The Dreamt Ones

Origin

The Dreamt Ones are "conjured from faulty magics and foul resurrection and soul binding spells," and the class covers both the souls that genuinely returned and the things that came in wearing them. The origin is a fork with two prongs and no signpost. "If someone were to summon forth a person of recent passing, a possibility presents itself, one where the person may return and inhabit another body, or be trapped on the planet to wander aimlessly until it is released to move on. The second possibility is that one may try to summon this person who has passed, whether recent or further into the past, yet their soul has been devoured. Hearing the call, the Dre'mnae, or its master would send itself or a lesser void star to answer it, re-entering the world as a mimic of that person's spirit, possessing the new host, or haunting Nu as a Shade." The summoner never learns which they got.

Underneath the whole class runs the soul traffic, and the living do not know the truth of it. "Tantis is constantly shepherding souls along the void in his vessel, yet many fall to the siren temptation of the void stars, jumping overboard to be met by what they think is their saviors, but is instead their eternal damnation." The worldly gods keep no afterlife realms. Every heaven promised at every shrine of Orton and Irus and Tantis is make-believe. All souls go to the soul auction of the star gods, and the only people who know are a handful who came back and are taken for mad.

Class Three exists in the gap between what happens and what is believed. A necromancer calling a soul back believes he is reaching into an afterlife. He is reaching into a market, or into the void that runs alongside it, and something in the void is always listening for a call it can answer.

Body

There is no common body. A Lich King is "foul, husked and burning up from the inside with voided power." A Lich wears whatever body it prepared, and the prepared bodies are chosen for utility rather than resemblance, so a Lich three deaths old may be unrecognisable to its own household. A Shade has no fixed form and hides in corpses. A Ghost looks as it did, exactly, and is slightly wrong at the edges in a way nobody can name. A Ghast is a corpse that moves.

What is worth writing down about this class is what the void does to tissue, because in four of the five ranks the tissue belonged to somebody.

A Lich is a held body. The Prince's arm comes through the hole the Lich's own soul made and works the body from inside, and the flesh it runs through stops doing its own living: cells cease dividing, hair and nails stop growing within the hour of occupation, and the blood settles where gravity leaves it, so that every Lich carries a permanent livid pooling on whatever surface it lies on and the body-servants turn their master like an invalid. Wounds do not heal. They close, by the same holding that moves the limbs, and they close exactly as they were, so that a Lich two centuries in one vessel is a seam-work of old openings that never knitted. The flesh does not rot, because rot is what happens to a body that has been abandoned and this one is occupied. What it does instead is dry. It loses water year by year, the fat goes waxy, the skin tightens and then splits at the creases and does not come back together, and the joints seize. A Lich of eighty years in one vessel is light enough for one servant to lift. This is the true reason for the prepared bodies, and it is why the real work of a Lich household is oil, steam, damp cloth and warm rooms; a great Lich's chambers smell like a bath house and are kept at a temperature guests find unbearable.

A Lich in a living host is a different and more expensive arrangement, and Marcus Blackstone is the example. The host's own life keeps the tissue supple, so nothing dries and nothing splits, and the body passes every inspection because it is genuinely alive. The channel still burns. A living vessel ages at four or five times the ordinary rate in the places the arm runs through, which is the spine and the throat and behind the eyes, and it fails without warning, all at once, usually mid-sentence, after fifteen or twenty years of looking perfectly well.

A Lich King is a wider channel and burns accordingly. "Foul, husked and burning up from the inside with voided power" is a description of combustion rather than a figure of speech. The organs nearest the channel have been cooked down to a dry lattice and are no longer organs at all; heat comes out through the eye sockets, the mouth and every old wound, and in cold air a Lich King smokes faintly at the face. They cannot be near dry cloth for long, they char the floor where they sit, and a King's hall is stone, water and iron with nothing soft in it. It is also why they live far from settled country, and the world has always read that as caution when it is substantially ventilation.

A Shade animates a corpse without holding it, which is the important distinction. 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.

A Ghost is not tissue at all. A Ghost is a soul standing in the shape it remembers, and every account of the class agrees that a Ghost is exact in most places and vague at the edges in a way nobody can put a finger on. The reason is simple once it is said. Nobody has ever seen the back of their own head, the true set of their own ears, the line of their own shoulders from behind, or their own walk. A Ghost is perfect wherever it had a mirror and approximate everywhere else. The nape, the spine, the backs of the hands past the knuckle and the gait are all guesses, and in old Ghosts the guesses simplify further with the years. There is a test, practised quietly in four countries, in which the returned loved one is asked to walk away down a hall, and the family watches the back of the neck.

A Ghast is a corpse driven directly. Where the Ghast of Ashwell takes a living villager the effect on the host is specific and is recognised by everybody in that parish. 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, and Ashwell can tell who was ridden last night by who is limping at noon.

What runs through all five is the cold and the smell. Void work leaves a scent that the trade calls the after-thought: dry, faintly sweet, like the inside of a chest that has been shut for a generation. Dogs will not stay in a room with it. It is the only tell that crosses every rank, and it is the reason a good many innocent apothecaries have been hanged.

Life

Immortal while the debt is paid. There is no reproduction in this class and there never has been; every Dreamt One is made, one at a time, by a decision. That is what separates them from every other class in the tier. A Crimson horror is caught. An Abomination is born. A Shattered is spilled. A Dreamt One is chosen, and usually by somebody else.

What stands in place of a life cycle is the debt, and the debt has stages the way a life has. It is set on one night, in front of witnesses, at a stated number. It is serviced by collection, in quantities that must be met on a schedule. It grows while the debtor is away in the Prince's realm and cannot be worked down from there. It can be bought by another household. And it ends in exactly one way, which is failure, since no debt in this class has ever been paid off in full and the Princes do not accept final payment. A Lich's whole existence is the interval between two deliveries.

Frailty

Everything that threatens this class threatens it on a schedule, which is what makes them behave so strangely to anyone used to ordinary predators.

The quota is the first and the worst. "If a debt is not paid, a lich will die instantly," and instantly means instantly: a Lich prevented from harvesting is not weakened, does not sicken and shows nothing at all until the hour, at which point it stops, wherever it is standing. Everything a Lich does is scheduling around a delivery date, and a household that has lost a week to weather is a household in quiet panic. The commonest way to kill a Lich is not violence. It is delay.

The vessel is the second. The drying is set out under Body; what follows from it is that a Lich must keep spares, must keep servants who know the work, and must keep both in a place it can reach on short notice. A Lich separated from its prepared bodies is a Lich that will be stiff in five years and immobile in eight, and there are documented cases of great necromancers ending as dry seized things in the corner of a room, entirely conscious, for decades.

Miasma is the third, and the irony of it is that the class makes its own poison. Their work punctures the Caelyrean, the punctures weep, and what weeps out sinks into the very tombs and cellars they work in. The Miasma does nothing to a Lich and a great deal to everybody a Lich needs: the servants, the archivist, the harvest arm, the mortal who knows where the master is. A Lich household loses its people to the hollowing at a rate that has to be planned for, and the great houses recruit accordingly and do not explain the work.

The fourth is resonance, and it is narrow. "Music from the Elegeain religion" wards Shades and in some cases banishes them outright, because a Shade is "of an air based deviant." It does nothing to a Lich, nothing to a Ghast, and nothing to a Ghost. Every village that hires singers against something believes otherwise.

The fifth is the cleansing burial rite, which is the only effective popular defence in the world and which is aimed at Ghasts alone.

The sixth is the count, which is the Ghost's alone, and against which there is nothing at all.

Country

Lich tombs and ruins; the Wildlands for Shades; massacre-sites such as Ashwell for Ghasts; and the Void Princes' realms, where the Liches wait between debts.

The High Throne of the Lich stands on the Dead Continent, in the far west. The Dead Continent is the homeland of the Mekuhlian and a necromantic society where necromancy carries no shame, and the High Throne stands there because it is the one place on Nu where such a seat could stand in the open. Twenty million were sacrificed on that continent, to the void, by Mahlbar.

The Throne is a seat and an office rather than a building, and what has accreted around it over four thousand years is a black terrace, the ossuary of the households, the sworn-halls of the Liches who owe upward, and the field where the twenty million went. Nothing grows in that field and nothing is buried in it. Liches from every continent travel to the Throne to swear, to renegotiate, and to be told what their debt has become while they were away.

What a Lich household does to a district over a century can be read off a parish register without any knowledge of the void at all. The burials rise slightly and steadily and never dramatically, because a competent harvest arm takes the ones nobody counts: travellers, the unhoused, the last of a line, the sick in a bad month. The wells go bad in the low part of the valley. The dogs go. And the district acquires an unusual number of people who work at the big house and do not come to market. When a household moves on, which happens roughly every two centuries, the Miasma stays, and so does the ground it has sunk into, and the next thing that goes wrong there will be blamed on the water.

Society

The household is the unit. A Lich of any standing keeps body-servants who prepare and maintain the spare vessels, a harvest arm that collects souls at quota, an archivist who tracks the debt, and one person, always mortal and always terrified, whose only job is to know where the master is. Above the household sits whichever Lich King holds the oath, and the sharing runs upward: a Lich's collection is never entirely its own.

Between households the etiquette is precise and entirely about time. A Lich will not keep another Lich waiting, because waiting is what they cannot afford, and to delay a peer's business deliberately is a declaration of war that will be answered by an attack on the vessels rather than on the person. Attacking the vessels is the recognised form. It is slow, it is deniable, it costs the victim a century of careful preparation, and it kills nobody, which in this class counts as restraint.

Debts are bought and sold openly. A Lich who buys another's debt owns them, and there are households in the world that have been owned four times over and have outlived every owner.

On the Dead Continent none of this is hidden. Elsewhere it is, and a Lich in a Nu'uman city is a scholar, a physician or a lord with an unusual number of shuttered rooms. The physician is the commonest disguise and the reason is arithmetic rather than irony: a physician is expected to be present at deaths, expected to travel at night, and expected to keep a warm damp house.

Faith

Lich Kings are "prophets of each Void Princes religion," and the class is therefore both the clergy and the debt-collection arm of the void faiths.

The doctrine they preach is the one thing in the religious landscape of this world that is not a lie. The Void Princes hold realms and can raise a soul into them. The worldly gods hold nothing. A person who signs with a Prince is being told the truth about the destination and lied to about the terms.

The rite of the sworn is simple and is performed on the night the debt is set. The mage speaks the total aloud, in souls, in front of witnesses, and the Prince's arm comes through and touches the mouth that spoke it. Every Lich carries the mark: a place on the lip or the jaw where the skin will not take colour, and a Lich meeting another Lich looks there first. The mark moves to each new vessel within a night of occupation, which is the one piece of evidence that the thing wearing the body is the same thing that swore, and it is the reason a Lich cannot disown its own debt by changing bodies, which several have tried.

Tongue

The naming law of this class is a rule rather than a pattern: Liches surrender their birth name. Mahlbar "laid down his birth name upon the Stygian altar and died that night, taking up the name Mahlbar, known as the Defiler in Ancient Naga'esh." A person who becomes a Lich stops being addressable by anybody who knew them, and every binding, oath or curse keyed to the old name lapses in the same hour. Names taken are Naga'esh in flavour and are usually an accusation: Defiler, Stygian.

Below the Liches, naming falls apart. A Shade is called by whoever it is imitating. A Ghost keeps the name it had and finds that it no longer fits in anyone's mouth. A Ghast is called by the place: the Ghast of Ashwell, and there are four hundred such names in the world and not one of them is a name.

Mahlbar the Defiler; Delfi the Defiler; Marcus Blackstone, true name Ya'kvor; the Ghast of Ashwell.

Regard

Feared, hunted and, on the Dead Continent, employed. The rest of the world's attitude is best read from its funerals. The cleansing burial rite is practised in towns that have never seen void magic and could not describe it, and the priests who perform it mostly have no notion what it is for. It is the largest piece of surviving practical knowledge about Class Three in the world, and it is carried out by people who think it is about tidiness.

Their alliances and their enemies are equally plain. The Void Princes are patrons and owners. Above them stand the Lich Kings. Against them stand every religion and government that opposes void magic, and the Elegeian singers whose music banishes Shades. Xikon, the Grand Soul Catcher, is less an enemy of the class than its accountant, and he is inevitable. The Remoulded dispute precedence with them permanently. The Mekuhlian, the only people who have built a civil society around this work, regard foreign Liches as provincial.

Harvest

Void Miasma. "Like an emanating radiation, Void Miasma, the remnants of Void Magic, is extremely toxic and near impossible to repel, besides at the hand of a strong Mage. Many within the apothecary and magical arts collect this essence to create powerful poisons, resurrection spells, and other dark assortments of elixirs."

The working of it is this. Void magic is done through a hole. The Caelyrean is a filter and every casting punches through it, and the puncture does not close cleanly; it weeps. What weeps out is Miasma: the void's own substance in the smallest quantity the world can hold, neither smoke nor gas, behaving like a heavy liquid that has forgotten it is one.

It gathers by three rules. First, downward: Miasma sinks, which is why it collects in crypts, cellars, well-shafts, mine sumps and the low corner of any room where a Lich has worked, and why the floor of a tomb is always worse than the ceiling. Second, inward: it is drawn toward previous punctures, so a site that has been worked once becomes the sink for every casting within a day's walk of it, and the oldest casting site in a region is the one that will kill somebody. Third, it does not disperse. Wind moves it and does not thin it. Rain carries it into the water and it settles in the silt. Only a strong mage can repel it, and repelling is not removing; the Miasma goes somewhere, and where it goes is downhill and into the next hollow along.

What exposure does to the living runs in four stages and past the second there is no coming back. In the first days there is the taste, metal at the back of the tongue, and sleep goes shallow. Within a season comes the thinning: the hair goes, the gums go, wounds stop closing properly, and the person is cold in a warm room. Within a year comes the hollowing, in which the sufferer begins to lose the sense that their own memories are theirs, and recounts a childhood as something they were told. Past that comes the opening, which is the stage the trade will not talk about: the person becomes a soft place in the Caelyrean, and things looking for a way in find them easier than most. Most who reach the opening are dead before anything uses it. Some are not, and a Shade that arrives without being summoned arrived through somebody.

Miasma is collected in sealed stone, never metal and never glass, by people who do the work for a few years and then stop, if they are sensible, and it sells for a great deal to apothecaries who put it in poisons, resurrections and elixirs. Every city with a physicians' guild has a rule against it and a supplier.

One object stands outside the trade. The Eye of Mahlbar is a talisman: his connection of power to his Void Prince's realm, the object through which the arm reaches, and the reason he can act as a Lich King at any distance from the Throne. It is no place, no organ and no figure of speech.

Remembered

Mahlbar the Lich King, "the Defiler." A Mekuhlian, and it fits: the Mekuhlian are the people of the Dead Continent, where necromancy carries no shame, and the greatest Lich King in the world came out of the one society that would have let him learn openly. He laid down his birth name upon the Stygian altar and died that night, and took up the name he is known by; the Naga'esh sense of it is the Defiler. Twenty million were sacrificed to the void on the Dead Continent at his hand. The Eye of Mahlbar is his talisman and his connection of power to his Void Prince's realm. He holds the High Throne of the Lich, and what makes him the largest figure in this class is the arithmetic that followed the sacrifice. Twenty million souls did not clear a debt. Twenty million souls established one, at a scale that required a continent to service, and every Mekuhlian necromantic house that has risen since has risen inside the collection apparatus he built. His people do not universally revere him. They live in his ledger.

Delfi the Defiler. Named, with the epithet, and nothing more of her is remembered anywhere. The shared epithet is no duplication and no error. The Naga'esh word rendered as Defiler is a rank within the void faiths, held by one at a time under each Prince, and Delfi holds it under a different Prince from Mahlbar's. Two Defilers, two Princes, and a great deal of ill feeling.

Marcus Blackstone, true name Ya'kvor. A summoned Lich possessing a Nu'uman body and walking under a Nu'uman name. The pattern is common and Blackstone is the example the world can point to: a Lich whose prepared vessel is a living person rather than a corpse, which is more expensive, more stable and considerably harder to detect. Nothing dries, nothing seizes, and no servant is needed to turn him in the night, and the whole cost is paid by a host who is being burned through from the spine outward and who is, by every account that matters, still in there.

Xikon, the Grand Soul Catcher. He comes for stolen souls and hunts for a thousand and one days. He cannot be stopped, bought off or hidden from. He is not of the void and not of this class; he is the star gods' collector, and the auction is his employer. Those who have seen him describe a tall figure with a net and no face, and they describe him calmly, because by the time anyone sees him the argument is over.

The Ghast of Ashwell. It possesses one villager at a time; the eyes go pale, the voice goes flat, the gait stiffens, and the host remembers nothing afterward. Whitestone wards on the boundary hold it out. Ashwell has held the same ward line for four generations and repairs it before it repairs its own roofs, and the parish knows every stone in it by name.

Ranks each has a page of its own