For most residents of Graypool, rituals and observances to placate the fey that they believe to dwell in the forest to the north are a significant and routine part of life. However, someone has to pass on and coördinate those rituals, and those ritualmasters, while they have no official political power, exercise great influence in the community. The people depend on the rituals to protect them from fey mischief, and they depend on the ritualmasters to know exactly how and when the rituals are to be carried out, and to make any necessary preparations and arrangements they may be unaware of.

How the ritualmasters attained this knowledge is unknown. Many apprenticed under previous ritualmasters; some have long family roots in the neighborhood and have had the rites and knowledge passed down from their ancestors; some have had or claim to have had direct contact with the fey and learned the rituals from them. It should be noted that "ritualmaster" is in no way an official title, and is not something the ritualmasters call themselves, but it is a term that is used to refer to them on those ralatively rare occasions that they need to be referred to. Usually Graypoolers just talk about consulting with the particular individual who happens to be the ritualmaster for their particular block and don't often think of them as being a member of a larger group.

Generally each ritualmaster organizes the rituals and observances for the inhabitants of a particular area. On the rare occasion when two or more ritualmasters have a disagreement, they generally defer to the one with the highest seniority. There is no official ranking of ritualmasters, but there is something of an informal pecking order. Perhaps the most respected and most influential ritualmaster is Nyhelli Daer, an ancient woman who lives in a house in the highest area of Graypool. It is said that one member of each generation of Daer's family has been a changeling, a fey being sent to be raised by the Daers while a blood member of the Daer family is sent to be fostered by the fey in return.

Nyhelli Daer is an aged woman with spotted hands that she habitually holds in front of her like claws, her distant alicund ancestry evident in the slightly sparkling white splotches in her otherwise brown skin. (The Daers are descended from an alicund born of snow.) She has a thin nose with an upturned base, sunken cheeks, and long, white, curly hair. She speaks slowly in a quavering but confident voice, often exaggerating plosives at the ends of phrases. Nyhelli Daer is usually seen wearing coarse woven gowns made of locally harvested fibers and decorated with colorful abstract patterns.