Fused Dead
The overburn of the Ash-Furnace Civilization glassed whole stretches of the Glassbelt. In some of its ruins the glass holds shapes: people caught in the fire and fused into floors and walls. These are the Fused Dead. They do not move. They speak.
Appearance
A Fused Dead is a figure in the glass, seen when the light is low and slanting: a dark outline sunk in a vitrified wall, a body lying in a glassed floor as if under ice, its arms raised or its face turned away. Some are only a hand or a head breaking the surface, smoothed by the fire into something like a lump of dark green bottle glass. The glass round them is warmer than the rest. Their voices are dry whispers, many at once, in a tongue no living salvager knows, and they seem to come from inside the glass. The air in such ruins smells of hot stone and old ash.
Habitat and Range
They lie in the vitrified ruins and dead furnace zones of the Glassbelt, most of all in the deepest furnace scars, where the glassed ground is said to hold the fire’s heat still. How many there are no one knows, and which ruins hold them is part of the salvagers' route knowledge.
Behaviour and Temperament
They are still, and mostly silent. They speak when the ruin is disturbed, above all when ash or slag is lifted and carried away: the whispers rise and follow the carrier, and grow louder the farther the ash goes. Salvagers say they sound like pleading. What they ask for no one can tell.
Abilities
Their voices carry dread, as the voices of remnants do, and those who listen long sleep badly and dream of fire. They cannot leave the glass. Whether they have any part in the sickness the old warnings blame on carried ash is not known.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing, and they are a warning: a ruin with Fused Dead in it is one where the fire was worst, and the ground there is dangerous for more reasons than the dead. Salvagers keep the old warnings strictly near them: do not speak the Pyre-King’s name near a furnace, and do not carry ash or slag out. Those who break the second warning say the whispers follow them for days.
Lore and Belief
The Salvage Peoples say the Fused Dead are the furnace-folk who fed their god until he consumed them, and that they plead to be carried out of the glass. Some salvagers believe the ash is what is left of them, and that carrying it away takes their bodies from them. Nobody knows which is true, or whether either is.
Salvage crews tell of a delver who chipped a furnace-king’s gold collar out of the glass around a Fused figure and heard it begging the whole time; he sold the collar and drank the money, and never worked the scars again.