a type of spirit/fate in burnos very similar to will-o-the-wisps and in fact rn i am just calling them that or 'wisps', and while they'll have different nicknames in kuserian and stoelic i might just keep this as their general name. basically these are tragic spirits that appear as children. there's not really anything about them that looks otherworldly aside a faint glow to them if you get close enough, so a lot of people (they mostly show themselves to travellers) who see them don't actually realise it's a wisp and not a lost child initially. like i said, wisps are spirits attached to tragedy - more specifically, the sites of tragic events - and they don't abide by normal chronology. they can appear in locations where a tragedy happened long ago, or they can appear in a place where something tragic is yet to happen. they very rarely appear alone, so once you see one wisp it's very likely you'll see another, especially as they tend to try and lead travellers away from the location they're attached to. this is because they're actually benevolent spirits. no one really knows what the wisps are or how they came to be or what their true purpose is, but the elves - who have the most accurate opinion of the wisps - believe that despite the inherent immortality to the wisps' spirits, they have a certain naivety and fear that comes with their childlike appearance. the wisps themselves are scared of the tragedy they've seen and want to warn people away from it, even if it happened centuries past.
wisps have no language of their own nor do they speak any of the burnosian languages, but they do mimic. this mimicry and their association with tragedy means a lot of burnosians actually dislike wisps and see them as bad omens, some even misunderstanding that the appearance of a wisp means they will inevitably face tragedy despite the actual tragic events a wisp has seen being completely out of their hands. they frighten a lot of people, as they appear as ghostly silent children who always dart just out of reach of anyone trying to approach, and when they do speak, it's to mimic things they've heard. given the nature of where wisps appear, the phrases they repeat are usually very ominous or downright horrific - in fact they're commonly known to repeat peoples' last words. imagine a child appearing in the woods and the only thing it can whisper, over and over again in the same lilting, windchime voice, is help me help me help me.
to repeat, wisps don't abide by chronology. tragedy is, to them, without tense. they can exist for a tragedy long past just as they can exist for a tragedy yet to come, and this is the same with the phrases they know, so sometimes wisps will even repeat someone's last words to them before they even speak them. it's a little heartbreaking in itself, because they really are just very young spirits trying desperately to warn people in the only way they know how, but the general burnosian consensus is that wisps are terrifying at best and a bad omen/threat at worst. some bolder travellers will even swear and shoo wisps away or throw rocks at them like you would a stray dog.
some notable locations for wisps:
dancing around the ever rising smoke plumes of tauga
whispering to aiden around each corner of silverhall
ducking behind the bookshelves in the royal library
calling up from the darkness of a ravine a mournful ama, ama, ama
