Shade
"False spirits, dragged to our world to perform horrible deeds on both good and foul persons, these beings mimic those we love, hate or do not know, and haunt the living." Fragments of darkness, dangerous in proportion to who called them, their forms ever changing, hiding in the corpses of the dead.
A Shade is what answers when the soul that was called has already been devoured, and the summoner never learns which of the two he got.
Body
A Shade animates a corpse without holding it, which is the important distinction in this class. The corpse goes on rotting on its ordinary schedule while it is being worn, so a Shade's vessel falls apart around it within days and it moves to the next one.
An infestation is therefore tracked by the graves rather than by sightings, and a district under Shades can be mapped by its disturbed burials before anyone has seen anything at all.
Life
They are common in the Wildlands and they "sustain themselves by feasting off of Nightmares." That fact is the useful one. Shades swarm small towns and refugee camps and mostly do not attack, "as their nightmares, when alive, sustain them more than a corpse would."
A Shade infestation leaves a town that cannot sleep rather than a town that is dying. A place that has been under Shades for a year has a particular look: nobody is hurt and nobody is well, the livestock are fine, and the children have stopped being frightened, which is worse, because a town grown used to its nightmares has stopped feeding them properly. The Shades move on to somewhere with fresher terror, and what they leave behind is a generation that does not dream at all.
Frailty
Wards are light, and "music from the Elegeain religion." Being "of an air based deviant, a certain resonance can not only ward them away, but in some cases banish them back to the void."
That resonance is narrow and it is the only one in this class. It does nothing to a Lich, nothing to a Ghast and nothing to a Ghost, and every village that hires singers against something else believes otherwise.
Origin
Not every Shade was summoned. Long exposure to Void Miasma runs through four stages, and the last of them, which the trade will not talk about, is the opening: the sufferer becomes a soft place in the Caelyrean and things looking for a way in find them easier than most.
Most who reach that stage are dead before anything uses it. Some are not, and a Shade that arrives without being summoned arrived through somebody.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How many Shades a single summoning brings
- Whether a Shade knows it is a forgery
- What the Elegeian resonance actually is
- What becomes of a generation that has stopped dreaming