Threats To Eden VII: Hordes of the Dead

There is no real afterlife in Adel. Once a person passes away, its essence scatters like ash into the winds, rejoining the global essence flow that encompasses all things, drifting invisibly and eternally. Consciousness as we know it is lost, memories and emotions scattered incredible distances from one another. Coalescing the entirety of a person back from death is next to impossible. The body can be made to move, but the essence, the aura that gave it true life, cannot easily be reassembled and attached to the body again like a lost limb. But the system is not flawless. At the crucial moment where a person’s body ceases to function and its aura ceases to anchor, a perversion can occur. The nature of the death and the divine perversion gives rise to a multitude of creatures neither alive or dead.

Dawn of the Dead

Essence is a substance subservient to the Adelians. If they will it with enough strength, essence can be quite malleable. Words, actions and emotions can all produce differing effects on a creature’s aura. A creature’s birth can be influenced in subtle, mysterious ways and likewise, a creature’s death can be perverted in strange ways. A murder can tinge the essence of the victim as it struggles to cling to the corpse. A suicide would affect the aura in a different way, and even within this set, hanging and drowning have different effects. The emotions and relationships that the victim has built up until the point of death can pervert the act of transcendence. Shasa vampires, for example, are created by the death of a person tied to material possessions. Their egoism and greed carries on to the undead form.

An Undead creature has suffered a perverted transition from life to death. The corpse continues to move, remainders of its aura in part trapped by its body and granting it some form of sentience or mobility. Most undead cannot maintain a full aura on their own, so they must feed on that of other creatures. Undead can be considered pseudo-spirits – their bodies are primarily upheld by essence, rather than through physical power and the rules of physical existence. It is impossible for a bare skeleton to move, or for a zombie with two broken legs to walk: for physical creatures. For the undead, both are quite possible.

There are three classes of undead, as defined by religious scholarship:

Corporeal Mindless: Corpses that walk. Zombies and skeletons either retain enough essence to rise and walk after the obliteration of their selves, but not enough to cling to a sophisticated mortal consciousness; or they are imbued by a third party with only enough essence to move and carry out basic commands. Such undead do not shift shapes when they transcend – the body is left as it is, and continues to deteriorate on its own.

Incorporeal Emotional: The corpse is obliterated, as is most of the self, but enough emotion remains to carry an avatar of the victim into a transcendence. There are creatures existing in an incorporeal state, mere shapes of gas and light and energy fueled by lingering emotion to carry out a task unto eternity. Incorporeal Emotional undead can only exist in areas in which there is a lot of ambient essence agreeable to them, such as cursed places, artifact sites, blasphemed graveyards, or the haunts of Necromancers. It is possible for them to generate essence if their cardinal emotion is powerful enough, but most Incorporeal Emotional undead are fleeting, frail beings.

Corporeal Perfect: Also known as “intelligent undead.” The corpse transcends, attaining a new form that gives it perfect locomotion, and retains much of its personality, memories and emotions. What is retained and what is amplified or twisted will differ with the circumstances of transcendence. With Shasa, the creature’s body becomes its ideal self, often incredibly good-looking and neat, and its desires are amplified, so that it becomes greedier, lustier and also nervous, manifesting compulsions, paranoia or other disorders.

One of the more controversial subjects about the undead is whether or not the new being is a continuation of the old one, or a barely functioning replacement. Corporeal Perfect beings are thought of as continuations of the living being, while all the others are commonly accepted to be byproducts. Your lover’s ghost isn’t your lover – it is what’s left of your lover, or a copy of your lover. But a Shasa of your lover IS your lover. The arguments underlying these distinctions can be rhetorically challenged, and have been, but they persist in the culture. How pernicious they are varies by opinion.

Threat of the Dead

The undead do not deliberately join together. It is very rare to see Shasa working together, for example. Corporeal Perfect undead tend to be too eccentric and intolerant of each other’s eccentricities to join together, while other undead lack the ability to organize. Ghosts might haunt the same area, but they rarely haunt it together. However, undead still pose a very relevant threat to the people of Adel.

Necromancers: Adelians loath necromancy more than anything else. Even the possibility of bringing back a loved one, through stitching corpses and leashing the soul back into the body, causes most stomachs to churn. Necromancers are scarcely even thought of as people – they are monsters. They have no rights. When found, they are brutally tortured and killed for their crime. Necromancy is a very dangerous art. Adel is a world littered with material for Necromancers to use. Countless wars have been waged, including a war that spanned the entire world. Every site is a battle site – every village a graveyard. A Necromancer with enough skill could have an army easily at his or her disposal. It might just be skeletons bereft of flesh, but skeletons can be enough to terrorize anybody, and in numbers, to kill many. All nations of Adel have a zero tolerance policy on Necromancy. If you perform it, your life and liberty are entirely forfeit.

Ravages of Sin: An Adelian who has committed great evils always has a chance to do so again. The firing squad or the executioner’s axe or the assassin’s garrote may be ending one threat, but there is always a chance they are creating another. The corpse is discarded, the people rest easy, but the creature may not be truly dead. It could have risen again, with powers nobody can predict, and a mind in greater turmoil and depravity than ever before. The chances are minimal, but they are ever-present. The creature may just rise as a Shasa, obsessed with its own lust, money and property – this is the best case scenario. Shasa are often seen as harmless or at least tolerable, but they are not the only creature that could come of a sinner’s corpse. In the Spirits of Eden, none can say for certain when a villain is really, truly, gone forever. They don’t like to think unduly about this, but it is there.

Warbands of the Dead: There are organizations of undead out there, awaiting some odd moon to give them the go-ahead to strike. The most deadly and notable of these warbands is the Damned Legion, deadly and notable because it is a Fury warband. The Furies, also known as Fallen Seraphim, Traitor Seraphim or Anti-Seraphim, were once the exalted protectors of Sargasso. Orphaned women who were discarded by Sargasso’s once patriarchal society, the Seraphim were invested with power by the first High Lords of the Inquisition and used as the Inquisitorial legion, and soon, grew to become the true national army of Sargasso. But when their benefactors were killed by the King, many of these Seraphim grew furious. Tired of being used and abused by Sargasso, they proved their power by slaying the king and as much of his family as could be found, and laying waste to the capital. The remaining loyal Seraphim fought their own, unwilling to allow their grief and the injustice of it all to turn them into monsters. The loyal Seraphim won the day, the Furies were driven into the shadows of the world, to hide, to sulk, perverted by the betrayals and horrors they had suffered and committed. This tale is kept secret in Sargasso – even among the current Seraphim, few know the true history of the Furies. Why should they? The Sargasso of today offers an equal society to all. They won.

But the Furies remain. The Damned Legion is one of the most terrifying of the Fury Warbands. It is said that during the siege of the capital by the Furies, the Royal Guard led a hundred of the furies into a vast open courtyard and flooded it with acid as a desperate move. The Furies died horribly, but when the acid drained away, they were back on their feet. Armored in hatred, with bodies of anger and anguish, the Damned Legion continued to slaughter, their beautiful countenances preserved for all eternity as though untouched by the devilish substance that killed them. It is said that the leader of the warband begged Kaehma, the Greater Spirit of Death, to spare her sisters. She did. The Damned Legion was driven away by the loyal Seraphim in a horrific battle, and though diminished in number, they remain. They can only be killed by divine magic and a truly driven soul. And unlike most undead, Furies remain as lucid about their murderous goals as they’ve ever been.

But the Seraphim are not the only ones who’s past soldiers have risen to fight again. Every nation has its own tale of a fallen army, that rises on ghoulish nights to carry out battles long since won, trying in vain to change the course of their history. Some tales are false. Some are undoubtedly and horrifyingly true. In Vedaria, word has it that a pyramid exists in which lies entombed a mummified king, with an army at his command, to strike at any who disturbs him. In Periterim, there is a story of Shadow Company, a mercenary group who were sent on a suicide mission and became wrathful shades, wandering the countryside, traveling only at night, and laying waste to whatever they find – unless paid.