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Aughra

"All life is choosing."

Old enough to know the world that existed before the race of Gelflings came to be, Aughra remembered life before Mystics and Skeksis evolved their separate codes. She studied the movements of planets in the heavens and lost an eye a thousand years earlier observing the last Great Conjunction of the Three Suns. Jen was sent by his master to Aughra to fulfill the prophecy and find the shard that would make the Crystal whole again.

A horned, one-eyed, wild-haired sorceress, Aughra is the sole member of her race. She is the watcher of the heavens and the keeper of secrets. An astronomer, she maintained her observatory, which housed a complete working model of the solar system of the world's Three Suns.

She is not an attractive thing to see. The bit of her that lasts is female and the bit gone rotten is male. Her breath is loud, rasping, and rheumy. She can unscrew her heavily bloodshot eye from its socket and hold it in her gnarled hand for extended view. She is a hag with a ruin voice and a lank gray mane. She is stout, clad in a ragged, stained wine-colored tunic that smells of strong chemicals. Her arms are like weathered walnut branches. Above her broad shoulders, unkempt hair straggles down a face that not only is hideous now but could never have been better than ugly: a broad nose, with hair sprouting from the gaping nostrils; a single swiveling eye; no eyebrows above either eye or her empty socket; and two rows of blasted black stumps for teeth. Her brisk voice is harsh and broken and short of breath. Her breath has a dank stench.

Aughra can control tendrils, bushes, and tall grasses.

It is disconcerning how abruptly she can become taciturn.

One of her eyes was burned out during a Great Conjunction. She laid down under the Crystal within the cave in the mountain. She looked directly up into Crystal and into the beam of light from the three suns. This not only burned out her eye, but also burned her body. She said she saw spirals and the arrival of the urSkeks.

Aughra is three times three ages old. She has seen many lesser conjunctions.

Aughra knows that the Great Conjunction is coming because there are crystals everywhere, all over the ground. She knows that a great metamorphosis is due. She had cast the charts and shuffled the cards that confirmed it.

She has an inveterate habit of not telling everything she knows, the trademark of the seer, gives her pause. This is a vital piece of intelligence.

She is not much use to the Skeksis without her orrery.

Aughra's astronomy is devised chiefly through intuition and empirical models.

Aughra's eye is itself an image of the three suns that destroyed its fellow. Modesty, or caution, prevents Aughra from making this comparison for herself.

Aughra's device: The simplicity of the conjunction symbol gives no clue to the complexity of its manufacture.

Aughra is primarily a student of the heavens, and one of the great mental and psychological cleavages exists between those who naturally incline toward alchemy and those who follow astrology or astronomy. Very few rare spirits are equally balanced: Aughra is perhaps the first to master both arts.

The difference lies, fundamentally, in one's attitude toward time. Star gazers seek to measure, record, and predict the passage of time and the events it brings; alchemists, to control and regulate it. The popular picture of the alchemist as one concerned above all with turning lead to gold is a distortion, based on minor aspects of the craft that was given more prominence than it deserved in the eyes of the alchemists' patrons and that led them to a delusive hope of riches. Now that the patrons have passed into the hands of economists, alchemists are free to return to the fundamentals.

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