The Wickerman: a Hagraven's Counterpart

Raltin

Always wondered if there could ever end up being a male counterpart to a hagraven, as I found the daedric rituals that create the latter to be fairly fascinating... so I figured 'why not workshop one?', give the reach wizards something to morph into, who says the witches get all the good stuff right?

So I thought about hagravens, how they often seem to be connected to Nocturnal, as are many witch covens, then I had to think 'what daedric prince would make something else out of a man?'. Hircine felt a little too obvious, and he already has lycans. Same with Bal and Vampires. Then my thoughts turned to Hermaeus Mora, who for cultures that are more inland and don't deal much with the sea, takes on an aspect known as "The Woodland Man", associated with the deep woods and the secrets they hide. So instead of darkness and crows like hagravens, the theme would be the deep woods and the dark knowledge hidden in nature.

So with the theme in mind, I had to think of 'what would this thing look like, and how would it come about?'. I thought about the briarhearts, and then that wrothgar world boss who transforms himself into a lurcher, as well as the forest wraiths we encounter on Galen where nature transforms human souls into twisted guardians... and since these are reachmen, the idea would be not to be enslaved by nature, but to rather force your will OVER nature instead. Given the reachmen's gaelic themes, my brain crept over to The Witcher series and I couldn't help but be reminded of the Leshen. Tall, gaunt, made of wood, malevolent and sinister, with nature magics... it all checked out. So then it basically became 'how to make an elder scrolls version of a leshen and put a different spin on it'.



obviously the design would need to be tweaked, maybe ditch the elk skull in favor of a long-faced wicker mask 'face' similar to what the icereach coven motif has on its headwear so it still looks inhuman and has a bestial element, or swap it out with a different animal skull. I like the antlers though, make those tree branches instead, maybe give them a tentacle-wood-like design similar to those tendril-wood trees we can find in apocrypha, to hint at the hermaeus mora connection, and sprinkle some eyes here and there across parts of the wooded body that look kinda like knots in tree trunks and limbs. If it wears 'clothes', make the clothing out of hanging moss, which is very common in the reach. Rabbits have some association with hermaeus mora's aspect of The Woodland Man, so maybe have it have rabbit skulls strung up across its clothing here and there, maybe a lucky rabbit's foot eh? Onto the transformation process.

The idea starts with a briarheart, which we all know are made by hagravens, but what happens when the reachman briarheart wants more power and wants to take things further, maybe even compete with or suprass the hagravens that made him? Welp, they don't call the reachmen 'witch-men' for nothing! Start the daedric ritual! The briarheart's briar heart is removed (carefully so as not to kill them! Likely through ritual magics), and forced into the chest cavity of a spriggan, which acts as a sacrifice for the ritual, where it latches on to the spriggan's taproot, infects the spriggan like a disease, and begins its conversion process from a briar heart into a wicker heart. This does multiple things... 1 it lets the briar consume and absorb the spriggan's power, refining it. 2 the spriggan is essentially turned into a temporary phylactery for the reachman briarheart, similar to the lich transformation process. And 3: the taint of daedric magic begins to corrupt the spriggan into a lurcher, which has to be killed to retrieve the transformed wicker heart afterwards for re-implantation. Finally, after the wicker heart is returned to the ascending reachman, the ritual is concluded by the reachman drinking the sap of the corrupted lurcher, which begins the transformation process into a wickerman.

Any thoughts, input, criticisms?