Unsworn Dead
In the Confluence Basins and along the Lower Serath, anything that must bind is sworn aloud before the gods and the neighbours and written down, and a death binds as much as a marriage: it settles an inheritance, frees a widow, closes a debt. A death never sworn is unfinished, and the Unsworn Dead are what such deaths leave behind, lingering until someone swears them.
Appearance
They are seen as the person they were, faint and grey, where their life was bound: a figure at the back of the oath-house while vows are taken, a shape bent over a ledger in a record-house at night, an old man at the door of the house that passed to his heirs while no one spoke his death. They try to speak, and are not heard; scribes say they hear a pen scratching where no one writes. The air near them smells of ink and tallow, and is cold.
Habitat and Range
They linger in the oath-houses and record-houses of the march-towns and river towns, and in the homes and fields their deaths should have settled. They are thickest after hard years, a failed rise, a fever, a feud, a raiding season, when the dead came faster than anyone could swear them.
Behaviour and Temperament
They want their death sworn. An Unsworn Dead haunts every swearing that touches it: a sale of its land, a marriage of its widow, an heir’s claim. Ink spills, seals crack, the speaker’s voice fails. It is not cruel; it cannot let the matter close while its own part in it is unsaid.
Abilities
Like other remnants they bring cold, move small things, and sour a room. The strongest can stop a swearing outright, and an oath-house with one in it may find every vow taken there that season quarrelled over.
Uses and Dangers
They are a danger to heirs, buyers, and anyone who profited by a death left unsaid. The towns lay them by swearing the death: whoever knows how it happened tells it aloud at the oath-house, and it is written down. Most go quiet once the entry is made. A death whose truth would ruin a powerful house is harder; such houses would rather keep the haunting than the truth, and few dare cross them. Basin songs are full of such hauntings: the murdered heir who stood at every feast his brother gave until the brother confessed, the drowned ferryman whose widow could not remarry until a stranger swore he had seen him go under.
Lore and Belief
Basin folk say a death not sworn before the gods of the Sworn Accord is a death the gods have not accepted. Scribes say only that the record is incomplete, and that the dead know it. Reedfolk, who say the basin towns took their swearing custom from them, claim the Unsworn Dead were always laid by naming them on the water, long before the towns wrote anything down.