Poludnica

A haze of heat shimmers around this female figure. Her robes are plain and sunbleached, her hair a pale white, and her skin dry, red, and terribly sunburned. Her face is inhumanly beautiful, but bears an expression of bitterness and sorrow, and her eyes shine with the light of a summer day at noon. She wields an old and weather-beaten scythe, the pitted blade glowing like the midday sun.

Spirits of heatstroke, noonday sun, and the fertility of summer, Poludnicas are both boon and bane to the farming communities they are born next to. Cursed to crave human affection, but unable to understand human emotions or motivations, they frequently resort to kidnapping men, women, and children in an attempt to create a family of their own. When the abductee inevitably rejects them or tries to escape, they lash out in anger at the perceived betrayal, often with fatal consequences for the human involved. The flip side of this is that their very presence has a beneficial effect on crops in the surrounding landscape, encouraging growth and fortifying them against pests and weeds.
While outdoors, their powers wax and wane with the sun; they are at their most dangerous at noon, and at their weakest at midnight. Most attacks and abductions thus occur when a farmer or child is out in the fields at midday, when the fey is most able to subdue them and they are isolated from any others who might notice the attack.