An Unfinished is a figure of sepia and grey, faint as a face seen through old glass, about the size its person was and clearer in the hands than anywhere else, since the hands do the business. It does one thing over and over. A man counts coins onto a table that is only half there, sweeps them up, and counts again. A woman writes a letter, folds it, unfolds it, and starts the first line once more. A young soldier walks to a door, raises his fist to knock, and walks back.

Each has a sound to it, the coin’s click, the scratch of the pen, the knock that never lands, heard through the plane’s low murmur of whispers. The air near one is cold and smells of dust and dried flowers, with something of the business under it: ink, wet wool, the tallow of a single candle.

They are found only in the Trace, usually among the ruins and graveyards that echo the places where they died: a hall that is only an outline, a road that ends in mist, a grave with no stone. They are many; nobody knows how many, and they come and go as their business is settled or forgotten.

An Unfinished is absorbed in its loop and takes no notice of travellers until a traveller touches its business. Then it turns: it holds out the letter, points at the door, pushes the coins across the table. It cannot explain; it can only show. Some seem patient; others grow agitated when they are not understood and repeat the loop faster.

An Unfinished carries the memory of its business, and through the Trace a traveller who attends to it can recover what it knew: where the debt stood, what the unsaid word was, who was wronged. If the business is resolved, by the traveller, by kin on the Material Plane, or by any hand at all, the Echo settles and is free to pass on. Left alone, an unresolved one may attach itself to a traveller and drain their energy and sanity, and the traveller may be caught in its loop.

They are the plane’s most direct source of what the dead knew, and its readiest chance at closure: settle one and an Echo goes free. The cost is the loop. Those who take on too many of them, or stay too long trying, risk the Fade, losing their own memories until they become an Echo themselves.

Every people has its stories of the dead who cannot rest until a thing is done, and most believe the restless dead are punished or angry. The Unfinished are neither; they are held by the business itself, as the Trace’s Echo-Walkers know. Mourners settle a dead person’s debts and say what was unsaid at the grave partly for this reason, and the custom does more than they know: remembrance and settlement on the Material Plane ease the Echo in the Trace. Unsettled dead whose traces harden on the Material Plane instead are what people call haunts (see Hostile Remnants).