Song of the Storm Hag

When your ears ring with voices from the song of the damned,
Pray to your god that you'll someday see land.
Or the arms of the hag will reach out through the rain,
Snatch up your body and drown you in pain,
And you'll sing for all time with the choir of the damned.
—Traditional Brightwater sea shanty

For thousands of years, sailors in the western Aquatic Kingdoms and along the Liberty Coast have warned each other in fearful whispers of the Storm Hag and her haunting choir.

Summary

The Storm Hag appears in the midst of the rough storms that plague the region during the autumn. The first sign of her presence is an eerie song that can be heard clearly through the thunder and crashing waves. The song sounds as if it comes from a choir of hundreds of voices, singing in beautiful harmony. If the crew turns the ship towards the sound of the singing, they will soon see a hideous woman with greenish skin and teeth, larger than the boat itself. Once she is visible, it is usually too late to escape. Her arms can stretch twice her height to snatch sailors from their ship, and her fingernails contain a powerful paralyzing poison that incapacitates even the hardiest sailors. Some versions of the myth say she simply drowns sailors and destroys ships for her own amusement; others say she swallows the sailors whole. Still others claim she sucks their souls from their body through their faces and tosses their lifeless bodies towards shore, to wash up as zombies or some other Undead creature.
The only way the legends say a doomed sailor can reclaim their life is to offer the storm-hag their voice for her dread choir. She takes it and returns the sailor to land, mute but alive; however, by collecting their voice, she also marks their Soul for destruction. The sailor inevitably dies an unlucky death within seven years' time. Here, again, legends differ. Some believe they become wights eternally bound to the storm-hag's service. Others think they join the ranks of the Sluagh or the Sorrowsworn. Still others think that the eternal choir itself is its own separate entity, made of every soul ever lost to the Storm Hag's touch.

Historical Basis

The autumn storms around Cantonova are, for the most part, a natural weather phenomenon. Despite its name, this particular legend is not associated with the Hagstorms of Scalados.
That said, Jezibaba—sometimes called the Queen of the Hags—lives near a known Feywild portal well within the region where these storms occur. Some faerologists believe she is capable of traveling to the Material Plane in the form of the Storm Hag.
Mute sailors sometimes wash up on the shores of Cantonova, though they do not tell their tales. They are considered deeply unlucky and widely avoided. Without fail, they disappear or are found dead within a few years, sometimes taking other sailors with them.