Baba Yaga
Baba Yaga (a.k.a. Mother of Hags, Mother of All Witches, Bone Mother, Little Grandmother)
Baba Yaga is an ancient and formidable presence in the fey realms, known to many as the Mother of Hags. She is an ArchFey whose nature defies easy categorization. Even her form is mutable: some nights, she appears as a stooped old crone with skin like dried birch bark and eyes that gleam like distant lantern light. Other times, she cuts a commanding figure, tall and straight-backed, robed in patchwork cloth woven from centuries-old moss and crow-feather quills. None doubt the immense, primal power that swirls about her—an aura at once fearsome and strangely comforting, like an old grandmother’s shawl that smells faintly of peat and herbs.
In her woodland domain, the gnarled roots of ancient trees twist into crooked huts and sprawling halls that shift through the seasons with mischievous unpredictability. Paths that lead to her cottage one eve may instead guide travelers to a patch of toadstools or a silent clearing strewn with bones the next. Within her favored abode—a hut perched atop great chicken legs—one can find a home not merely to her physical presence, but to the humming press of countless secrets. The hut moves often, but when it aims to stay in one place for a while, it is fenced in with a fence made of bones. Mortal adventurers and lesser Fey who manage to gain entry speak of impossible clutter: bundles of dried herbs hanging from rafters, fetishes of bone and ribbon, stacks of weathered grimoires filled with looping, inscrutable script. The air is thick with incense and the echo of old songs, as if her dwelling stands at the crossroads of many worlds. Though her hut moves, it resides "at home" beyond the Thrice-Nine Kingdom, in the thirtieth realm, beyond the fiery river.
As the mother of all hags, Baba Yaga’s maternal instincts manifest in twisted ways. She bestows cruel blessings upon her daughters, granting them sinister magics and shaping their destinies to reflect her own capricious philosophy. To her children, she offers no gentle lullabies—only half-truths, riddles, and the constant testing of their cunning and cruelty. The hags who emerge from under her tutelage are fearsome indeed: subtle enchantresses and vicious shapechangers who stalk mortals from the shadows. Yet none dare cross their matriarch lightly. She rules them not with love, but with an all-knowing glance and an ancient wisdom that can unravel any scheme before it begins.
Beyond her brood, Baba Yaga’s role in the Fey Courts is that of a near-mythic presence—rarely seen, but always felt. She acknowledges no single court’s dominion, instead drifting along the borders of seasonal fey politics and treaties as if they were children’s games. Occasionally, she trades a secret or a charm for some rare component or a whispered truth. Some say she has counseled kings and queens of the Summer Court in their youth, challenged the Winter Lords to duels of icy wits, and plucked destiny’s threads from the spinning wheels of Autumn and Spring. Others swear they have seen her black silhouette against the moon, conversing with spirits of the forest no other soul can hear.
In truth, Baba Yaga is part wise woman, part horror story, part divine grandmother of all that slithers and cackles in the night. She represents the cycle of change and the reality that wisdom can be as frightening as it is helpful. To encounter her is to brush against the deep marrow of The Feywild’s oldest magic, where life and death, laughter and shrieks, healing poultices and poisoned apples all lie mixed together in her cauldron. In that moment, one realizes that Baba Yaga is not simply a being—they are an archetype of knowledge and darkness, a keeper of the wild and crooked paths that only the bravest, or most desperate, dare tread.
Current Location
Species
Children
Pronouns
She/They
Gender
Female
Presentation
Feminine
Eyes
Milky cataract covered
Hair
Matted gray-white
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Old, leathery and wrinkled
Aligned Organization
Other Affiliations