The Unreturned
The Thaluren live for the return, and a run that does not come home is not a run: their custom has nothing to say about it. The Unreturned are what is left of such runs on the current roads they did not finish. Outer-Route runs meet them most, on the farthest roads, as a presence in the water, keeping pace.
Appearance
They are felt before anything else: a cold patch in the current that moves with the run, a pressure on the flank as if another body swam alongside, the sense of being one more than the run’s count. Sometimes they are seen, at the edge of sight in the green dark: a line of pale shapes swimming the same road a little apart, gone when looked at. They make no sound in the water, but some runs report a call that is almost the run-call of a line no longer living. The water near them tastes faintly of the home river they never reached.
Habitat and Range
They are met on the farthest current roads that Outer-Route runs ride home, above all on the Far Set, the outermost road the Thaluren know, at the edge of the Unrun Sea, and on the outer routes of the Tidebound Reaches.
Behaviour and Temperament
They swim the road home and never arrive. They keep pace with a living run, as if they were part of it, and some runs say they fall back at the point where they were lost. They do not attack. A run that turns aside towards them, or follows them off the road, may lose its way.
Abilities
Like other remnants they bring cold and a heavy dread, and those who swim among them for long grow tired and slow. Their pull is the danger: a young swimmer may follow a pale shape off the current road into water that leads nowhere the Thaluren can follow.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing, but runs read them as a sign of where the road is hardest. The danger is to stragglers and the young; Outer-Route lines keep their runs close when they feel the cold patch, and count aloud.
Lore and Belief
The Way of Return asks only whether a return is rightful, and gives no rite for those who never returned. The Outer-Route lines, who meet the Unreturned most, are said to keep one of their own: naming a lost run’s members when the living run comes in, as if they had come home with it. Other lines dispute whether that is rightful. Some Thaluren believe the Unreturned are what the devourers leave; others, that they are runs that took a road no one should take.
Outer-Route songs remember the run-leader who went back out past the Far Set to bring a lost run home and returned at the head of a run of the Unreturned, singing, before vanishing into the open sea with them.