Mermaid Lunar (Ariel)

Changing Moon Caste The moon’s brilliance shifts as it wanes and waxes, show- ing a different face each night. Ephemeral moonlight fascinates and enraptures the unwary, promising mystery and denying revelation. Luna’s Tricksters take their divine patron’s lessons to heart, triumphing over enemies with honeyed tongues, magnetic personalities, and mysterious duplicity. The Changing Moons are silver-tongued devils, beautiful seducers, inspiring warlords, and sly charlatans. They slip unnoticed through tightly guarded checkpoints in the skins of trusted couriers or animals beneath sentries’ no- tice, infiltrate enemies’ courts wearing faces stolen from confidantes and conspirators, and whisper into the ears of princes and tyrants in the guises of trusted advisors, beloved spouses, or favored children. Few can match their cunning, ingenuity, or charm, and many have fallen prey to their tricks without ever realizing it. When the Lunars remade their Castes, they knew it would take subtlety and subterfuge to undermine the hegemony of the Shogunate and its Sidereal patrons. They made the Changing Moons a Caste of tricksters, spies, and seducers to bedevil the usurpers and sow chaos amid whatever or- der they tried to establish from their stolen thrones. Some Changing Moons act as their Circle’s envoys to mortal society; others keep to the shadows, assisting Circlemates through subterfuge and deception. Those who choose to become Changing Moons are often diplomats, chieftains, con men, priests, merchants, actors, libertines, demagogues, spies, artists, and anyone else whose tongue was their most formidable asset in mortal life. Others are drawn to the allure of becoming a divine trickster: criminals, dissidents, contrarians, misfits, and cynics. Spirit Shapes: Changing Moons tend toward spirit shapes symbolizing grace, beauty, deception, and cun- ning. Serpents, birds, sleek cetaceans, and svelte cats such as cheetahs and panthers are common, as are the more graceful and clever ruminants, mustelids, reptiles and insects.