The Great Shattered

Origin

The Shattered are what comes through when a summoning is not enough. "When Void Mages began conjuring Remoulded into our reality, their magics were scattered and still evolving, thus pulling with each Remoulded a group of lesser beings, shattered fragments of each Void Prince." They are the same substance as a Remoulded and share its origin. What they lack is the mind, and what they lack the mind for is a plan.

The summoning law decides the class. A strong summoner with souls enough tears a wide fissure and pulls a mass of a Void Prince through it: that is a Remoulded, and a hair off a Prince is eighty feet of it. A weak summoner, or a thin sacrifice, still tears something, and through the smaller tear comes a smaller and less sentient piece. Nobody sets out to make one. Every Shattered in the world is a failure, and the world is full of them.

Every Void Prince has from ten to many hundreds of Shattered loose on Nu, and some have thousands. That number is the reason the wilderness of this world is what it is. Monsters do not breed themselves into these figures; for every den of Remoulded there have been a thousand botched castings, and none of the results ever died of anything.

Body

The form law defines the class. "When entering into our reality, the Shattered, having no true consciousness of their own, pull on any and all negative emotions present within reality, thus taking similar forms to things present that we hold fear or negative emotion towards. Giant spiders, Goblin Lords, Four Headed basilisks, ancient terrors and all the in between."

A Shattered has no shape of its own and borrows the worst one available from the people nearest to it at the moment it arrives. The consequence is that the monster a region has is a confession about that region. A valley that fears the water gets a serpent. A valley that fears its own dead gets something that walks like a relative. A hamlet that burned nine people in a mill fire and has thought about nothing else since gets a burning thing shaped like a wheel.

Because the class has no anatomy, its Body is a process, and the process has four stages that anyone who has watched a fissure open can name. First the arrival, which is a mass of the same cold dense void substance the Remoulded are made of, unshaped, roughly the volume it will end up being and nothing like the shape. Second the drawing, in which it reaches for the strongest negative feeling within reach and holds it. Third the setting, in which the mass runs into the borrowed outline the way water runs into a mould, over minutes in a crowd and over days in an empty ruin. Fourth the hardening, after which nothing changes again for as long as the world lasts.

What settles is more literal than the summoning mages expected and it is the single most useful fact about the class. A Shattered grows the body the fear describes, and only the body the fear describes. It has the teeth because the story has teeth, and the teeth are real teeth-shaped void substance with no root, no nerve and no bone behind them. It has a throat if anyone imagined a throat. Behind the throat there is nothing at all: cut one open and a physician finds the mouth, the gullet, perhaps a stomach if the tales dwelt on being swallowed, and then undifferentiated substance from there to the skin, with no heart, no lung, no vessel and no gut. They are hollow in every place the fear did not go.

The consequence of that is the whole practical folklore of monster-killing, and it works. A Shattered is invulnerable in every part nobody pictured and genuinely vulnerable where the story said it was. If the country's tale held that the beast's heart sits under the left foreleg, the thing has one there, and a spear in it stops the thing for a year. If the tale held that the eyes are its only soft place, the eyes are soft. Heroes kill these creatures by the story, and the story is the only weapon that works, and every court in the world keeps somebody whose job is to find out what the local grandmothers used to say. A district that has forgotten its own tale has disarmed itself and cannot kill the thing in its fen, and there are at least six such districts, each with an unkillable monster and a library that would solve it.

The borrowing happens once, at arrival, and then hardens. A Shattered that comes through into a crowd takes minutes to settle; one that comes through into an empty ruin may stand shapeless for days, drawing on nothing, until the first frightened traveller walks past and gives it something to be. After the form sets it does not change again, which is why an ancient Shattered can wear a shape nobody in the region fears any longer: the thing in the fen is the terror of a people who died out eight hundred years ago, and the current villagers are frightened of it for its own sake, which is a different kind of haunting.

Their sensing is as narrow as their anatomy. The eyes are eye-shaped and do very little; the ears, where there are ears, are decoration. What a Shattered perceives is dread, as a gradient, across a distance of some miles, and it moves up the gradient the way water runs down. That is the whole of its navigation and the whole of its hunting. The practical consequence is savage: a Shattered does not go for the armed, the near or the noisy. It goes for the most frightened thing in the district. A village that sends out its steadiest men to stand in the road will watch the thing walk past them and into the house with the children in it, and there is no counter to this, because nobody can decide to be unafraid. The people who survive encounters are the very calm and the very stupid, and the world has drawn from that the conclusion that courage protects, which is nearly the opposite of the truth.

Size runs from "titanic sea monsters to treacherous starved trolls and giants, and everything in between." They are called "uncivilized and lame," with a careful qualification straight after: "they still are smarter and more ruthless than most civilized experimental races." Unintelligent is relative here. A Shattered has no consciousness of its own and it still outthinks a village, because it does not get tired, does not get bored, and has nothing else to do.

Life

Infertile, and permanent. "The Shattered are infertile and when they are killed, their bodies never rot, until the day they are reclaimed by the void or their Remoulded half." A slain Shattered leaves a body that does not decay, does not draw flies, and stays exactly as it fell. Villages fence them. Cults build shrines at their feet. Eventually something comes to collect, and the collection is the only funeral the class has.

Above them runs the hunt. "The higher forms of Remoulded hunt these creatures, as to reattach them to their larger forms, allowing them to grow in size and recover more knowledge of their previous existence and power." A Shattered does not know it is being hunted and could do nothing about it if it did.

They do not eat to live and they eat constantly. Feeding is the nearest thing a Shattered has to a purpose and there is no nourishment in it; it is the borrowed shape doing what the borrowed shape does. A Shattered wearing a spider spins, a Shattered wearing a serpent drowns things, and a Shattered wearing the shape of a starved giant will keep eating a village after the village has stopped being food. What is eaten goes into the hollow and stays there, undigested, for centuries, which is why the inside of an old Shattered is an archive of a district and why the fields around a slain one are dug over by families looking for a ring.

Frailty

They cannot adapt, they cannot learn and they cannot change shape, and each of those is a door.

The story-weakness is the first and the largest, and it is set out under Body. A Shattered is killable by whoever knows what the local dead used to be afraid of, and unkillable by everybody else, and the difference between the two is an afternoon in an archive.

The second is the thinning. A Shattered lives off dread the way it navigates by it, and when the fear that made it goes out of the world, the thing does not die. It goes quiet. It stops hunting with any purpose, becomes slow, stops responding to what is in front of it, and over decades stiffens where it stands. There are standing Shattered in three countries that the local people take for rock formations, weathered, lichened, and climbed on by children at harvest. Two of them have been built against. One is the corner-stone of a barn. And the condition is not permanent: a scholar who reads the old tale aloud in the village square, in the hearing of people who then take it home and frighten their children with it, can bring the fear back into the district, and the thing in the field will be moving inside a season. This has happened four times that anyone can document, and it is the reason the Imperial Diet's clerks quietly buy up and burn local folk-tale collections in certain counties. The peasantry read this as censorship of sedition and complain about it in exactly those terms.

The third is competition. Two Shattered in the same district feed off the same dread and cannot both hold it; the nearer and larger keeps the gradient, and the other thins and goes quiet within a few years while still perfectly capable of killing anyone who trips over it. Void mages who understand this have been known to summon a second one deliberately, as a way of dealing with the first, which is the sort of solution this trade produces.

The fourth is the Remoulded, which is not a frailty the Shattered can feel. It simply ends them, eventually, and they never see it coming.

Country

The Wildlands, the seas, ruins, and anywhere a summoning spilled. They hold no territory in the sense that a people holds territory. What there is instead is a radius around a place where somebody once tried something.

Old casting sites are therefore the map of the class. A ruined tower with three Shattered within a day's walk of it is no coincidence and never was; somebody worked there for years and got it wrong every time. Cults have learned to read the pattern backward and go looking for the tower.

What a Shattered does to a country is measured in the way the country is farmed. The fields nearest it go out of use, then the road moves, then the hamlet moves, and after eighty years there is a shape on the map, a long empty bulge in otherwise settled land, that everybody navigates around and nobody can account for. The wood grows back in that bulge, the game comes in, and the poachers take the risk, so that the districts with Shattered in them are also the districts with the best hunting and the highest prices for venison. Where one is killed, the bulge fills in over two generations and the hunting is finished within five years.

Society

They sit above other monsters in the local order. "These creatures often hold sentient higher authority over lesser creatures and sometimes Abominations." A Shattered in a region is usually the thing the other monsters are working for.

The authority is neither organised nor chosen. Lesser things gather around a Shattered the way weather gathers around a mountain, because a Shattered is a piece of a god and everything with a nose for the void can feel it. What forms is a court without a courtier: goblins, chaos-spawn and blight-things arranging themselves into ranks around something that has never once given an order. When a Shattered is killed the arrangement collapses and the region gets six months of ordinary banditry, which the local lords mistake for improvement.

Faith

They are worshipped without knowing it. A monster pagan river cult of "deep-wood monster clans" unknowingly "worship a Shattered fragment of a Void Prince." The worship is not wasted. It goes past the Shattered, which has no capacity to receive it, and reaches the Prince the fragment came off, which does. This is the cheapest devotion in the world from the Princes' side of the ledger, and several of them are held to leave a Shattered standing in an inhabited region for precisely that reason.

There is a second reason and it is colder. A worshipped Shattered is a fed Shattered, because worship of this kind is fear with a ritual around it, and a cult that gathers every dark of the moon to be terrified in an organised way is topping up the gradient the thing lives on. A district that starts worshipping its monster has guaranteed that it will never go quiet.

Whatever the cults are told, the souls of their dead go where every soul goes, to the auction of the star gods. A Shattered has never granted anything to anyone and has never been able to.

Tongue

None of their own. A Shattered has no consciousness and no language. Some make noise in the shape they borrowed, and a few of the oldest have learned to repeat words heard often enough near them, which is how the wolf in the story comes to say a child's name. It means nothing. It is worse for meaning nothing.

Their names are given by the people who suffer them, and the naming follows local habit rather than any rule: a place name, a trade name, a woman's name, a description. A Shattered called by a person's name is nearly always wearing that person's shape, and somebody in that district gave it to them.

Regard

The settled world draws no line between a Shattered and any other large horror, and the line matters enormously. Two of the most famous monsters in the world are no Shattered at all.

Mad Margaret is a wild monster spider. She exists in the wild, she is enormous, she is a fragment of nothing, and she is no Shattered. She is a beast, she can be killed, and her body will rot like any other. Her resemblance to the form law is a coincidence of the world having spiders in it. The creature in the river is likewise a creature; what it is remains an open question in the world and no business of this class.

The Pendragon of the Penwood is a Shattered, and is the only true dragon in the world: a three-headed rotten dragon abomination, attached to no Void Prince anyone has yet put a name to. Every other dragon in every other story is a Shattered wearing a shape, a Crimson-mutated thing, or a lie. The Penwood held one real one.

Harvest

Void Elixir. "Some have perfected the art of distilling their essence, creating a special Void Elixir that can grant extensive knowledge of the Voided Arts, and insight into the darker realms, as well as the evolving of the individual's magical circulatory system."

There are two sources and the second one requires no monster at all. Void elixir is extracted from a Shattered. It is also made from void fluid: the blood of a victim sacrificed to a Void Prince under the dark moon becomes void fluid, and void fluid can be worked into elixir. The first source is a hunt. The second is a murder, and it is the reason the dark moon is watched in every city that has a watch.

The distilling is done on the hollow. Cutters take the undifferentiated substance from the deep interior and leave the shaped parts alone, since a tooth or a claw is the same material arranged into a silhouette and yields nothing; the horn of a Shattered is worth exactly what a stone is worth, which has ruined several collectors. An old carcass with a district's worth of eaten history inside it complicates the work, and the cutters have a trade rule about it, which is to pull everything that was ever alive out first and burn it.

The two grades are not equal and the trade knows it. Shattered-drawn elixir is thick, cold and stable, and keeps for as long as the carcass does, which is forever; a preserved Shattered body is a bank and is treated as one, with a fence around it and a family owning the fence. Void-fluid elixir is thinner, warmer, and goes off within a season, and it carries the victim with it: those who drink it report the sacrificed person's memories surfacing for weeks, in fragments, at inconvenient moments. Both grades are illegal everywhere. Both are available anywhere.

Remembered

The Pendragon of the Penwood, the only true dragon in the world, three-headed and rotten, attached to no Prince anyone has named, slain in the Penwood by Gaius' father; the kill gave the Pendragon line its name. Five others have been named by the countries that live with them.

Ossuweth, "The Mill Fire," a fragment of Drenolor. It came through in farm country in a season when a mill fire had killed nine people, and it took the only shape available to it: a wheel of burning timber the height of a barn, turning on its own axis, with a man's shoulders and a man's face pressed out of the burning wood at the hub. It does not spread fire and never has, which is the detail that unsettles people most; the flame does not leave it, because the fear it was made from was of burning in a mill rather than of burning generally, and a Shattered can do nothing its shape does not describe. Ossuweth follows watercourses and mills, and it stops outside a mill and turns, and the millers of three counties have a custom of walking their families out and standing in the road until it has gone by. Drainijod the False Dreamer has been seen at two of the mills it visited, before it came.

Grennoch Nine-Doors, a fragment of no Prince yet named. A goblin lord in shape, eight feet of it, crowned and armoured in doors: nine of them, taken from nine houses it emptied, strapped over its body as plate and worn until the paint came off. It came through into a hill country whose people feared their neighbours more than they feared anything in the dark, and so it wears the neighbour. The doors are the one thing about it that is not borrowed substance; they are real doors, and nobody has explained why a mindless thing should collect them, except that a shape made out of fear of the man next door will go where doors are. It holds the largest monster court known outside the dens, several hundred lesser things arranged in ranks it has never addressed. No scholar has identified the Prince it came off, and the Coven has twice sent to have it looked at, which suggests one of them suspects it is theirs.

The Sallow Bride of Kesk, a fragment of the Void Prince of plague and pestilence. She wears a woman in a wedding shift, walking, with the sickness on her that took the town of Kesk in a single winter: the skin gone yellow, the throat swollen shut, the hands still gloved. She does not speak, because the shape she borrowed could not. She goes into houses and sits with the ill, and the ill die, and nothing else in the house is touched. Kesk has been empty for sixty years and she has never left it, which is the clearest case anyone has of a Shattered that has outlived its gradient: with nobody in the town to be afraid, she has slowed to a walk of perhaps one house a week and does not appear to notice. She came off the Prince who cursed Zhurx, and she carries a thin, cold shadow of the same disease; the physicians who have gone into Kesk to study her have not come out, and the ones who came out early were not well.

Ulmurrahk, "The Weight Below," a fragment of no Prince yet named. A titanic sea form, and the only Shattered whose full shape has never been seen by anything that reported back. What is seen is a swell that does not match the weather, a shadow under a hull that takes eleven minutes to pass, and, twice in remembered history, an eye. The coastal peoples who gave it its name feared drowning above every other death, and Ulmurrahk is drowning with a body. It takes ships whole and leaves nothing floating, which is how no other sea monster in the world behaves and is exactly how a fear behaves. Nobody knows where its weak place is, because drowning has no soft spot in any story anyone tells, and that may be the whole reason it is still there. A greater Remoulded has been hunting it for four hundred years and cannot get at it, because the thing it wants to reabsorb will not come up.

Kessivar of the Four Heads, a fragment of Drenolor. A four-headed basilisk, which is the second example the form law itself gives, and it is the reason the example exists: Kessivar was seen early, described often, and became the picture the world uses. Grey-green, forty feet, four necks that argue with each other in movement and never in sound, because it has no voice. The four heads do not coordinate, since nothing behind them is coordinating anything, and a hunter who stands where only one head can see him is in a position the creature cannot resolve. It lives in a ruin field where a void mage worked for thirty years and failed thirty times, and three of the other failures are still standing in the same field, dead and undecayed, with a shrine at the foot of each. Kessivar is the largest piece of Drenolor loose in the world. The Coven has an interest and has not yet moved, and the reason is thought to be that whoever collects Kessivar becomes something the Queen would have to deal with.

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