Ghast

Origin

A Ghast is the only rank in this class that can be made by accident and made in numbers. Where a Lich has worked, the ground keeps the leavings, and a body buried in that ground without the cleansing rite will get up within a year.

That is why the burial customs of the settled world are as elaborate as they are, and why a priest who cuts corners is run out of a parish. Every village that has been near void work for a century has a list of families it will not bury in the old plot.

Frailty

Against them the settled world has a defence and it is a burial custom: "Many towns and cities hold fast to their cleansing burial rituals, ensuring the thoroughness prior to burial, just in case the person who has passed was of a Void past."

It is the only effective popular defence in the world against anything in this class, it is aimed at Ghasts alone, and it is performed in towns that have never seen void magic and could not describe it, by priests who mostly have no notion what it is for.

Body

A Ghast is a corpse driven directly rather than held, and where the Ghast of Ashwell takes a living villager the effect is specific. The eyes go pale, which is the aqueous humour clouding under the void's passage. The voice goes flat, because the larynx is being worked without the breath control that gives a voice its shape. The gait stiffens, because the muscles are driven all at once rather than in the ordinary conversation between opposing pairs, so every movement is over-strong and badly aimed.

The host comes out of it with torn muscle, bitten cheeks, wrenched joints, four or five pounds gone, and no memory whatever. Ashwell can tell who was ridden last night by who is limping at noon.

Remembered

The Ghast of Ashwell. It possesses one villager at a time and the parish recognises every sign of it. Whitestone wards on the boundary hold it out, and Ashwell has held the same ward line for four generations and repairs it before it repairs its own roofs. The parish knows every stone in it by name.