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Lift Maiden

The Lift Maiden is one of The Eight Elemental Constructs.

A being of pure, darkly perverted elemental Carry, the Maiden fashions a form for itself from surrounding materials, always forming a hard outer crust from heavier materials and a juicy center from softer ones. It is also called the Ecreek Ooamp, a reference to its nature as a failure of a failure, a negation of a negation, a wheel within a thing that pokes wheels and breaks them. The main encounter with it occurs in Book 11.

First, a pathetic attempt is made to poison the carry energies by diverting the entity through an apple orchard, the thought being that the cyanide in the seeds will poison and destroy it. The entity responds by taking the form of a massive cyanide-spitting cobra. At the last minute, a new character named Ray the Telesorcerial arrives along with a regiment from the Dragoon Knights of Wyvernclaw Mountain. He deprives the construct of any surrounding material by the use of telesorc'ley. However, the portgates only serve to spread the dark carry energies, generating an army of smaller Lift Maidens that strive to re-unite themselves.

The Lift Maidens are dispersed, but never finally defeated. They continue to hang as a lingering threat through the end of the series. They are discussed briefly in Derrida's groaningly pun-heavy short essay Spectres of Carry, which was somehow posthumously written.