The Pale Apple Necronomicon
Sibling to the Green Cherry Demonomicon, its sparse state is a legacy of the relative attention given to the lands of the Dead by the Chosen of the Maidens. While it is also made available to the students of the Heptagram, it is exclusively focussed on combating and banishing the Dead described within. The sections on the Lords of Death are largely taken from the annals of Sijun, while there is scarce original research on the Greater Dead. Only the sections on the Lesser Dead have novel information.
Due to the terms of the deal with Sijun, copies of the Pale Apple Necronomicon are kept within the libraries of that deathly city as well as in the repositories of the Realm. As a result, it has proliferated to other circles of necromantic learning. Though it is held in low regard by summoners, it has seen more respect from exorcists.
The Crawling Thing in the Rivers
Grandmother Hunger, Mother of Mothers of the Zu Tak
The Malachite Princess and the Amber Crone, the Sisters of Istamar
The Pyre-Saint of the Penitent Legion
The Seer Mourned in Ashen Veils and Crimson Draperies, the Voice of the Murdered
The Ashen Priests of the Penitent Legion, Immaculates of the Ashen Dragon
Henna iz-Kabbaz, the Cannibal-Queen of Dead Zairio
The Hero of the Damned, Champion of the Penitent Legion
Manosque Azure, the Gout-King, Governor-General of Dead Guanado
Lady Noone, Marchioness of the Scar
The Nameless-and-Abhorrent Spider
Lord of Death
Creature of the Well of Oblivion
There is a worm that squirms through the rivers of Death and which speaks with a terrible rotted voice. Its flesh is a bloated coalescence of everything that gets carried down in the currents, swirling with mercury. Half-digested ghosts protrude from its tarry bulk. It has a hundred limbs, each one from someone new, and sometimes it gnaws off one of its limbs and grows a new one, when its sees fit. The Crawling Thing is a creature of impurity at a spiritual and physical level, and its very presence is one of rot and degradation. And it was once human, though such a memory all but forgotten.
Perhaps its story starts with a peasant farmer, back when the Realm was young. He cut himself out in the fields, the wound got infected, and then his arm turned black and he died slowly and painfully. Or perhaps its story starts with the ninth Shogun. Fifty years of deals, countless betrayals and a few well timed deaths, and then she was killed in the bath before a week was up. Ten of them pinned her down and they strangled her and threw her naked corpse into the sewers, denying her even an honest burial. Maybe its story dates back to one of the glorious golden lords of the First Age, and how the woman who loved him turned on him in Hollow and the sickness of the city found a vessel in his ghost.
It doesn’t really matter, though. There is very little of the human it once was in there. Carried away in the currents of the lands of the Dead, it spiralled down into the depths and there, just above the ultimate descent, it found the will to survive. It ate the ghosts that were carried in the currents and it ate the prayers from the livings that were carried away. It ate and ate and ate and bloated on the filth and the twisted memories and in time it found the remnants of a dead titan and it feasted on them too, a maggot in the carcass of a world-maker.
This did not sate its hunger. Nothing could fill the bottomless belly of the Thing in the Rivers. But now the rotten mud and tainted mercury of its body contains the trappings of a dead deva of the Third Circle - some say more than one - and it knows well how to use the stinking remnants. A tarnished onyx crown inlaid with emeralds sits upon the Crawling Thing’s brow and six mismatched arms wave stone implements of authority. It commands certain nightmares within the Labyrinth still sworn to the dead deva it devoured, and when it beaches itself on a domain they come pouring out of its bottomless gullet. It haunts the rivers of the seeping Well and of the South, pouring its filth into dead domains.
But that is not the sole measure of its threat. Where it goes, ashen trees blossom in the rivers around it and pale flowers grow on the banks. Flies and other plasmic insects buzz around such fetid tumescence. All these things are infused with its nature and its tainted mercury. This accumulates in mad yidak and driven ghosts alike. First they hear its voice. Then they dance and spasm. Then they act to further its will. Finally, the Crawling Thing devours them from the inside out and they become it. Ghosts pray to it for fear it will crawl up the rivers, and it spares them if they offer sacrifices to it. Other ghosts willingly pledge themselves to Lords of Death or Greater Dead if they will protect them from the Crawling Thing and its creeping hunger
The thing in the rivers hears the echoing whispers of the Neverborn. It does not care, but it has heard of the Dead Princes. Many things are washed down in the currents of the Rivers and in its hunger the Crawling Thing consumes memories and rumours. In a secret cove, following the whispers in its dreams, it has constructed a Monstrance from scrap and dead things and decay, half-sunk in a lake of stinking quicksilver. Some whisper that it wishes to devour a Dead Prince. Others say it has already eaten one - and one of the other Deathlords has lost one of their servants. Pity the poor soul who serves the Crawling Thing if that is true.
For it has a plan. It would crawl up to Creation and from there sup on the fruits of life while it shed its flesh into the rivers of death. All those rivers touch would consume it and so it would become them. Veins of mercury would fill the maddened ghosts and they would twitch and dance in the streets before it consumed them utterly. The Thing in the Rivers cares not for Creation - why would it? All things will die in time. And if it had its way, all who enter the Underworld will find only rot and decay and endless rivers of mercury.
There is a shadowland in the southern Inner Sea, a sunken island where sealed pits of plague-dead still await a fool who would unleash them. There, it sends its mind-slaved ghosts to gather power from life for it. These ghosts are poisoned by its presence, and so they are bloated drowned things, laden with silver veins. Other Deathlords know of its plans. Those with Abyssal Exalted servants might send them to take the Thing in the Rivers down - while others might have to reach out to the living to slay such a puissant monster.
Only a few necromancers have called upon the Crawling Thing, for one would have to be insane to take such a risk. Still, with offerings and supplication and a thousand ghosts to feast on it will feign obedience, at least, and then it is a weapon that might sweep away a domain. If called into Creation during Calibration or welcomed through a shadowland on the night of a new moon, it could feast upon a demesne and drain it quite dry, or blight a land with mercury for years to come.
Lord of Death
Creature of the Great Frozen Expanse
Grandmother Hunger is a young Deathlord, having only achieved her apotheosis sixty years ago. More than that, she is isolated. She spent her life in the Wailing Fen and her death in lands of the Dead below that lonely place.
What she lacks in knowledge of the outside world, she makes up for with personal prowess and ferocity.
Grandmother Hunger as a Liege:
Lord of Death
Creature of the Abhorrence of Life
Once, Istamar was a city of prosperity and wealth on the northern coast of the Inner Sea. Dragonblooded masters of the occult and medicinal arts gathered there - and so the sick and injured came to it, looking for remedies to their ills. But doom too came to Istamar. Shining Istamar died in the Great Contagion, and the bodies were stacked like firewood in its white-stone streets. Its bubbling brooks ran with bile and blood, and its jade-roofed towers crumbled and fell. The Underworld claimed it, fog shrouded the city, and the ulcerous depths of the Labyrinth painted the walls with filth and decay.
Two of the Sidereal Exalted had been resident in Istamar, working with everything they had to try to devise a cure to the plague, and when the horrors of the nightmares of the Neverborn embraced the city, they alone survived. Desperately they fought to gather the scattered notes that the Dragonblooded had gathered on a possible cure for the Contagion. But they were trapped within the nightmares of murdered titans, and a reaper-monster of rusted iron and blades came to hunt them down. There was no way out save death against a creature like this.
Obsession over a cure for the Contagion meant they lingered as spectres, endlessly chasing the Labyrinth-corrupted notes, and each one they found strengthened the whispers in their minds. They drew power from filth and corruption, certain that there might be a cure to the Contagion in understanding the Neverborn. For their greed, they were cursed. They wallowed in the decay of Istamar and devoured the wandering Dragonblooded ghosts, cracking open their skulls with rocks to sup on their memories and drives. They wrote prayer-strips in the glossmalia of dead titans and donned the flayed faces of nephwracks to assume their roles. By the time they slew the reaper-hectonkhire that had stalked them for so long, they had forgotten their original goal.
Now the Sisters of Istamar share the title of Lord of Death - and everything else, for the barrier between their minds decayed away long ago. The Amber Crone commonly wears the form of a wizened woman whose matted, filthy hair reaches her feet. Sometimes she cuts this hair and weaves it into curses that twist the underworld. Dressed in tattered robes, she ambles through the Labyrinth, ever travelling - for that is her curse, to ever seek out the forbidden. Her teeth are iron shears and her fingers are tipped with iron nails. Given access to a forge, she will pluck out her teeth and nails and forge a rusty iron blade from it, upon which she records the lore she finds. In mannerism she is soft-spoken and reclusive, seeking to stay in the background. She says less than she hears.
The Malachite Princess, seems to be a regal woman in her thirties, bedecked in green jewelry. The woman is merely an anglerfish’s lure, a small vanity from a monster. In truth the face she wears is not hers, and the pile of bile-coated blades that make up her real body constantly tear the skin she steals from ghosts. Each blade is one made by the Amber Crone, and she adds them to the pile endlessly. She truly cannot leave Istamar, but when she cuts off one of her shears and grants it to a ghost she subsumes them and they become a regal woman wearing green jewelry. At the heart of her blade-mound flesh lies the ghost she once was, the Crone’s starmetal sword thrust through her heart. The Princess is open and gregarious, generous with her gifts of blades and hedonistic in her mad abandon.
The Malachite Princess and the Amber Crone endlessly delve into the lore of the Neverborn. They record the screams heard in forgotten places and scrape fragments off their tomb-bodies. They do not think of Creation, but instead turn their eyes to the Primordials. Perhaps as a memory-echo of who they were in life, the Amber Crone in particular hates demons with a cold, cloying fervor. She will don the face of a ghost and creep into Creation, acting in ways both subtle and malicious to thwart the agents of the Demon City.
And this Lord of Death has a plan. The Sisters of Istamar would see every Primordial slain - Yozis, Gaia and Autochthon alike. They would choke the Labyrinth with the corpses of the teeming hordes of Malfeas and they would plug the Well of Oblivion with tomb-body after tomb-body. Only when every Primordial is dead will they be sure that the Neverborn hold all the secrets they seek - and then, truly, they could know all the secrets of death and achieve their ultimate goal...
… whatever it was
The Sisters of Istamar as a Liege: The Amber Crone in particular wanders wide and far and so is in the position to gather scattered Monstrances. Given a choice they will choose scholars over priests, favouring Daybreaks over Midnights, though they will expect a black obsession in their savants. Otherwise, they will seek out those who have reason to hate demonkind. A soldier torn apart by a blood ape or a priest slain while trying to defend his congregation from a teodozija would be their perfect candidate.
Their Abyssals may see service in Creation or in the Underworld. In the lands of the Dead they will be sent to acquire knowledge from those ghosts who will not give it to the Amber Crone - peacefully or otherwise. On the other hand, in Creation their Abyssals will be demon-hunters, wiping out Yozi cults, slaying demons - and in the end, looking for a way to slay a Primordial. What would happen if one were to trap their fetich and cast them into the Well of Oblivion, the Malachite Princess has pondered.
Lord of Death
Creature of the Queen of Suicides
There are few places more wretched in the Underworld than the lands of the Dead that reflect the Blessed Isles. Starved of prayer, mad self-loathing ghosts punish themselves for their failure to reincarnate as they should. Others fall to the putrescent whispers of rotting titans that echo out of the hole that Meru’s fall left in the world. Civilisation in the Dead places is centred in the East, around Sijan - what sanity exists beneath the Realm is the province of armed encampments and warlords.
The Pyre-Saint is one of the mightiest of the warlords upon the shattered isles that revolve around the great drain of the Well of Oblivion. She commands the Penitent Legion of the Ashen Immaculate Dragon, composed of those among the Dead who seek penance for their sins that set them out of the cycle of reincarnation. Their faith is at best heterodox from the Immaculate Order they followed in life, but their devotion gives them purpose and lets them hold strong against the whispers of the Neverborn.
The First of the Penitent Legion takes the form of a figure dressed in melted and blackened Realm armour. Blood-red fire oozes from the joins and cracks in the metal shell. Pale prayer strips cover every spare inch of her armour and her To conceal her face she wears a white china mask cast in the semblance of a woman of the Realm, and under that she has a layer of dark obsidian. The flames underneath still glow dimly through the dark glass.
She is young by the standards of the Dead and a veritable child for one who is a Lord of Death. The Undying Pyre breathed her last a mere four hundred years ago - a stupid young Dynast called Ragara Luanela barely out of the Thousand Scales killed in an illegal duel with her cousin. The Penitent Legion found her gasping in her caul and took her to one of their fortresses along with the other recruits they had press-ganged. As a former Dragonblood, she had the skills they needed - but the weight of her sins was heavier than most, for a Terrestrial Exalt whose sins were such that the Dragons deliberated too long was a sinner indeed.
Something broke inside her as she listened to the words of the ashen priests. She raved for five days and nights, and on the sixth day she emerged from her cell. With dead eyes, she willingly embraced the catechism of the Penitent Legion. Other Grey Legionaries had traces of their life to cling to, but she scourged herself of the traces of her unworthy life. in life she had been unsuited to be a child of the Dragons, and so in death she sought martyrdom and through that a chance of rebirth.
As one of the greatest sinners of the Penitent Legion, she was a repository of the misdeeds of her fellows. She willingly drank of the Rivers in the ceremonies of the ashen priests and meditated upon her death. As others repaid their sins and were freed to transcend their wretched state, she was weighed down with the passionate dregs the priests carved away, bloating upon power. Soon Luanela had become one of the Greater Dead, her flesh bloating, covered in the leech-like sins she had consumed. She took to wearing full armour at all times, so that others need not observe the writhing mass of attachment that weighed her down.
But everything changed when a hecatonchire waded up the Rivers, smashing its way into one of the fortresses of the Penitent Legion. It was a great red sun-beast that wore the form of one of the Anathema, howling madly as its hands flickered and it pinned ghost after ghost to the walls with burning arrows. Still, they managed to wear it down and she was at the forefront of the assault. To defeat this icon of the Anathema might repay some of her own sins in life.
But an ashen priest stopped her from delivering the final blow. Knowing that if this nightmare of the Neverborn was not destroyed, it would return again and again, she made her final sacrifice and took on the sins of the Anathema, devouring the power. Her armour melted. Her sins melted. And the Pyre-Saint rose, blood red flames seeping out of the joints of her fused armour.
The Pyre-Saint commands the Penitent Legion, but she is an object of reverence and emulation, not a general. Her eyes are turned to the Labyrinth, and under her guidance the most fanatical of the Grey Legionaries have embraced the sin-eating doctrine she demonstrates. Her fanatical followers grow powerful on the sin-Passions of other Dead. Slowly, the legion splits as the power of a Deathlord allows them to expand their claims into safer areas of the Underworld and certain dragonlords look towards the secular for power. The Pyre-Saint would chastise them if she knew and take their Passions of greed and temporal power and feed them to her followers, but her attention is divided.
Within her armour, the whispers of the Queen of Suicides echo. She is one of the nightmares of that corpse-beast, and in her fire-blackened heart the Pyre-Saint knows this. She holds stolen power, keeping it confined, and there will be no redemption and no rebirth for her. The stinking corpse of a Primordial calls for her to emulate it, and it twists her actions, leading her into riskier and riskier actions. She hopes for martyrdom, but there are few things that can stop a Lord of Death within the Underworld. There is a nagging urge in the back of her head to declare war on other Deathlords, for some of them were Solar Anathema in life - and the others may be strong enough to slay her and destroy the nightmare she confines.
So far she has kept this urge repressed. So far.
Pyre-Saint as Liege: It is entirely possible that the Penitent Legion may have found some of the scattered Monstrances that were cast throughout the Underworld by the blasphemous ritual by the Well of Oblivion. From their location near the gateway to Meru, they are well-placed to acquire some. If so, the Grey Legion may have as many as an entire circle of Abyssals. The Pyre-Saint’s eyes are entirely turned to the Underworld and her endless crusade against the Labyrinth, so Abyssals sworn to the Legion might be pressed into her endless war too. Then again they might find themselves placed in command of the more secular affairs, managing the conquest and settlement of the blasted apocalyptic surrounding Meru-that-Was. Such a position would give them much power and scant supervision from their Deathlord.
But then again, maybe the Legion’s heterodox Immaculate Faith means that they reject any service from things that resemble the Anathema. In such a case, it is likely that the Penitent Legion might launch a grand crusade against the Dead Princes and the Deathlords who count them as their servants. The Grey Legion might find the redemption they seek there, or otherwise simply Oblivion.
Lord of Death
Creature of the Abhorrence of Life
There are many reasons that terrible things have been done in Creation. Pride, greed, envy, wrath. And yet the sins of the monster who squats in the ruins of Labyrinthine Te Frei are born of misaimed guilt. She bathes in the corruption and decay of the corpses of murdered Titans, letting it sink into her pores, and gnaws at their ossified tongues so that she might write testaments to their torments. Her books are burned when they are found, but enough fools read them that many horrors are unleashed on the world. Nightmare spiders crawl from her mouth and her empty eye sockets and weave her silken veils, that are soon stained red by the tears she bleeds for the Neverborn.
In life, Mikari Aitchi was no great sinner by the standards of the late Deliberative. Exalted as an Eclipse caste by the Sun, she loathed conflict and discord, and sought to bring peace and comfort to all. Other more jaded Exalts sneered at the soft-spoken bureaucrat’s kindly heart and her embarrassing lack of proper detachment from mortals, but she was considered harmless. She loved the study of languages, and worked to further the education of the masses and the development of tongues intended to enlighten and educate their speakers, shaping their minds to discourage aggression and aid empathy.
But her kindness had a darker side. Rather than oppose the excesses of her age, she instead enabled them. Better to vote to raise the military budget for the hundredth year in a row than risk harsh words on the Deliberative’s floor. Better to support her friends than risk losing them by speaking against them. Better to tolerate the indulgences of the more sadistic Exalts than censure them, because condemnation might risk a war and then many more would die. The shocking suicide of a young Twilight artificer she had cared for broke her heart, but she said nothing.
And so a woman who could have been the moral compass for the Host instead drifted in the wind as the rule of the Solars unwound to its final, tragic end. She died asking only “Why?”, unable to see how such death could ever be justified. She lingered, a powerless ghost wandering an Underworld wracked by the terrible turmoil of the Usurpation. She did not want revenge. She did not want justice. She only wished to know why the Dragonblooded and the Sidereals had felt it necessary to do this monstrous deed. But there was no understanding forthcoming, and any hope of finding the truth was futile in the face of the thousands of Dead once-Terrestrials whose oaths were so strong that their shades continued to hunt the ghosts of the Solars.
She fled to the most wretched, most base places of the Underworld. And then she heard the screams and the moans. She spoke with mad nephwrack-priests who preached in alien tongues that she knew only from her studies of pre-human languages. She read the abhorrent carvings in Labyrinthine walls. The filth and spiritual corruption of the dead titans coated her. And she came to understand one ten thousandth of the pain of the inverted universes of the Neverborn and her heart broke. Her entire life had been built on this monstrous suffering, and in a past life she had been guilty of these deeds. Mikari Aitchi set off to the Well of Oblivion, in a quest of penance.
And when she returned, she was the Mourning Seer, draped with the silk of the monstrous spiders who once trailed in the wake of a demon prince.
Creation has not been afflicted by the Seer’s actions, but in the Southern Underworld she is greatly feared. Her words echo in the minds of ghosts, filling them with compassion and sorrow for the Neverborn. She transcribes runes which represent the suffering of the dead titans with such clarity that those who look at them are blasted with understanding. Nephwracks who memorise her glyphs wield strange and abhorrent powers and become twisted into freakish hecatonchires. Entire domains have fallen into the Labyrinth because of one masterfully crafted letter she sent to the lord. She destroys soulsteel foundries - for she loathes such sources of pain - and kindly explains to any she sees that such an abomination of eternal suffering cannot be tolerated. Those who do not listen find that her spiders’ venoms are painless but quite incapacitating. Soon their hearts swell with compassionate guilt, once she has finished lecturing.
The First and Forsaken Lion hates and fears her, for all his ghostly legions cannot defeat a foe who fights with the pen, not the sword. He has vowed to take her head, because she would see all the Underworld sink into the Labyrinth and every ghost become a mad spectre eternally placating murdered titans. His dreams of secular power mean nothing to her. Where bands of her apostles come bearing letters, his legions crush them and cast burning salt onto their crucified corpuses. He maintains crack forces of illiterate ghosts moliated so that they lack ears just to counter her influence. With Abyssals on both sides, a full-on war between the Lion and her is all but inevitable - and a Dusk serving her may find themselves handed a disorganised rabble of Whisper-maddened ghosts and terrifying hecatonchires to lead against one of the Lion’s legions.
He would be upset to know that the Mourning Seer considers him little more than a petty tyrant, whose only sin is the fact he holds a fragment of a murdered titan torn from their corpse. She does not oppose him because she hates him; she simply spreads understanding of the pain of the Neverborn. If madness and chaos follows in her wake, it is a tragedy - but she believes that if all comprehended how they suffer, then they too would devote their existence to lessening such pain.
Some day he will see the harm he has done - as will all living and Dead. All will come to the tombs and honour the dead and sing paeans to them.
And then the Neverborns' suffering will cease. She is sure.
Mourning Seer as Liege: The Seer is a monster - but she is so cracked and broken that she cannot tell the difference between monstrosity and innocence. Guided by the whispers that fill her dead mind, she has gathered up what scattered Monstrances she can find - certainly one, and perhaps as many as a circle. She will look for the compassionate and those she believes will aid her in bringing peace to the Neverborn, but she is blind and crazed and so her selections might well turn out differently than she wishes. Wise Abyssals will fake compassion and devotion to the cause of the dead titans, though - for if they do not, she will try to crack open their shrivelled hearts and fill them with empathy for the murdered.
She does not treat her Abyssals as servants. There is still enough of the woman she was in her that she treats them as friends, making suggestions and giving them a loose leash. She strongly desires for all her Abyssals to get along, and will bend over backwards to avoid conflict between them. Unlike the long dead Solars, though, it is unlikely that they will treat her with amused contempt. The Seer inspires fear in a way that Mikari Aitchi never did, for she willingly debases herself in the filthy run-off from the tombs of the Neverborn, spiders crawling from her mouth and empty eyesockets as she babbles grieving laments. There are Lords of Death who one might be able to pretend are sane and well-balanced, but she is not one of them.
The Mourning Seer is not a Deathlord who has long-term plans. She does what she believes her Whisper-granted visions command her to, but is frequently distracted by trying to avert some great suffering. High Compassion Abyssals may be able to eke out surprising levels of support for their personal goals from her - but she is soaked in spiritual corruption and all things she touches turn sour and wither. Abyssals who take too many of her gifts will find the same corruption afflicts them. Her Daybreak has tried to run away many times, but every time it turns bitter and she returns to her master - who greets her with good cheer that her friend has returned once more.
Greater Dead
Baptised in the River of Sacrifice
Heretics and damned souls, the ashen priests of the Grey Legion are the unbeating heart of the penitents. Though their faith is heterodox, they consider themselves to be the the priesthood of the Ashen Immaculate Dragon, the deceased child of Sextes Jylis and Hesiesh. In the name of an impossible child, born of two men, who was born and died in a single day, they take it upon themselves to guide the Dead back to life - or else to save others by devouring their sins and attachments to the world.
Among the Penitent Legion, the ashen priests oversee the legionaries and ensure that new recruits have a solid grounding in their faith. Their words smoulder in the minds of the Dead, fanning the fires of fanaticism. The priests are great orators, and to a large degree it is their influence which keeps the legion so cohesive.
There are as many as six - and no more - ashen priests among the Penitent Legion, for they know how to induct others into their ranks to replace others when they fall. There are lesser acolytes among the Grey Legion, but very few are full priests. The River of Sacrifice demands much from those who would drink from it - the sacrifice of others and the sacrifice of themselves. Pyreflame has devoured them. Each ashen priest has been consumed entirely by the fire. Their flesh is cold soot and scorched wood, and they bind themselves with plaster-soaked bandages and prayer-strips torn from burial gowns to give themselves form. Should their bindings be released, they are born away on a stinking breeze to reform in the pits of grave-ash that exists in the heart of their temples. When they go to war, they don dragon-faced jade armour made of a mishmash of salvaged parts, and painted ashen grey.
The priests are masters of the martial arts - as most of them were Immaculates in life - and apart from their practice of the Immaculate styles, they also maintain their own, synthesised heretical martial art - Ashen Dragon Style. This, they teach to their acolytes and to the fanatics of the Penitents and put it to good use as they throw themselves at the horrors that crawl out of the Labyrinth. It is not uncommon to see a priest returning from war with a collection of heads, taken from great beasts and monstrous spectres.
Two ashen priests accompany the Pyre-Saint at all times, speaking for and protecting their impure martyr. The other four can be found among the forces of the Grey Legion, leading them down the road of self-sacrifice in the hope that it will grant them rebirth. They frequently lead detachments of the Legion’s forces, looking for newly dead ghosts to recruit. At other things they will oversee efforts to capture and contain yidaks, who are muzzled and kenneled as the legion’s war-beasts, unleashed to run rampant over their foes. They also sit on the disciplinary boards that punish those ghosts who sin for their own sake.
Some say that the ashen priests are not truly among the Greater Dead; that instead they are, collectively, a Lord of Death. This is widely considered as nonsense, and yet the learned among the Dead give it more credit than other hypotheses about ‘secret Deathlords’ or other such tales. Certainly, all six ashen priests gathered together are a combat force to rival a Deathlord, just as six Immaculate masters threaten even the mightiest Anathema. Others question their influence on the Legion. It was the early priests who led the Penitents down the path of sin-eating, and because of that they have transformed from a core of devoted soldiers to a fanatical cult-army, led by a Lord of Death and the upper-echelons filled with damned monsters. And who - or what - is the Ashen Dragon? Do they even exist, or is it just the desperate self-assurance of Immaculate monks scrambling for certainty in death?
Ashen Dragon Style (Melee)
Heresy in the eyes of the living, this Immaculate-derived style was born of the promise of salvation for the Dead. It is a highly aggressive style practiced by those who claim the scalps of spectres and other creatures of the Labyrinth, and shows clear ancestry from Fire Dragon Style. Its form weapons are scythes, two-handed axes and greatswords - the weapons of the harvester and of the executioner. It may be practiced in full armour.
1: +1 Accuracy when making a called shot at the head of a target
2: +1 to Valour rolls to resist fear from enemy combatants.
3: +1 Damage vs targets with at least one dot of Whispers.
Greater Dead
Baptised in the River of Dead Grain
Those who descend down to Dead Zairio will find white marble statues of a great woman-headed lion greeting them when they enter the domain. Those who venture forth to the palace built from the memory of the ruins of the Shogunate will find that those statues are true to death. The throngs of the Dead that pack the dense market streets must give reverence to their monstrous queen, or she devours them. To fail to worship her is to commit a crime, and criminals feed her hunger. The law is swift and harsh. Still, the unquiet souls prefer her rule to the alternatives, for under her hungry rule Dead Zairio has conquered its forebears and grown rich on the spoils of war. The war-ghosts who wear her face on their bone china masks expand across the southern edge of the Inner Sea, and the Lioness Vigilant turns her eyes on Dead Paragon.
The Cannibal-Queen of Dead Zairio has the body of a lion as big as an elephant. Her once-innocent features are hunger-pinched, her skin is like paper, and her tens of fangs are as long as a man's forearm. Her tongue is a leech's. Death has darkened her once coffee-coloured skin to a stormy grey, but her milky white eyes stare out. To that end she wears a china mask painted by the finest artists of her city in semblance of life. It is a pretence let down by the fact that she only wears a half-mask; she bares her fangs, the better to eat you with. Her hunger is part of her, but she retains enough humanity that she tries to channel it. When she loses control then she becomes a true monster.
In life, she was no one. Three hundred years ago, a baker bled out after her first labour despite all attempts to staunch the flow. She was buried, and her husband remarried. Still, an echo of his wife remained to watch over her son and husband, a smoky figure whose spectral robes were drenched in blood below the waist. Her husband grew old. Her son married, and was carried away too young by sweating sickness. Henna's ghost endured, eking out an existence in domain reflecting her hometown close to Creation. Her people did not hold to the ancestor cults and so it was a lamentable unlife, as poor as her first.
Then came a nephrack-born surge up the River of Dead Grain, a landslide of dry seed and dusty worthless soil crashing up over their defences. The river's hunger devoured memory-substance and left nothing behind. Ghosts starved and withered as they were borne away. Famine consumed all. All save Henna, who took some of that hunger within herself and latched onto another ghost as they were swept away. She ate his corpus and crunched his bones - and when he was gone, she moved onto the next and the next and the next.
With her cannibalism, she had the strength to resist the pull of the river. Slowly, painfully she fought against the tide and clawed her way through dusty soil. Her feast had given her the bulk to surface and vomit forth the worthless seed that sought to fill her stomach and so she pulled herself out onto a tiny domain. The hardened pirates who held off Whisper-maddened ghosts and preyed on other travellers here tried to destroy her. She ate them too.
Something in her maddened passions quieted once she found herself alone on an isle of the dead. She had lost human form and bloated into immensity. A full belly let her claw her way back from the hunger, but already she could feel the urge slowly nagging at the back of her mind. Taking their yacht, she wrapped her tail around the tiller and set course back up the river of soil and dead grain, heading back towards Creation. The Dead can feel the pull of the Labyrinth and she knew that cursed place was too close for her liking.
As one of the Greater Dead, the lesser haunts and spooks she encountered could not stand against her alone. What one cunning group could do, however, was subvert her. With a creature such as her on-side, Dead Yahrad became a pirate power - and then they swept in and conquered Dead Zairio, installing themselves as its new aristocracy aided by the conniving of the merchants who realised that they could rid themselves of the hated Tyrant for someone more... amenable to their desires of conquest and profit. Now the nouveau riche pirate-princelings rule a power in the South and the lion-banner of the Cannibal-Queen is raised high by war-ghosts.
Henna herself restrains her predations to slaves, captives, and yidaks and so far this has been successful. The River of Dead Grain suffuses her nature, but she channels it into more than just devouring other ghosts. Her passions drive her to expand, to conquer others and digest their lands to make them her own. She understands at least in part that the merchant-dukes and pirate-counts who hail her as queen view her as a useful monster, but she does not care. It is their role to feed her more ghosts, more lands, more treasures - and they can have the crumbs from her table. The mad power of the Underworld has changed her from the woman she once was and their fear is just another prayer that she can devour.
Notes and Abilities: The Cannibal-Queen is presented here as typical of the kind of Greater Dead that might rule over a new regional power in the Underworld. Through her alliance with a powerful band of River-pirates and their alliance with merchants who considered them the lesser evil, she has a position of queen of a domain. With the force of a combat-focussed Greater Dead, they have been able to conquer multiple other domains - and success breeds success. Because of the wealth flowing into Dead Zairio, they can afford to enhance their defences against the Labyrinth and protect other subservient island domains. Moreover, due to the primary of River-pirates among their forces, they are a naval power who control an entire tributary. As an expansionistic group they will seek to conquer more of the Underworld, but a lack of ancestor cults in Creation is limiting them - and so they will turn their eyes to the mortal world in time.
A necromancer would primarily summon her for combat. She is a terrifying monster that can crash through a legion of mortal soldiers, breaking ranks and devouring champions. Bound down into a host, she would lose some of her most powerful utility from her size and capacity to swallow men whole, but would remain a potent weapon. The other reason, of course, is to gain control over Dead Zairio by binding its queen. A necromancer who would try that must be careful, however, because not all of the power rests in its queen and even if her physical prowess might extract obedience, it will not be hasty or willing.
Greater Dead
Ancestor of the Scarlet Legions
Among the colourless ranks of the Grey Legion, one figure stands out. The armour of the Hero of the Damned is as red as blood and he wears plumes of laurel leaves so fresh as to seem alive. His uniform is spotless, though five hundred years out of date, and his sword drips molten silver. A golden halo floats behind him, wispy and pale. He never raises his helmet, but from behind the closed helm golden light shines. Others of the Penitent Legion treat him with awe, for he is the Legion’s champion, Hero of the Damned, saviour of the Second Empress and former Anathema.
Five hundred years ago, early in the reign of the Second Scarlet a vile Lunar Anathema sought to slay the newly crowned Empress. Through cunning and savagery it infiltrated the Season of Fire Palace, slaying many of her guards, and worse it called upon its demonic allies to aid it. Demons galore rampaged through the gardens and demon lords flanked the moon-demon.
But the worst was yet to come. Howling, it called for the greatest of its allies. One of the Solar Anathema responded, and possessed a man of the Empress’ bodyguard. The demonic power called on him and his soul ignited in cursed red flames, but in an act of supreme willpower the man managed to retain his sense of self. He threw himself at the shapeshifting monster, channeling the cursed power of the damned for the good of Creation. Grabbing the monster, he threw it out through the nearest wall and gave chase.
Eventually the Lunar Anathema lay dead, and the soldier rose, the brand of an Anathema on his brow. He saluted the battered and bleeding Empress with his blade. And then he reversed his beast-slaying blade and thrust it cleanly through his own heart. Through such a selfless deed he died a hero who had thwarted the malign spirit that had possessed him.
Of course, such actions were perfectly in line with the Immaculate Faith and the soldier was held up as the model of a perfect soldier. Pamphlets extolled his virtue in how he sacrificed himself to save the Empress from the Anathema and completely fictional stories of his involvement in major victories of the Realm are still told to this day.
Theologians may have considered the soldier to be an exemplar and an ideal, but such sophistication was beyond most of the common infantry. In the folk religion of the Legions, the nameless soldier was worshipped as an intercessory, as someone who might ask Pasiap to give a scared recruit the strength to stand firm against wyld barbarians or ensure that Mela hears their call for a messenger to break through an encirclement.
And thus the ghost of the real soldier, weighted down by his fears and worries, became more than what he once was. He became the Hero of the Damned, the Perfect Anathema, one of the Greater Dead buoyed by an enduring hero cult that still endures to this day among the Scarlet Legions. And sometimes a legion caught in a shadowland in some forsaken area of the Threshold and beset by spectres will find a grey spectral legion marching beside them, led by a man in outdated armour. This only happens a few times a century, but it has saved the Scarlet Legions from doom several times.
In death, he shows the same steadfast will and bright heroism that he showed in life. He shuns the two-handed weapons beloved of Ashen Dragon stylists and forces his men to drill in the classical defensive formations of the Realm. The Hero of the Damned shows no mercy to those soldiers who give in to vices claimed by sin-eating. The other powers of the Dead Blessed Isles consider him a fortunate bastion of sanity among the Grey Legion - though those who have seen how he shows no quarter to treaty-breakers may reconsider. Under his full helmet a dreadful rage simmers, filled with contempt for any who fail to live up to his standards.
The Champion worries about the path of the Penitent Legion. He fears the path the Pyre-Saint will lead them down, and he views the gluttonous and indulgent governor-generals of their conquered lands with scorn. The Grey Legion should be an extension of the Scarlet Legions, he considers - not a cult of death-seekers or the weapon of tick-like governors of conquered domains. But the Pyre-Saint cares not for temporal affairs and she will not see to their core mission. He believes that this cannot stand, and she would fritter their heritage down in endless wars in the Labyrinth.
The Hero of the Damned has a solution. He withstood the damned power of an Anathema in life, and did not succumb to its power. Surely that makes him best suited to assume the power of a Lord of Death. He must slay a Deathlord and take its mantle for himself - or else find such power within the Labyrinth and claim it. Only then shall the Legion’s fate be secured.
Notes and Abilities: Necromancers must be wary when calling on the Hero of the Damned. His strength of will and his capacity to throw off the most baleful influences are core to his legend and his cult. He is powerful for a Greater Dead, and harder to bind than many weaker Lords of Death. He has taken the heads of several foolish necromancers who underestimated his indomitable will. He hates Celestial Exalted with a dreadful intensity and would never willingly ally with them, but is loyal to the Dragonblooded - even though he recognises that a Greater Dead such as him has no place in the world.
The Hero of the Damned is a dead Solar - though he would not think of himself that way - and his valour, temperance and conviction are all without question. His legend from his cult is that of a perfect Realm soldier and his personal charms enable that - he is superlative commander of the Dead, able to hammer a motley collection of ghosts into a rigid formation, as well as a lethal swordsman. He also foresees military disasters that would affect his cult that would occur in Shadowlands and the Underworld, which is how he has been able to lead the Grey Legion to save otherwise doomed forces from certain death.
Greater Dead
Baptised in the River of Emptiness
Among the dark ranks of the Greater Dead drifts a child, clad in pale robes and holding a black mirror. Her voice is an inflectionless monotone that carries the accent of the Realm, and she walks the banks of the River of Emptiness; the death of once-great heroes whose lives ended in quiet and miserable deaths devoid of point or purpose. The sucking waters bubble with the resentment of those who drown there, directed inward at their own emptiness and the aching hole left where once dwelt vibrant principles and heroic motivations. Few ghosts survive this River, which leeches away all else but the gnashing hunger for remembered drives and the self-loathing of one’s own apathy. Jingzi is one of the very few of its Baptised who remains in the modern day, and none know what lies under her shadowy hood; living or dead.
Jingzi is old. There are records of her that date back to the early years of the First Scarlet, and she is often older than her masters of the moment. In her baptism she travelled deep, deep down the River, and some say her mirror is a piece of polished stone taken from the Maw of Oblivion itself. Despite her power – which might have been that of a deathlord had she sought it – she lacks ambition and will of her own; only ever appearing as the servant of others. Exactly what binds her to death is unclear, but Oblivion cults form in her wake even when her masters shun them, and it is whispered that she may be a nephwrack whose madness stems not from the Neverborn, but from the Void itself. If so, she is either unusually passive... or dangerously patient. Many ghosts fear the potential of the latter, and will not approach her or meet her mirror’s gaze.
Whatever her nature – whether it stems from the Labyrinth or merely her Baptism in an unusual River - Jingzi rarely if ever acts of her own accord. She works as emissary, mouthpiece and lieutenant for masters of the Greater Dead and the occasional necromancer. She seems to shun the service of deathlords – or perhaps they shun her for the threat she poses; for she is among the stronger echelons of the Greater Dead, though she has never been proven to have turned on a master. To her equals and inferiors, though, she is an invaluable ally, and rare is the Sin-Eater or ancestor-ghost who can refuse her offer of allegiance, no matter their dread of what hidden cost it might come with. Some such masters have vanished abruptly from the Underworld stage during her service... but such things happen in the turbulent power-plays of the Dead. No evidence exists that Jingzi is to blame.
Necromancers might treat Jingzi as a “safe” ghost to summon, and certainly she often seems amenable to binding. Her mirror can absorb or reflect attacks directed at it, and steal the souls of the living and the Passions of the dead – a power that strikes terror into the hearts of ghosts who know of her. Her hollow essence renders her imperceptible to many forms of essence sight, as well as allowing her to pass barriers and wards that others of her kind cannot. She makes an excellent messenger and spy, for her mirror can also be used to scry for things unseen and scenes from afar – though its dark depths may show other things, less wholesome to the eye and soul. Perhaps the most valuable role she serves is an administrator and handler of other ghosts, for by trapping their minds in the depths of her mirror she can compel their obedience, and she is nothing if not loyal to the letter of her current master’s orders. A necromancer might be wary, though - if she has malign intentions, she is well-practiced at hiding them indeed, and experienced in pursuing them under the command of paranoid employers.
:: SIDEBAR: REFLECTIONS IN THE VOID GLASS ::
Jingzi is a mysterious ghost; her motivations cryptic and her behaviour unpredictable. Why does she shun the lords of death and yet serve ghosts weaker than herself? What lingering passion drives her, beneath the hollow emptiness she was baptised in? Here are a few options that an ST can use, either individually or in various combinations:
Feeding the Beast. Every soul and Passion Jingzi absorbs with her mirror goes towards a fell purpose. Four times since the Great Contagion, hekatonkhires she has fed have clawed their way up to shadowlands and broken loose into Creation; marring the reign of each Scarlet and forcing Sidereal or Lunar intervention to stop them. Deathlords are too powerful and too perceptive for her liking, and she shuns the attention their service would draw - but her work for lesser masters offers her plenty of powerful victims to prey on. Should an employer of the moment find themselves vulnerable and alone, they too will become food for the latest horror she has chosen to free - though she is careful to never leave witnesses to her betrayals. Perhaps she is seventy years or more from freeing her current obsession - or perhaps it will take only one more powerful soul.
Her True Master. Everything Jingzi does is in service to her true lord - a Whispers 5 deathlord who dwells near the Maw of Oblivion, immersing itself in the blasphemies of the Neverborn and acting through her at a remove. It gathers extensive intel on anyone she works for by way of the authority she’s given in their affairs, and each job she chooses in her cryptic logic comes at his behest, accompanied with an additional objective that she prioritises. She is skilled enough that she usually gets her employer’s work done as well, and this has veiled the overarching plan for the moment - but interference from an Exalted Circle may show her hand by forcing her to pick a single goal to achieve.
An Ancient Grudge. One of Jingzi’s few distinguishing traits is the faint Realm accent she has carried ever since the earliest records of her, during the reign of the First Scarlet Empress. Whoever she was in life, she was noble - perhaps even related to the famous queen. Her grudge against that woman tied her to unlife, and Baptism in the River of Emptiness only reinforced the spiteful longing for forgotten ambition and the resentful memory of a life eclipsed and made meaningless. She serves any who hate the Realm or whose actions will harm it - and might perhaps be a solid ally for an Exalt willing to see Creation’s superpower fall by any means necessary.
Greater Dead
Eater of Sins
Not all of the Penitent Legion are fanatical seekers of redemption. If they were, then they would have exhausted themselves in the depths of the Labyrinth long ago. No, for better or worse they are soldiers of the Realm and as a result they conquer and plunder the domains they so bravely defend. It does not matter that these domains are the reflections of Realm and Shogunate cities - the Grey Legion considers such to be the cost of safety.
And so, like flies after meat, come the governor-generals. A deathly mimicry of the satraps of the living, governor-generals oversee or directly rule conquered domains. Those who willingly accede to the Legion’s demands are permitted more self-rule, but those who do not willingly join are crushed. Ofttimes large amounts of the population of such domains are enslaved and sold to other, more loyal holdings - for the costs of an invasion along a river are prodigious and the Legion must recoup its funds.
Manosque Azure, the so-called Gout-King, rules the granite fortress that the Legion built on the ruins of the palace of Guanado, a town of the Shogunate which did not survive the Contagion. The aged plague-dead ghosts glare in resentment at the looming presence of the fortifications and whisper behind the backs of the young Dead who supplanted them. The Legion is stripping Guanado bare, taking everything of value. In the end, the husk will sink into the Labyrinth and become one of the nightmares of dead titans, but the generals have decided that this domain cannot be held in the long term. The Gout-King is here to systematically extract everything of value so that other domains can be strengthened, and it is something he is very good at.
One of the members of House Manosque executed when the Third Scarlet crushed the House of his first and treacherous Scarlet-in-Waiting, Manosque Azure was conscripted by the Legion upon death. He quickly took to the path of sin-eating. This was not out of any religious fervor - though he veiled it that way - but instead it was out of a craving hunger for the feelings and sentiments he had before his death. Plucking the Passions from other ghosts and savouring their bloody taste came naturally to him.
In life, Manosque Azure was a legionnaire, and his many, many sins are a soldier’s sins. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Because of this, he has bloated until he stands three yards high, pale skin stretched tight over his bulging flesh. His piggish eyes glow a pale green and he has acquired the tusks of a boar which sit proudly on his corpse-sweat covered face. He has had commissioned a new set of armour in faded Underworld jade, which traces the contours of his corpulent corpus, and carries a grotesquely oversized hammer which he uses to demolish buildings and extract the wealth within. Sometimes a sin escapes his open sores, and takes form as a crow with a human face. Moreover, he enjoyed the company of camp followers, and now that he has power and authority he keeps a harem of courtesans - who are aware that, in the end, they are something he will consume and discard.
Within the Penitent Legion, Manosque Azure is quite content with how things are. The upper levels of the Underworld beneath the Blessed Isles are safer than they have been in centuries, and this stability allows men like him to flourish. The Legion needs his extracted tributes of prayer and fine faded jade and slaves, and thus he is valued. He fakes faith when needed, so he can sup upon the sins of others. He has long since discarded any desire to return to life - in death, he is the rival of any Dynast.
Despite his vices, he is loyal to the Grey Legion as an organisation - even if he only pretends to their faith. He genuinely desires for them to grow stronger and to take his slice of the proceeds. To that end, he is looking covertly to hire ghost-mercenaries from outside the Legion using his extensive fortune. He understands fully that the Penitents need a constant flow of newly dead ghosts to fuel their campaigns below, to chew up and spit out. Some raiding on the side, some piracy, perhaps a few false flag operations and the Legion will see most of the proceeds.
Notes and Abilities: Manosque Azure has his grand armour and oversized hammer, but in truth he is not the fighter he once was - or thinks he is. His legend of indulgence and sated greed is what dominates, and so his Charms enable his rapacious consumption - both at a personal scale and an organisation scale. A necromancer might call on him to oversee the plundering of a town, because he can smell out wealth and taste deception from those who would keep him from his vices. His charms do not help him build up an organisation, but he can effectively run it into the ground extracting everything of value and liquidating the rest.
East of the Fire Mountains, the Daimyo of Withering Years rules a barren empire which sprawls across countless domains of burning sand. He turns his empty eye sockets to the west, feeling the power of the First and Forsaken Lion - and he cannot tolerate a rival. To that end, he has gathered lesser Deathlords and Greater Dead to his court, and even now he plans for war. There can only be one absolute ruler of the lands of the Dead.
Greater Dead
Baptised in the River of Fear
Shadows gather, moving like living things. Flames die. Moths and other night-insects gather, filling the air with the flapping of their wings. There is the masked face of a woman in the darkness, as pale as the moon overhead. She does not speak, but gently removes her mask. The fear grips onlookers and they see their nightmares taking form, creeping in through the walls and ceiling. Terror seizes them. The woman puts her mask back on - and now the darkness is only shadows again.
The ghost who goes by the name Lady Noone is one of the lesser nobility serving the Daimyo of Withering Years in the South. She dresses in a tattered black cloak which hides her power from onlookers, making her seem like one of the Lesser Dead. In the service of her master she holds a march in the sands of the east of his domain, riding a spider-like creature of the Rivers that she tamed. The Daimyo and the First and Forsaken Lion are great foes, and she watches the border for movements from Dead Gem. Sometimes she sneaks into the land of the living on moonless nights, taking her pleasures in that decadent city.
Like many of the Baptised, Lady Noone has lost much of who she once; recollections washed away by the screams of the terror-wind. She believes she was one of the Contagion Dead, from the lost cities of the once fertile plains of the Far South. The scars on her face and hands suggest she died of some such disease - and her presence spreads hysteria and panic like a sickness. The mask she customarily wears contains her presence, but even then blood runs cold when she passes unseen.
A reclusive spectre by nature, Lady Noone is always scrupulously polite and even kind, unleashing the horrors upon those who catch her ire by hurting the weak or vulnerable. For all that, there is a sick fascination in her that she tries to dampen and cannot; the cold nightmare creature she became in the River. She tries to direct her nature at those she believes deserve her darker side. When she lets go of her restraint, her full bulk unfolds from under her cloak. The fear in the air becomes thick enough that men drown on dry land, screaming as their nightmares eat at their minds.
Necromancers summon Lady Noone as a spy and a thief. She is a flitting ghost who can move between shadows in the blink of an eye, and patient enough to sit and watch a building for days. Though she is weak by the standards of the Greater Dead, she is more amenable to negotiations than many. Because she hides that side of her, none of the tomes that mention her associate her true form with her more common face, instead believing them to be different ghosts. Some of the exorcists of Gem know of her, though they believe her to be a benevolent Lesser Dead.
Lesser Dead
Dead beneath the Earth
Tap. Tap. Tap. The sounds echo out from below the earth. The miners refuse to go into the dark places without a flame - and that’s a problem, because there’s firedust in these depths. But the miners say that the tapping isn’t just the sound of the props, no; it’s Ol’ Ali, who died when there was a cave-in, all alone in the dark. He’s still down there, sightlessly tapping his way through the dark, checking all the timbers. If he runs into a miner, he might just think that they’re a weak brace - and take their bones, to reinforce the ceiling.
When a miner slowly dies down in the blackness, trapped far from the sun, his ghost might forget what eyes are for. When he rises as one of the Dead, dried skin covers his eye sockets. His form is twisted and mangled if he died from rockfall, or else gaunt and shrivelled if he died in deprivation. Instead, his hearing is inhumanly sharp, and he taps his too-long fingers against the walls and floor. The sound echoes as he blindly gropes through the dark. When many men die in a cave-in, they’ll form entire shifts of ghosts who keep on working, returning to their crushed corpses to rest when they tire. Blind miners are material in total blackness. Even a smidgen of light is enough to disapparate them, but below the world they have solid form.
Throughout Creation, miners are treated with caution by many - just like blacksmiths. Miners venture into the depths, braving death - in more than one way, for the lightless places below the world are close to the lands of the Dead. Many miners have tales of strange things they have seen, and they leave small offerings out for dead friends who may have become a blind miner. Many blind miners are kindly ghosts, and will tap to warn other miners of weak supports or more malevolent spectres - but others are cruel and will trick and deceive men who don’t leave them beer and bread. Miners know to fear those blind miners who formed from men who resorted to cannibalism before they died, because their ghosts are hungry for life.
Necromancers use blind miners to carry on their work in life, or else as sentinels who listen for things that cannot be seen. It is rumoured that below Thorns, the Mask of Winters has vast chain-gangs of blind miners hollowing out underground chambers. Exorcists often have a mixed relationship with blind miners - and may face resistance from the living if they try to rid a mine of the Dead, especially if the blind miners blame the owners for the deaths within. Laying angry ghosts to rest may mean the exorcist must face powerful men.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Famine
When the rains don’t come, the land dries up and crops fail. The small-holders and day labourers who make up most of Creation’s population who go hungry, and their children are worst affected. Their empty bellies swell and their limbs wither to become stick-thin. The children die and are buried in the dusty ground. But their hunger prevents them from passing on. Plagues of rats or locusts appear that scream with children’s voices and the wind gnaws at fruit on the vine. Eventually the rats grow bold enough to attack sleepers, and a traveller may stumble upon a town where no one is left alive, for even the vermin have fallen on each other in their ceaseless hunger.
Children of dust are young famine victims taken during times of mass starvation. They seldom occur individually, and in the lands of the Dead they form feral packs. Their teeth become sharp and rat-like, they move on all four stick-thin limbs like beasts, and they endlessly shed flakes of dusty skin. The marks of a famine victim in life are exaggerated; their bloated bellies look morbidly obese, even though they are otherwise so thin that every rib can be counted. Their passions force them to eat and eat and eat, but no matter how much they devour they can never be full. Instead, they simply grow larger and their appetite grows commensurately.
These ghosts plague the lands of the Dead, for they only appear in times of mass death when things are already in turmoil from the suffering of the mortal world. Starving children of dust attack settlements of the Dead for grave offerings to devour, stripping them bare, and they fall easily into the practice of sin-eating, so will attack other ghosts. Moreover, in times of mass death small shadowlands form and this allows them to crawl back into Creation. Their nature grants them powers over hungry beasts - rats, mice, locusts, toads and other such creatures. They ride their senses and can force them to eat and eat. One child of dust can influence a sizable swarm, and a pack of children can bring a cataclysm to a town.
Necromancers summon children of dust to ruin cropland, or to control animals as spies. With training and the acquisition of new Passions, a child of dust can mitigate their hunger somewhat, though they remain mentally young and prone to pranks and poltergeist mischief. For an exorcist, a plague of these ghosts is a great challenge. Even if they can avoid having their flesh stripped from their bones by swarms of hungry rats and successfully lay the child of dust to rest, as long as there is famine more will likely form. Such exorcists often reach out to wandering priests and the like to try to coax the gods into bringing rain.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Violence
A pirate is killed while chasing after plunder, cut down by the Imperial Navy or betrayed by his fellows. His greed is so great that death has no hold on him. He desires treasures beyond measure, and there is no fortune in Lethe. He drags himself out of his shallow grave or claws his way ashore, and dead-but-dreaming-of-gold he sets sail once more.
Crossed bones are the ghosts of desperate, greedy men whose lives were stolen by violence. Deprived of that vital treasure, they seek their fortune after death, hoping through the accumulation of wealth to replace the life they lost. Their greed is such that they refuse to let go of material form, and so they quickly acquire skill in animating corpses - usually starting with their own. This protects them from the hateful sun and the befuddling moon, and their greed leads them to drape themselves in fine clothing and jewellery they steal. Crossed bones are dandies and are often found in rotting sea-coats bedecked with golden braid and fine silks. Still, they do not forget that wealth is born of violence and so hooks, cutlasses and boarding sabres are never far from hand.
Some crossed bones find others of their kind, manning vessels and forming ships of the dead. These hulks need no food and no water, and sail endlessly, taking slaves, plundering towns and attacking other vessels for treasure and repair parts alike. Others of these ghosts join with those among the living who feel the same greed in their hearts, and many of these ghosts can be found among the ranks of the ancestor-cultist pirates of the Weeping Fen. Others still leave Creation behind and take up their bloody trade on the Rivers of the Underworld. They are more than willing to serve as privateers for any power if suitably paid, for their greed drives them on and keeps them from sweet Lethe.
Necromancers call upon crossed bones to be sailors and to fight for them. They find it very easy to assume material form, able to inhabit fresh corpses and fleshless skeletons alike. Of a particular note, their greed makes them relatively trustworthy if unbound, for they will only betray their master if they are offered more money. Many a black-hearted captain has considered this a worthwhile deal to get sailors who never sleep, never tire and cannot drown.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Grief and a Broken Heart
A noblewoman engages in a torrid secret marriage with a monk, and they conceive a child. The father chooses his faith over her. The child is born, but the mother cares not for her babe and wastes away, letting her grief for her lost love consume her. Hereafter a weeping spectre in fine robes is seen wandering the streets of her hometown, carrying a cloth-wrapped babe and playing a stringed instrument. Those who try to speak to her find that under her robes she has the body of a spider and her bundle is in truth the drained-dry skull of her lover, wrapped in her silk.
In the scholarly lore of the Realm, it is said that the spider is a selfish and lazy creature, who refused to do its duty to the gods and chose instead to lurk in its web, waiting for prey. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the ghosts of men and women who let unrighteous love and maudlin sorrow consume them and neglect their duties often take on the aspect of the spider. Crying spiders are spectres born of self-indulgent grief. Many took their own life, while others merely let death claim through negligence. They can hide their arachnid bodies under the clothes they spin from their own silk, but they smell of amaranth and copper and they must play music to hide the clicking of their legs.
Crying spiders hunger for the blood of the living, which allows them to feel emotions other than the grief that slew them. Their mouths unfold to reveal barbed chelicerae which leave a characteristic bite mark on their victims well-known to exorcists. Given their druthers, a crying spider will drain their victim until they are a mummified corpse, parchment-thin skin draped over bone. They dwell in graveyards and around places where there is stagnant water, and spin webs which snag on men’s minds. A person trapped by a crying spider has their curiosity muted and can touch - and be touched by - the spirits. Fire can burn off these webs, and exorcists know to keep a candle close at hand to singe their own flesh.
Necromancers find crying spiders to be unusually trustworthy ghosts, as long as one remembers their nature. They are predatory, but their minds are sharp and when glutted on blood they are unusually mentally flexible compared to most ghosts. Some crying spiders even regret their deaths and seek to protect the living, though they ask for a payment in the blood of animals from those they watch over. Exorcists tend to take a dimmer view of them, and many monks have blue-white puncture scars from where a crying spider tried to feed on them.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Opiates
On the streets of Nexus, Chiaroscuro, or any of the great cities of Creation, an opiate addict spends the last of her money on her fix. The rail-thin, filthy woman lights up her pipe, losing her pains in the poppy. Her wasted body is found in a forgotten place, but her cravings prevent her from passing on. Her skeletal vaporous figure is seen in the smoky streets and poppy dens, desperately seeking her next hit.
Opiates consume the lives of many of the most wretched in Creation. Dragon chasers are gaunt ghosts with elongated limbs whose stinking forms are wreathed in narcotic smoke. Their matted hair is long, their poorly clad bodies show signs of abuse and suffering, and their ribs poke through their paper-thin skin. Dragon chasers haunt opium dens, and cannot roam too far from the scent of burning poppies. They stumble through death, minds fogged by the all consuming need that still afflicts them. When merchants dump cheap poppies on a city for the sake of profit with no care for morality or a batch of drugs is cut with the stuff of the Underworld, then these ghosts are seen in large numbers.
Their mere presence instils a narcotic feeling and relieves pain. When these ghosts are malevolent - and many are, for they hate the world that left them to die in filth and squalor - then they use this confusion to cause accidents and ruin lives. When they kiss a man, they pass their cravings onto him, driving him to do anything for poppy-juice. Some may take form, but only for the already drugged - and kindly ones will sometimes take up a role as a guardian of the lost and those no one else cares for.
Necromancers know well that a pouch of poppy will buy the service of a dragon chaser without need for binding, and they can be used to numb the pain of men if they can be stopped from taking revenge on the living. They are poor sentries, but often know the area they died in and its darker side well. Some Immaculate exorcists will trick these ghosts into hunting down illicit opium dens for them before sending them onto their next lives.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Their Own Hand
There is a pernicious rumour that goes around certain secondary schools in the Realm, despite the best efforts of all authority figures to stamp it out. The whispers claim that if an unexalted Dynast cuts their own throat on the stroke of midnight on their twenty-first birthday, while praying to the Immaculate Dragons, then they’ll be reborn as someone who is guaranteed to Exalt. Someone desperate enough to try this ritual will not pass on, however, and the ghosts that rise from such tragedy are intensely malevolent. They haunt places the young frequent, killing their former peers and the next generation.
In truth, the rumoured method for such a suicide is a thaumaturgical ritual laden with the spiritual pollution of the Neverborn, and the death is a prayer to rotting murdered titans. The ghosts this produces are tainted and impure by their deeds, soaked in the filth of the Neverborn. Their passions become twisted towards hatred and revenge - which they inevitably turn on the Dynastic society that mocked them for their inability to Exalt. Most of all, they loathe those with strong breeding who bear the marks of foretold Exaltation.
For all their youth, the corrupt power of the Neverborn strengthens these ghosts and fortifies them. The ritual grants their wish in a perverse manner, and clads them in filthy power, derived from Primordial races slaughtered by the Terrestrial Exalted. They become nightmare figures, bloody handed weapons of vengeance of the murdered. Some reanimate their own corpses and hunt down teenage Dynasts, seeking to reap a bloody harvest. Others gain the power to pull an entire building into a Cyst of the Underworld, trapping everyone within inside a horrific nightmare realm to be picked off one by one. Others still forcefully claim the body of a single person, and lead them down the path of spiritual debasement and self-mutilation, making sure that the hated Dragonblooded see what their children are made to do by their own hand.
Necromancers must take care when binding failed princelings, for they are powerful out of proportion to their age, sadistic and cruel. They are fortunately rare, thanks to the relatively few Dynasts who try this rumoured ritual and the hard work of Immaculate exorcists who seek to eliminate them all. Still, despite all this pages containing details of the ritual are found in old books in Dynastic schools and tales are passed from child to child, seemingly cropping up from nowhere.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Drowning
A sailor drowns at sea, and receives no honest burial. His unquiet spirit swims home, through the black seas of the Underworld, searching for his love. The cold, sickly waters sink into him and he becomes a wet, corpulent thing. He forgets his wife’s face. He forgets her voice. He remembers their vows of love, though.
And so when he sees a woman kissing a man on the shoreline, he is filled with rage. He tosses a bait ashore, and if the either take it, they’re caught up on the fisher’s line. The man, he’ll drag out to drown - or else hack apart. The woman, he’ll think is his wife and drag her off to a stinking cave to ‘keep her safe’ and feed her rotten fish and saltwater. Of course, such innocent women usually die quickly if they can’t escape the cave and free themselves from his barb, and the fisher forgets about her. He returns to his endless search for his wife.
Fishers of men are rotten, bloated ghosts. Plasmic creatures of the Underworld wriggle in their corpus; glowing spectral worms, quicksilver sea-centipedes and worse things. In their long swim, grey coral and black barnacles and other such things grow over them. They smell strongly of rotten seaweed - and this odour is present even when they cannot be seen. Any body they inhabit quickly acquires the same characteristics. Fishers of men hate the plasmics that inhabit them, but can never remove them all.
These men have lost much of themselves to the rivers of the Underworld. A few find new strength in that swim and become Greater Dead, but most are reduced to a nearly mindless, irrational state. The lucky ones can shift their obsession somewhat - if they’re found by other ghosts, or drowned close to land, there might be enough of them left that they can find a new partner in the Underworld who fills the hollowness in their minds. Such ghosts often wind up as the enforcers for local lords, or conscripted into the ferrymen who scull the Rivers. Others possess drowned corpses and guard the shore against other wretched spectres coming ashore. There are tales of how some fishers of men who take up such a duty manage to save their original wife from a monster, and in doing so pass on. The unlucky ones remain monstrous ghosts until they finally dissipate or some exorcist banishes them for good.
Necromancers find that fishers of men are stupid ghosts, too lost to the Rivers for complicated instructions. However, they are very good at guarding a necromancer’s treasures, or keeping prisoners confined. Many a prisoner of a necromancer has found that any attempt to run gets them yanked back by the monstrous ghost that has them hooked.
Physical: 4; Physical Styles: Black Water Butcher 6
Social: 1; Social Styles: Sea Shanty Style 4
Mental: 1; Mental Styles: Sea-Caked Fisherman 6, Watchful Lover 4
Enlightenment: 1;
Arms: SPD 4, ACC +2, DMG +3L, DEF 1, Rate 2 (Seaman’s Cutlass)
Armour: 6 (Barnacles and Coral)
Join Battle 2; DV 3
Accuracy: 8; Damage: 5L;
Soak 8; Health Levels; 4
MDV 2; Urge: Return to My Wife
Principles: Jealousy of Other Men (4), Protect What Is Precious To Me (4), I Must Fish (3), Hatred of Plasmid Creatures (2)
Fast Charms:
Baited Hook
Keywords: Crippling
Fishers of men can cast a barbed hook baited with some precious item like jewellery or pearls onto shore, within 10 yards of the water. If someone takes the item, the barb sinks into them. They become both material and immaterial at the same time. While the barb remains in them, the fisher of men can take a Misc action to inflict a Knockback effect pulling them ten yards towards the ghost. It requires 2 successes on a Dex + Medicine roll to pull the barb out, and each attempt inflicts one lethal damage.
Animate Drowned Corpse
Keywords: None
A fisher of men squeezes himself into the mouth of a drowned body, puppeting it. The corpse quickly becomes inhabited by barnacles and parasites, but does not rot further. The fisher of men uses his normal stats while puppeting such a corpse.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Their Own Hand or Sacrifice
A scavenger lord breaks into an ancient tomb. There is good gold and shining silver within the musty depths, but there are also row upon row of cloth-wrapped corpses weighted down with amulets and binding. Rock grates as the entrance seals behind him. The servants of the dead priest-king rise, bind him within cloth, pierce his flesh with amulets, and throttle him. Another corpse joins the endless rows.
Most men only leave spectres through pressing need or great attachment. Throughout Creation, however, powerful lords have wished servants in the afterlife that are more than a mere shade. They wish to take their favoured concubines, loyal guards and chief falconers with them. To that end, they have dabbled in wicked magics and many ways have been found to ritually kill a human in a way that twists their sense of self and forces them to leave a ghost-slave who is anchored by an irresistible desire to serve. The would-be slave is sacrificed or commits suicide after various magics and workings have been performed on them, and then they are interred within a place where deathly energies are strong like a tomb or a shadowland. Ironically, often the magics that produce grave servants are more reliable than ones which would-be thanocrats use to try to cheat death, and tombs full of servants are left with no master.
Such ghosts are seldom powerful and lack the more esoteric capabilities of many hauntings, but they are pliable and they are chained by artificial loyalty. They seldom grow strong, but they retain their skills from life - though they lose much of the context around them. A shepherd knows how to look after sheep, a soldier knows how to fight, a concubine knows the bedroom arts, but they have problems remembering their parents’ names or the faces of their loved ones. Their bound and constrained corpus shows what traps them, and their withered, dried faces are peculiarly blank.
Grave servants are not ‘natural’ ghosts, insofar as such a concept applies to blasphemies against the cycle of reincarnation. The dark magics worked upon them are what hold them from Lethe, anchored in their ritually prepared body. Should their corpse be destroyed, the grave servant is freed from the chains that bind them, and will pass straight to Lethe unless they have found other anchors to bind them to the mortal coil.
Necromancers call upon grave servants to carry out the same tasks they were meant to perform for their kings. They are among the easiest ghosts to control, for if someone has a fragment of their body they must obey them. Many a necromancer has prized the discovery of a long-lost tomb full of potential slaves. Exorcists from the Immaculate Order detest grave servants, but to simply destroy their bodies risks awakening the vengeful hungry ghost of the king they guard.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Many Causes
Among the soldiers of the Realm, there are folk tales of a force more wretched and more outcast than the Vermillion Legion. It is said to be made of those soldiers so weak and so damned that the Dragons would not let them be born again, and instead chained them to their spears and left them to guard the lands of the Dead. The Penitent Legion would say that these myths are true, for they describe them.
In truth, a Grey Legionary need not have been been a soldier in life. The Penitent Legion enlists any ghosts they find, taking them to be rebuilt as a legionary. They are trained in ash-filled parade grounds by long-dead monsters, broken down and turned into weapons. Their death is washed away from them, and they are left as legionaries.
Within the shattered remnants of the Blessed Isles, the Grey Legion is often seen as a blessing. Better stability under their cruel hand than the monstrosity. But their taxes are high and many dragons of the Penitents see more use in crushing other fortress-camps and putting down rebellions than they do against the creatures of the Labyrinth.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Their Parents’ Hands
A Tengese man who dreams of a shaven-headed woman for two nights in a row knows to fear, ignores whatever she tells him, and encircle his bed with salt. For if he does not take these precautions, on the third night he will wake, gasping for breath. A spectre with a bloated belly and no lips will be holding him down with the broken chains that once bound her, trying to strangle him with her stinking rotten hair.
Within An Teng, a girl who falls pregnant outside of marriage has dishonoured her family. Should she give birth before being married, the child is customarily abandoned at an altar to the Pale Mistress and the woman has a few paths to make up for her shame. Within the more conservative areas of the Tengese highlands, the parents often make the decision for her if she will not join a temple. The girl is strangled in her sleep, her head shaved, her corpse bound in chains and buried in an unmarked grave and her name excised from her family’s records. She was never born.
It is little surprise to those who know the ways of the Dead that such murders often result in spectres. The treatment of the corpse is intended to prevent a yidak from rising and mark to the family’s ancestors that this girl’s spirit is to be slain, for these ghosts are among the most malicious Lesser Dead that a Tengese exorcist might encounter. Still, frequently the furious nameless daughter escapes her deceased relatives and flees. Ones who head deeper into the Underworld often return as nephwracks or Greater Dead horrors, but most haunt the shallowest areas of the lands of the Dead as outcasts, shunned by right-thinking Tengese ghosts.
Such ghosts initially look as they did when they were interred, with shaven heads and bound in chains. Their necks are raw and frequently covered in fingernail scratches from her desperate attempts to free herself. Swiftly she bloats into a grotesque expression of Tengese concepts of uncontrolled wanton femininity; belly rounded as if pregnant, hips and chest swelling, fingers stretching into claw-like talons. This snaps the chains that binds her, and she controls the broken chains like an extension of her own body. She keeps her lost rotten hair with her, and it moves as if it were a living serpent, always close to hand for use in her strangulations.
Nameless daughters are intensely angry spirits, and most commonly direct their rage not only at their parents, but at the whole of Tengese society that considers it acceptable to murder the girl but spares the man. If the girl’s lover tried to save her or her feelings about him were kind then she will seek him out to ask for his assistance in getting revenge for her murder. Such stories are considered to be the happiest by outsiders, for if he aids her she will often pass on, but to the Tengese such men are the blackest criminals. If he does not help her, though, or he abandoned her or she was not willing, he will be her first victim.
Because of their rage and their burning desire for vengeance, these ghosts commonly find places to crawl into Creation. Their unseen presence is often accompanied by a feeling of tightness in the chest and nightmares of asphyxiation. Some Nameless Daughters shed some of their rage after killing their parents and choose to protect their sisters, their child (if they survived being abandoned), or other women in similar situations. They warn girls in their dreams and may even kill their lover to try to save the woman. Most, however, are too consumed by their anger and instead target men who benefit from the hypocrisies of Tengese society. The bitter irony is that their actions instead fortify that society and convince parents that a girl who becomes pregnant outside of marriage is evil at heart.
Necromancers call on Nameless Daughters to kill men - especially men known to have bastards - or to scout out locations. A newly dead Nameless Daughter will often serve a necromancer faithfully without the need for binding if they help them with their revenge on their parents.
Physical: 2; Physical Styles: Hidden Strangler Style 6, Ceiling Crawling Nightmare Style 5
Social: 2; Social Styles: Wailing Victim Style 8
Mental: 2; Mental Styles: Hunting Spectre Style 6, [Appropriate Tengese Peasant profession] 5
Enlightenment: 2;
Arms: SPD 5, ACC +1, DMG +1B, DEF 1, Rate 2, Range 5 (Serpent-like Hair Garottes)
Armour: 2 (Tight-binding chains)
Join Battle 3; DV 3
Accuracy: 7; Damage: 4B;
Soak 3; Health Levels; 2
MDV 4; Urge: Punish a World that Kills the Girl and Spares the Man
Principles: I Hate My Parents (5), I Hate Anyone Who Helped My Parents (4), I Hate Men Who Sleep With Unmarried Women (4), I Hate ‘Proper’ Tengese Standards (3), I Hate Priests of the Golden Lord (3)
Fast Charms:
Breathless Vengeance
Keywords: None
Men who have ever fathered a child on an unmarried woman (unless the man married the woman before any child was born) or are currently in a relationship with an unmarried woman are Obvious to Nameless Daughters. Nameless Daughters do Aggravated damage against such men and against their own parents, as they find their lungs seize up with each blow.
Nightmare Bride
Keywords: Illusion
Once per night, a Nameless Daughter can make a dreamborne social attack with Wailing Victim Style against a sleeping man who is in a relationship with a woman who is not his wife, the man who fathered her child, her blood relatives, or against an unmarried woman in a sexual relationship with a man. If she succeeds for three nights in a row, her target becomes both material and immaterial until sunrise. Some Nameless Daughters use this to protect certain individuals, but they are most infamous for using this to strangle their parents and adulterous men.
Wretched Crawler
Keywords: None
Nameless Daughters may freely Move and Dash on vertical and inverted surfaces, using Ceiling Crawling Nightmare Style. They use the chains that bind them to grip onto even slick surfaces.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Natural Causes
There’s a family living up on a prosperous estate on the edge of town. There’s rumours of some black deeds in their past, but few care. Perhaps they’d pay more attention if they knew that the family offers blood to a long dead man at the new moon, and that a spectre claims the flesh of his flesh, borrowing their bodies for his voyeuristic thrills.
Old longbeards are found in patriarchal areas of Creation. When an old and successful man with a disreputable past and many descendents dies in bed, sometimes his soul refuses to rest. Instead, his shade walks the earth, watching over and guiding his family. His hidden sins transmute his blood to tar. Such ghosts have long ephemeral wispy beards that resemble fog that sprout from their skeletal wizened faces. They wind these beards around them, to conceal the ooze from their black hearts.
Such ghosts can be a boon or a curse for their descendents. Old longbeards are often potent ancestors, and their madness drives them to aid their children in the pursuit of wealth and prosperity. As long as their family shows them reverence they will try to aid them with all their prowess. They are often grasping and rapacious, demanding regular prayer and are more than willing to inflict suffering on faithless family members. Moreover, they can possess any blood relatives, using their bodies to pass messages or further their goals in Creation. These spectres treat their families as something they own, and resent little more than a family member trying to escape their dominion.
Necromancers bind old longbeards to gain control over their families, or to learn wisdom from them. Exorcists may be called in to placate an enraged old longbeard or to defend someone from their malign intentions. An old longbeard who listens to the Whispers of the Neverborn can spread madness to a family that knows nothing of the sins of their forefather.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Impalement
A caravan travelling on an Imperial road late one foggy night comes across the rotting corpse of a bandit, impaled and left to die by the side of the road. And then comes the attack, by an inhumanly skilled rider on a skeletally-thin horse. He runs through one of the caravan drivers with his lance and makes off with a wagon. And the ones who saw his face saw his clouded eyes, his gaping bleeding mouth - and the fact that his face was that of the dead bandit.
Within the judicial code of the Realm, bandits who assault messengers on an Imperial road are to be impaled as to warn others of the consequences of such an offence. The corpses are left in place until they fall from the pole, and so it is little surprise that many of these bandits do not rest easily. They return from the grave riding a grave-horse of the Underworld, and even death does not hold them from their criminality. Their death has given them a sadistic glee for impaling others, and they string the corpses of their victims upon trees.
Pierced horsemen are skilled body-thieves, and can snatch the bodies of those who intend to repeat the same crimes they were executed for. Otherwise, they can take solid form on misty nights. As a result, a bandit will repeat their crimes time and time again on the same stretch of road. The stigmata of their impalement forms on their victims. The pain of their deaths fills any lance or spear they carry, and those they run through suffer greatly.
Necromancers call upon pierced horsemen as scouts and light cavalry. They are skilled riders, and their curse means that the horses of the lands of the Dead answer their call. They are however, prone to inveterate criminality and all the vices of their life, as well as a sadistic joy in impaling others. Most right-thinking exorcists shun such ghosts, seeking only to lay them to rest.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Self-Immolation
It is a tragedy worthy of the poets. Two men from rival families fall in love, but Fate frowns on their happiness and one is taken from this world through misfortune. Consumed by love, the other casts himself on the funereal flames, so they can be together forever. But only one ghost remains and he wanders the world, looking for his lost love - or someone akin to him. Such ghosts will make use of illusions in the smoke and trickery to snatch up mortals who resemble their obsession - only to burn them to death when they realise that they are not the one they seek.
It is never entirely predictable whether one will linger as a ghost. In the case of those who self-immolate to be with their love or liege-lord in the lands of the Dead, often they will find that their beloved passed on to be reborn. Only their desire can hold off the pain of their blackened skin and the blue pyreflame that licks at them forever but never will they see their paramour or prince again. Shrieking and wailing, they tear at their flaking flesh and try to quench the flames that afflict them, but this offers no respite.
In their madness, these tormented souls desperately seek out anyone who resembles their lost love. When they believe they have found the object of their obsessions, the fire that consume them dies down to mere embers. Just as smoke can escape through cracks, so too can these ghosts make passageways and portals to the Underworld through places where fire has burned. Through various trickeries they will try to bring the one they think they love to the lands of the Dead where they can be together. Alas, it is inevitable that they will realise that their beloved is an imposter, and then the flames burn with renewed fervour, consuming the innocent they believe deceived them. It is said that one can escape their wrath if one pretends to be the brother or sister of one the Dead looks for, claiming it was an innocent mistake - or otherwise an offering of rosemary and ice at a shrine can sooth the ghost’s pain for long enough that it realises its mistake. There are rumours that if the beloved is reborn their touch will make the ghost pass instantly to Lethe - but how would one find such a reincarnated soul?
Necromancers make use of spurned pyreflames for their capacity to make passageways into the Underworld. A moliated ghost can aid in the trickery of one of these spectres. Otherwise, a silver tongue might coax one into believing a foe are the one they seek out. Exorcists, on the other hand, seek to banish and placate these ghosts, leading them to Lethe so that they can escape the agony of their existence. Many exorcists react very poorly to romantic poetry which extols the virtues of suicide for one’s love or lord.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Slow Hanging
A traveller ignores the local folktales a farmer tells her, and sleeps under a tree from which an old noose dangles. That night she sees the hanged man, eyes bulging and nails bloody. He speaks to her in a breathy whisper, and tells her how the farmer - his brother - framed him for a terrible crime so that he might steal his inheritance. All she needs to do is cut him down, and he can rest in piece. She does so. Alas, he was not framed. The next morning the farmer is found dead in his bed, strangled with an old rope. The traveller wanders off, bruises on her throat and an cruel mind behind her eyes.
Those ghosts who return as one of the stranglerfolk were hanged and were not granted the mercy of a quick death. They wear their deathmarks clearly, and on their corpus the rope still dangles from around their swollen neck. Stranglerfolk are intensely angry ghosts. As long as the rope that kills them remains intact, they are bound to the tree and this gives them a very long time for their rage to simmer. Their bony hands have a terrible strength in them and when they seize a victim they throttle them slowly.
Occultists broadly categorise stranglerfolk into two broad motives; the ones who wish revenge on their killers and the ones who wish to share their pain with all and sundry. Unfortunately, the two of them are very hard to tell apart while they are still trapped. In either case, these Dead are natural body thieves. Some infamous murderers in folklore were possessed and led to kill and kill again.
Necromancers call on stranglerfolk for their capacity to puppet the living and as assassins. Bodies they snatch slowly sicken as the necrotic essence bleeds into it, wounds not healing and bruises forming on the hands and neck. Such a possession is a crude theft and gives them nothing of the memories, but these ghosts only want hands to touch the world again. Exorcists, by contrast, usually encounter stranglerfolk in a hostile context. Even when they are sympathetic or unjust victims, their slow and painful death leaves them rage-filled and viewing the world through a malevolent lens. Sometimes the only way to help them pass on, though, is to help such a ghost track down its killer - and pray they turn out to have already died in a way which satisfies them.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Many Causes
A scream is heard in the night, in the ancestral dwelling of a well-known family. The family fears what they will find in the morning, because the scream means one of them has died in the night. And sometimes someone might even see an ancient hag hovering over the figure of a sick man, pulling his soul out. His ghost will join the ancestors and be seen among the family hereafter.
Tallying grandmothers are only found in areas of Creation where land ownership passes down the matriline. Women who take ownership of land that previously belonged to another and was not given willingly will find it weighs upon them. It burdens their soul with attachments, and for that reason such women often linger as ghosts. They are cursed to watch over the land as long as their blood holds it. Their spectral forms are pale and ephemeral, their skin paperlike, and their legs become chains of mist that tie them to the ground.
These ghosts are psychopomps, though by their nature they subvert the proper order of heaven and Creation. They can appear in the dreams of their descendents, and know when one is about to die - and they scream when this happens, for each dead family member loosens their grasp that holds them from Lethe. Moreover, as matriarch they can snatch up the souls of their dying kin and force them to become ghosts, chaining them with passions of obedience to her. For that reason, tallying grandmothers often become powerful figures within the Underworld, ruling over a chained brood whose obedience to her keep them from passing on. Often a stranger may come across a domain to find that most of the ghosts wear similar features and obey their pallid ancestress.
Wary necromancers do not act incautiously around tallying grandmothers, for they are often powerful ghosts and have many followers who will act to free them. Many necromancers are not wary, however, and will bind them to gain control over their family, both living and death. Exorcists live in a difficult place with such ghosts, because they often have loyal families who have a tradition of serving the tallying grandmother - or at least kin sufficiently terrorised by the fear of the ghost who can track them down that they dare not oppose her. Immaculates know well how these ghosts are often the centre of ancestor cults.
Lesser Dead
Dead while Unfulfilled
A man dies poor, cursing the gods for his ill-fate and staring enviously at the rich estate of his neighbour. Bitter and hateful, his soul does not pass on. The only thing that remains to him when the debts are paid is his body, and he does not give it up. Cold and hungry, he rises from the grave. He breaks the legs of the animals of his neighbours, lurking in dark places away from the light of the sun. He steals milk from cattle who sicken and die, and drinks the life of men and hounds. When the exorcists find his body sleeping in its grave, his rotting flesh is bloated with blood.
Thirsty souls are only made from the death of those who look at the possessions of others and long for them with their last breath. The envy such people feel chains them to the world, and twists their very nature. Through taking from others, they can remain in their flesh - though they must reap a price in stolen life. The order of the glorious sun reminds them they are dead, and so they shun his light. Should they be threatened, they can mould their flesh to resemble their long-toothed, clawed ghostly forms and fight for their unlives.
These Dead are above all things thieves. They steal life so that they may enjoy physical form, and with that form they exact revenge upon the world and take everything they feel they are owed. They sneak into barns to suckle on cows, they murder men on the highway for their clothes and silver, and should they survive the destruction of their own flesh, they steal the bodies of others who feel envy. Of course, such higher selves cast out of their own flesh often become another thirsty soul, seeking eternal revenge for their own stolen body.
Necromancers call upon thirsty souls for their great skill at maintaining physical form. In the hours of darkness they can pass as human, and they may even operate in daytime as long as the light of the sun does not touch them. Thirsty souls do not require sacrifices of blood to respire essence in Creation, as long as they have victims to feed off, and so they often see use infiltrating villages and towns serving their masters. Exorcists, on the other hand, must learn to drive off such dark spirits, for they are one of the most common malevolent ghosts encountered in both cities and rural areas. They learn to hunt them in the daytime, finding the dark places in which they lurk and dragging them out to face the sun’s judgement. Corpses suspected of being a vessel of a thirsty one are nailed to their coffin and left out in the light for a whole day.
Lesser Dead
Dead by Many Causes
There is an old house up on the hill. They say that there were once three children who lived up there, along with their mother. One day she went out to get food and she fell and broke her neck. The children never left the house, but they’re still waiting for her. And perhaps if a woman approaches carrying a basket of bread, she sees the little emaciated ghost children and they weep with happiness when they see her. That lasts until they realise she’s not their mother. Then they get spiteful. No wonder the locals don’t go up there.
Someone is left behind. Perhaps it is a maiden, waiting for her lover to return from the wars. Maybe it is a child whose parent promised they’d be back with food and never made it back home. Maybe it’s a person who dies before the doctor arrives. What matters is that there was a promise, and it was broken. The ghost lingers, awaiting someone’s arrival and the fulfilment of the old promise. Such ghosts usually resemble their living self closely, although there is always some mark of the promise on their form; a mask, a kiss-shaped scar on the hand, or the words of the promise carved into their chest.
The materialisation conditions of such spectres are almost always directly linked to people who resemble the one they’re awaiting. The children waiting for their mother to bring back a meal can be seen by motherly women carrying food; the woman waiting for her lover is physical for curvy redheads. Alas, death blurs the memories and such ghosts often lack the capacity to recognise their loved one. Sometimes tales with these ghosts have a happy ending when the promised is fulfilled and they pass on peacefully, but others feature an age-maddened ghost trapping someone who resembles someone long dead, or cruelly slaying them for the crime of not being who they thought they were.
Necromancers find that such ghosts can easily be manipulated by their single-minded focus on the promise that traps them to the earth. The waiting ones are bound to a single place, and often display poltergeist-like abilities to hurl things at anyone who threatens their home - if magic is used to grant them a new anchor, they make excellent guardians. Exorcists, by contrast, usually concern themselves with resolving the ancient promise - which can be difficult indeed when the person they’re waiting for has been dead for centuries. It is hard, but it can be possible to persuade a waiting one that the person they await will never come back. Such a path is risky though, because if they do not pass to Lethe immediately they are often consumed by spite and take it out on the bearer of that unwelcome truth.
Yidak
Dead by Drowning or Violence
The water is cloudy; insects buzz all around. The travellers ignored the warning and cross the sodden land on planks between solid clods of ground. They do not notice the ripples in the twilight. A glowing green shape draws their attention, and they linger. Then there’s a splashing and a thrashing and one of their number is dragged down into the bog, screaming. A river dragon? No, say the survivors, no - something leathery and almost human. Meanwhile, their companion’s body pickles in the murky water until it’s as brown as leather. He gets no burial, for they fear to return. He becomes like the monster that slew him.
It is said by some that bogs of Creation are closer to the lands of the Dead. Certainly, corpses interred in them do not rot as they should. In many regions it becomes a tradition to give corpses to the bog, and the Dead rest easy. But when a traveller drowns or such a place is home to a murder, then the preserved corpse neither forgives nor forgets. The yidak never leaves dwelling place even as it is stained brown. These hungry ghosts are noted for their cold-blooded patience - and their sloth, too. A victim who escapes the initial ambush will likely not be pursued.
The tannins of the bog preserve the organs and brain of the body particularly well. Perhaps this is why a bog beast retains a certain degree of intellect; enough to stand ankle-deep by the path when mists hang low and call out “Help me!” or “Come closer!” or “My friend!”. Still, this knowledge passes in time as the brain degrades, and they retreat under the water. It remembers the knife; it remembers the feeling of water filling its lungs. Their dead breath rises from the water in luminescent clouds that draw in the overly curious. It lurks in the deeps, waiting to drag others down. There seems to be no pattern as to whether a bog beast will devour a corpse or leave it to rot - and perhaps rise too. In some places in the North East, tens or hundreds of bog beasts might lay waiting. They do not talk to one another, or hunt. They just lie under the water in torpor, lurking for the living.
Some necromancers have been known to deliberately create bog beasts, murdering men and women to leave their corpses to tan so that they might guard paths. These hungry ghosts are tied to their corpses, though, and their forms rot quickly if their anchoring remains are destroyed. Bog beasts prove a problem for exorcists, for their sodden bodies burn poorly and hunting them down can require months spent in insect-sodden marshes. Often the exorcist might just make sure that there are warning signs up and that the locals know the horror that lurks in the bog.
Yidak
Dead of Many Causes
Know this; the po sits in the heart and within that beating organ lives life, love and passion. But also know that the power of the dragons flows in the blood of the Terrestrial Exalted, and for the count of their years - which may be three hundred years or more - the po of a Terrestrial labours to pump their thick dragon-blood around their body.
When the hungry ghost of a Terrestrial rises, it knows the nature of dragons intimately and frequently takes on the form of an elemental dragon of the underworld element linked to their aspect in life. This happens more frequently the older the Dragonblood. Terrible dragons of blood, prayer, ash or stranger things burst forth from the disrespected body of the deceased, filled with rage at whoever woke them from their eternal rest. Some resemble a human with draconic features, but most have shed the appearance of man and exist as great deathly drakes of the Underworld.
Such po souls retain the potency of the dead Chosen. The yidak of a powerful Terrestrial begins their existence with the potency of one of the Greater Dead; a creature on par with a mighty god or a demon lord. Most terrifying of all is their long-earned acclimatisation to the elements, which means - uniquely - such ghosts can ignore those elemental defences which ward against the Dead. Such a yidak can swim through running water, crawl across a line of salt or freshly cut herbs, or burst through a circle of fire.
Dragonheart haunters are proud monsters, terrible fiends who are hard to propriate - and even harder to slay. They are greedy, iniquitous and cruel. In that, death has not changed them. They desire the treasures and pleasures they knew in life, and so pillage towns for wealth that they hoard, gorge themselves on food and drugs with an endless appetite, and seek out beautiful young men and women to devour. The sun burns them, and so when they squirm forth from caverns below the earth they do so at night. To hunt a dragonheart haunter one must venture down into its caverns and fight this monster on its own turf. The Underworld is no safer from their depredations, and it is said that they can still recognise the kinship of souls. Deep in the lands of the Dead, nests of tens of these drakes are said to exist, flying out to pillage and rage over the insolence of ghosts who fail to pray to them.
Even the weakest dragonheart haunter is a powerful yidak, and the mightiest are spawned as Greater Dead. Their greed and hunger leads them to only grow more potent. For this reason, necromancers treat these ghosts with a mix of wariness and ambition. A young haunter can be bound by a necromancer as a fearsome weapon, but no small number of necromancers have been devoured by a dragon they called up that they could not control. Exorcists fear these dragons greatly for they can dominate a landscape or lay waste to a town, and the Immaculate Order maintains several specialist teams of Exalted exorcists to handle those cases when a Dynast rests uneasily.
Yidak
Dead by Stillbirth
A mother strains in labour, but all for naught. The child never draws breath, and is cold and blue. The parents weep and bury their child. Yet wails are heard in the night, blood seeps from the walls, and their next child dies in their crib, burned by an unseen fire. Exorcists know to abandon such cursed houses and ring the room of the birth with salt. Otherwise, more children will die from a jealous monster that never got a chance to live.
Birth is a risky process, and occasionally tragedy strikes. The baby’s higher soul gets lost on the way to its body, and so arrives too late for the child’s first breath. The child dies - and sometimes the po that should have been theirs lingers. Such an unusual misfortune mostly occurs in shadowlands, where the violet threads of new life are murky and ensnared by the substance of the underworld. Established shadowland communities know rites to ensure that such a soul passes on, but they are not always reliable.
Gasping babes are a rare breed of yidak that have never known true life and so quickly become monstrous. In form they resemble wisps of pyreflame with a faint similarity to skeletal monkeys, and they crackle and inhale, endlessly trying to take their first breath. They lurk within the earth by day, but crawl out during the night to steal milk from cows, goats and nursing mothers. Their toothless gums burn flesh, which is one of the signs of their presence along with their wailing and their choking attempts to breathe. They are most feared, though, for their jealousy of children below the age of three. They crawl into cots of children left unattended and try to steal the breath they lack, leaving their victim’s faces horribly mutilated even if they survive.
A lower soul that has never lived has considerable mystical power, and they are prized by necromancers who can acquire such specimens. Interred within a lead coffin or boneash china jar they can bring unnatural life to potent undead abominations. More virtuous exorcists seek only to lay such unfortunate souls to rest when they have the misfortune to encounter one, and there is a dedicated task-force in the Division of Endings under whose jurisdiction such defects in the reincarnation process falls.
Yidak
Dead by Violence
A man dies on the battlefield. The killer thinks to be clever and laughs as he tosses the corpse on the fire after looting it. But he finds finds ashen footprints around his camp fire when he wakes. He makes it to the safety of a waystation, and trusts in solid doors and locks to keep him safe. There is a fire in the night, and his body is never found.
A grave ember only rises when a man slain by violence is shown no respect by a killer who plunders the body and then burns it. The hungry ghost lurks in the heart of the fire, hiding among the bone ash and inside the blackened bones. When it rises, it is a creature of ash and embers and soot, compacted into the vague shape of a man. When it moves, it sheds soot and ash, and this can be seen even by mortals. During the day it hides in cold campfires and forges and in soil that has tasted both fire and blood.
Compared to many hungry ghosts, grave embers have a simmering, cruel rage that leads them to stalk their prey for days or even weeks. When their bodies were consigned to the flames they lost their forms and so they cannot inhabit corpses or truly materialise - instead, they snatch up fire from unwatched hearths and wear it as their funereal garb, or animate puppet bodies from ash that blow away in the morning sun. Fire is all they know, and it is their revenge; such yidak fan the flames of neglected stoves and knock over candles onto bedsheets. When they kill, they feast on the blackened bones of their victims, breaking them open with rocks to consume the burned marrow.
The students of the dark arts call on grave embers as stalkers and trackers. Offered a bit of the clothing of an intended victim, they set it on fire and lick up the ashes - and from that day forth they will hunt that prey nightly, their bestial minds consumed by hatred. When forcefully bound within a corpse to animate it, the body burns from the inside out - but until it becomes useless to the spirit, the blackened revenant moves with the inexorability of a forest fire, flames spewing from its gaping, too-wide mouth.
Yidak
Dead by Leopard Soul Sickness
First a woman complains of headaches and suffers shakes and spasms. Then she falls into a deep lethargy or starts laughing hysterically. In the end, she dies when she gives up the will to live. She is ritualistically cannibalised, as is the custom among her people. But her soul does not pass on, and a mad ghost-leopard with human eyes preys on the village. Those who suffer its painless bite in their sleep will die as she did - and their souls will rise, too.
Such a tale occurs in the South-West sometimes when a man - or a woman, or a child - consumes the brain, flesh and heart of another human. Something bestial and horrible awakens within them, as their own lower soul becomes like an animal, unfit to wear the human form. The sickness is progressive, and may take decades to kill them. First comes clumsiness and headaches. As the beast within them grows stronger, they suffer emotional swings and hysterical laughter. The end comes when they can no longer swallow for themselves and do not respond to others. But their lower soul is a mad, hungry thing by this point and it leaves their corpse and wanders the earth wearing a form that resembles a big cat.
Man-eater leopards are highly dangerous hungry ghosts, with all the predatory threat of a leopard wedded to the supernatural horror of a yidak. They attack people at night, dragging their corpses away to hang from trees - for like most hungry ghosts, they must eat rotten meat. During the day, they rest inside hollow trees or ride the bodies of living leopards, driving them mad so they show no fear of man. Most feared, however, is the fact that they can smell humans who have consumed the brains of other men. They sneak into their houses, unseen, and bite them gently with their fangs. The bestial cursed nature of the hungry ghost passes to the lower soul of the victim, dooming them to this curse of leopard soul sickness.
Necromancers who know of this breed of hungry ghost use them as predators and weapons of terror. Those dark magicians who can think on longer timescales will often secretly feed their would-be victims scraps of human brain and send a man-eater leopard to bite them, so they are afflicted by the curse. Within the areas where this curse is most common, local exorcists know methods to placate the man-eating ghost. The Immaculate Order, by contrast, bans all ritual cannibalism in its lands and burns its practitioners alive, taking this disease as evidence of the practice - which proves effective at stopping the spread of the curse and preventing these ghosts from rising.
Yidak Lord
Dead by Lucien’s Hand
Faceless, nameless, lifeless; the Nameless-and-Abhorrent Spider crawls through the catacombs of the Labyrinth. Her name is a misnomer for she is no arachnid ever seen in Creation. The Spider is a spindly monster of limbs and blades and knobbled bone-skin as tall as a building, vaguely female in shape - but only vaguely. Where she walks, communication is impossible, for the world is twisted so all sense is drained from words and all is meaningless babbling. Her web is as black as night and razor sharp, and she spins it over the rivers of death to catch boats. Then when she comes upon them, she rips out their tongue and crams them into her gaping maw. Such is the destiny she makes for them. Sometimes she crawls out of the Labyrinth when prey becomes scarce, and brings wordless horror to the inhabitants of a city of the Dead, only returning to the depths when she is sated through gluttony.
Once the Spider was a half of a blue-eyed woman, lush and self-indulgent. Then the demon lord Lucien was called by a moon witch and he came across the blue-eyed woman in the night when she was in a drunk stupor, relying on her magic to hide her from ill-intent. He cut her throat and took her tongue, as the witch wished, and brought his trophy back to the sorceress. Did the witch feel that the magics she wove with the tongue of one of the Chosen of the Maidens were worth it?
Yidak Lord
Dead by His Best Friend’s Hand
It began, as many things do, with a fight over a woman, and ended in tragedy. Two brothers of the moon, divided by their love for their witch-sister, came to blows and when it was done one of them lay dead upon the ground. His spectre rose, and the hungry ghost returned the favour - and slew the young Lunar they had been fighting over, too. But Prince Skintaker was too mad and too hungry to know what he had done, for his reason had passed to Lethe, and so he still stalks Creation and the shallows of the Underworld.
The man who became Prince Skintaker was a man of great passions and desires, and his mad heart longs for sensation and feeling again. With the power of a lord of death he snatches up the bodies of mortals - men and animals alike - and devours their souls. Squatting in the vacant shells, the mad ghost mindlessly play-acts emotional scenes from his life; mimicry without understanding. Of course, those he has consumed rot from the inside out, but the flesh hides his form from the hateful sun, allowing him to taste the pleasures of life at least for a little while. Thrice he has tried to creep into that vice-ridden city, Nexus - and each time the Emissary has sent him running. Is it just indulgence that calls him to Nexus, or is it something else? The Nexan accent has a certain allure to him, and he pays attention to those who speak in that manner.
Greater Yidak
Dead by Drowning
The light in Weeping Lilly was smothered by the dark waters of the Great Western Sea. Brave and valiant, she was a maiden of the Sun who sailed for the joy of it. Then the Dragonblooded came across her in ships of jade and burned her beloved ship’s sails and while she was adrift they dragged her into the water and let it fill her lungs. They left her body to be eaten by sea creatures.
Her heart did not take kindly to that, and crawled out from her bloated corpse, snatching it up and swimming down into the darkest depths of the ocean. Now a pale-faced spectre haunts the West and she does not care about the running water nor the salt, for the sea was her life and it is her death. She cannot step foot on land, but this water-hag does not care. Sailors whisper that they have seen a beautiful woman sitting on a floating piece of wood during the night, weeping and combing her hair. The only sailors who tell these tales did not speak to her and did not draw her attention. Those who did doomed themselves and their ship. The taste of sea-bloated meat is the only thing that can salve her tears for her burned ship, and she cuts ships’ rudders and riggings during the night and leaves men adrift under the burning sun. When they go mad and throw themselves into the water to escape, she is waiting for them.
The Underworld is a land of memories as well as a land of death. Its geography is made of recollections and nostalgia. But a location is more than its physical description; a location is its people and its society and its feel. Therefore, just as an Underworld forest is filled with the memory of trees, so too is an Underworld town full of the memory of people. These walking, moving memories are known as shades.
Shades are not ghosts. Ghosts are the lingering souls of once-living beings, held to the mortal coil by a refusal to die - or by fell magics that bind them. A shade exists because the living and the Dead remember a location as having people dwelling in it. They are mobile scenery, part of the pallid imitation of life the Underworld pretends to. A shade does not think, does not feel, does not love or laugh or cry. They are the teeming masses in the background, the recollection of being surrounded by people and of seeing animals in the fields.
In some domains, one can walk through the lands of the Dead and see very few Dead. Shepherd shades herd shade sheep. Faceless villager shades pick at the ground, harvesting pomegranates and pale grapes from orchards. When the lords of death and the greater Dead war over domains, the shades within are part of the landscape, to be seized by the victor. Lesser Dead capture and corral them like beasts, selling them to other domains or taking them for their own personal use. The shades do not care, as long as they can do what they must. They are the ultimate downtrodden masses; without will and without want.
Shades are one of the key indicators of the proximity of a domain to Creation. A healthy domain has fresh shades coming into existence, for the memories of mortals shape the land. Once a domain is cut off from the living world, however, this flow slows to a trickle, as now only the pallid and distorted memories of ghosts bring them into being. The shades that do come into being are warped and twisted - memories of memories of people, rather than memories of people. And this cycle continues as a domain sinks lower and lower, and the shades grow more and more warped. These domains must resort to trade or invasion to take fresh shades from more healthy settlements, and this is a major cause of wars in the Underworld. The Shogunate powers of the lands of the Dead are buoyed up by countless shades taken in tribute, forming a mismatched underclass from many modern societies.
If it were not for shades, the society of the Dead would likely lock up. Ghosts only linger when they have some great driving urge that allows them to hold off the lure of Lethe. They all have great and terrible wants; the need to get revenge on their killer, the need to protect their children, the need to drag young men down to drown in stagnant water. This is not a mindset conducive to subjugating one’s desires to another’s. Shades, on the other hand, exist to fulfill whatever recollection brought them into being, and so clean floors, rebuild structures, and maintain the slowly mouldering memory-realm.
There is much necromancy and deathly thaumaturgy that invokes or draws on shades. Perhaps the most famous are the lavish sacrificial rituals of thanotic kings, that ensure that an abundance of shades that wear the face of the sacrificed men and beasts form in the Underworld. When a necromancer would animate a corpse without binding a ghost into it, she crams a shade down its throat to get a shambling, stupid servant. Shade servants are sent to carry messages to a target or bear a carefully crafted curse.
Shade Mechanics
Shades no not have true Attributes or Abilities. Instead, they have a small number of Style dice pools, almost always rated at 5 or less. Shades cannot take actions outside their Styles. A soldier shade might be able to fight, but it cannot fix a barn or herd sheep. Shades cannot learn and do not gain XP, and only have a sense of self-preservation if it is in-theme for one of their Styles. They are always Enlightenment 0.