Lamia

Content note. This entry describes mind control, including the venom used to make it more permanent, and notes that both are experienced as pleasant. The Magic section is the one to skip.

Overview

A lamia is humanoid from the waist up and serpent below. They were born on Earth and live in the Veil now.

They are not all female. Gender here is individual, exactly as it is everywhere else in this guide.

Physical traits

The serpent half is not one thing. Its length varies, its scaling varies, and which snake it resembles varies — some lamiae carry scales closer to velvet, others harder and smaller. All of that comes down to the individual rather than to any breed division, and there are no lamia breeds.

Lamiae give live birth. They are human enough for that.

Magic

Two things are fixed: the gaze and the venom.

The gaze is magical hypnosis, and on its own it grants powerful influence over the mind. Magical hypnosis is an extra force — an oddly consistent one, apparently born out of both thought and will together. Resisting it is mostly futile unless the person resisting is exceptionally strong-willed, and the feeling it produces is unfailingly pleasant regardless.

It is not the same as the fae will affinity, which is considerably easier to fight unless consent has been given. Magical hypnosis is the same force a kitsune channels as foxfire; the only real difference between the two species is how it comes out.

The venom deepens that control toward something more permanent. It is also very pleasant.

Beyond those two, nothing is fixed. Whatever else a lamia is tied to magically is theirs.

Constriction

The lower body is capable of genuine constriction, and typically runs far longer than the upper body would suggest.

Whether a lamia uses it is entirely up to them. It is a capability, not a behaviour.

Ageing and shifting

Lamiae age much the way dragons do. The serpent half keeps growing until it stops, and when that happens depends on the individual. The human half grows until roughly the human age of twenty-five and then stops.

They do not die of old age.

Once a lamia is old enough, they can shift to a fully humanoid form. It is innate, and it is a true shift rather than an illusion — the same way kitsune shifting is true.

Shared instincts

Lamiae share the body, the gaze, the venom and the capacity to constrict. That is the whole list.

They do not share a temperament, and they are as varied as any other people here. Some are mothers, some healers, some fighters, some scholars. Some have nothing to do with children at all. The nurturing reading is Elysara’s own — she happens to embody it, and it is not what a lamia is.

Where the name comes from

Lamia was a queen of Libya and a lover of Zeus. Hera destroyed her children — in some tellings killing them, in others compelling Lamia to do it herself — and what remained afterwards became a devourer of other people’s children. Over time lamia pluralised into lamiae, a class of seductive predators of young men, blurring with the empusa and the mormo. The serpentine lower body is a late arrival; Keats’s Lamia of 1820 fixed the serpent-woman image in English so thoroughly that it now reads as ancient.

What we take is the body and the abilities — the serpent half and the hypnotic gaze among them. We do not take the monster, and we do not take the grief story that produced her either. Ours are simply their own people.

Field notes

Individual colouring, scale type, serpent length, presentation and gender belong on each member’s own page.