The Anchored

Overview

The Anchored are the dead of the Soul Anchor. When a being dies inside that zone, its Echo does not soften, scatter, or settle into Record as Echoes do elsewhere (see Resonant Continuity). It is caught at the spot where it formed and held there, made to repeat the end of its life. The Anchored are not the dead persons themselves but what is left of them: enough Pattern to suffer the repetition, too little to move on.

Appearance

An Anchored stands about the height it stood in life and keeps the clothes and wounds it died in, but all of it is translucent, a grey-yellow figure through which the broken headstones behind it show. It glows faintly from inside, and the glow flickers and pulses in time with its pain. Its face is set in the agony or terror of the last instant and never relaxes. Nothing visible holds it, yet it moves as if chained: it lunges, is jerked back a few paces from where it fell, and lunges again.

Each one repeats its death or its last hours. A woman stumbles, clutches her side, and falls, then stands where she began and stumbles again; a man drinks from a cup, chokes, and drinks. Their voices join the zone's drone, a low murmur like many people begging under their breath, and close to one the air turns colder and smells of stale incense and old dust. Touching one feels like a cold shock running up the arm.

Habitat and Range

The Anchored never leave the Anchor, and none can drift more than a few paces from the place of its death. A small Anchor over a forgotten catacomb may hold a handful; one over a field of sacrifice holds a crowd, and every one of them adds to the zone's strength.

Behaviour and Temperament

The Anchored are frantic. They cannot speak to the living in any way that makes sense, only throw out their fear and pain, which a visitor feels as if it were their own. They reach for every traveller who comes within their tether, and some seem to take the living for rescuers while others try to drag them into the loop or use them to climb out. Between visitors they repeat their deaths without rest.

Abilities

Within its tether an Anchored can touch the physical world: it can seize a sleeve, overturn a lamp, or drag at a leg with the cold strength of the zone behind it. Its grip carries its own last moments with it, and a held traveller may relive another's death for a while. The Anchored do not age or decay. They can be released only by a particular rite, by settling the business that holds them, or by giving them a stronger way into Record; the zone's keepers work against all three.

Uses and Dangers

The trapped Echoes give off a strong remnant charge that some practitioners harvest for magic, and the Anchored still hold what they saw, so secrets and crimes can be pried from them. Mourners come to free one they loved, and those who succeed sometimes carry away a recovered memory or a trustworthy fragment of the dead. The great danger is to die among them: whoever does becomes one of them.

Lore and Belief

Folk tales call them the souls of the damned or the ghosts of the unshriven, and many believe they were condemned to the Anchor for their sins. The truth is plainer and worse: an Anchored is whoever happened to die there, guilty or not, and the zone, not any judge, holds it. Mourners carry a release token, a relic or a prayer, in the hope that it will loosen a chain; scholars who study the place only agree that the first rule is not to die there.

Where It Appears

• The Soul Anchor