Kthuji'ji'ujhmi

Body

Things near Kthuji'ji'ujhmi age. Cloth goes at the seam, iron blooms, a fresh wound opens into an old one, and a visitor who stands too long on his side of the chamber leaves with grey in their hair. A Keeper holds a domain of the Void rather than a territory, and a domain is neither a metaphor nor a portfolio: a Keeper of Decay is made of decay in the same way that a hand is made of meat.

What is under the robe is not recorded anywhere, and the Coven has never had a reason to correct that. Since the class has no skeleton and no fixed count of joints, and since the form of a great Remoulded is an autobiography of what it has eaten, the absence of a description is itself a piece of information about how long he has been sitting there.

Society

He speaks seldom and slowly, and each sentence arrives already sounding like something remembered rather than said. That is not manner alone. This class cannot smell when a thing happened, only that it happened, so a Keeper will give an event four centuries old and an event from last week in the same breath and the same tense, and does not experience it as confusion.

Being the oldest, he has the most to lose. Banishment does not kill a Remoulded; it returns the fragment to the undifferentiated mass of its Prince and takes everything it ever accumulated with it, and an old Keeper has accumulated more history than the Imperial Diet has written down. Whatever else his lack of ambition is, it is also arithmetic.

Regard

The Keepers stand away from his side of the chamber rather than avoid him, which is a distinction the court observes carefully. A Keeper cannot turn a domain off. Guests are placed on the far side of the floor, the cauldrons near him are budgeted for, and nobody who works in that chamber grows old anywhere else.