and why her defection would gut the order rather than merely redirect it.

The Choir's relationship to the party is entirely mediated by her: while she is wary, the Choir uses law and paperwork; if she turns, the Choir fractures between those who follow her and those who keep scraping. The Choir holds no ground, owns three Crown clerks, one harbourmaster, and the Cathedral's bells, and it regards the party's codex as a catastrophe that has learned to walk.

Obligations

Supply eleven names a month to the Twelve — the obligation she has never resolved and stopped questioning.
Keep the Expurgated text in every temple and the true rites out of every hand.

Benefits

Legal obstruction: writs, watch sergeants, and sealed orders in any Lordinium or Greyharbor social scene.
Intelligence: the Choir's coral-bell watchers report ship movements and party activity across the Crown Coast.

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