The Changed Living
Living people of the Hushvale whose bodies can be overwritten by predatory survival under deep fog, fear, or moonless dark; not undead.
Overview
Among the things that move in the fog of the Hushvale are the changed living: living people, not undead, whose bodies can be overwritten by predatory survival when the fog is deep, when fear runs high, or on a night without a moon. They were shaped by the same catastrophe as the fog itself, the waking of the Sepulchre-Kin engine and the rite that hid the vale from it (see The Wake-Seal, c. 1,200 CR). Out of the fog they are men and women of the Held; in it they hunt.
Appearance
A changed one looks first like anyone from a ward-village, in homespun and fog-damp wool, and that is what makes it terrible. When the overwriting takes it, the body stays the same body but is used differently. It drops low and moves in short, quick rushes, stops dead to listen, and turns its head before its shoulders. The face goes slack, the mouth a little open, and the eyes stop answering a look: they track movement and warmth and nothing else. Hands curl to grip. It breathes fast and shallow, almost silently, and the only sound it makes is a wet catch in the throat when it is close.
It smells of the fog, cold stone and damp, with the sour sweat of the frightened under it. Those who have seen one come back to itself say the change leaves no mark but scratched hands and torn nails.
Habitat and Range
They are found only in the Hushvale, and most often where the fog lies deepest: on old roads between ward-villages, in the burial caves, and on the fields at the edge of night. Nobody outside knows how many there are, and the vale's interior is little known (see its ward-villages).
Behaviour and Temperament
Overwritten, a changed one has one aim, to survive, and it pursues it as a predator does: it stalks the lone, the slow, and the lost, and avoids light, noise, and numbers. It does not speak and does not seem to know names. It is not cruel; it is hungry and afraid, and the two have become one motion. When the fog thins or day returns, the person may surface again, sometimes with no memory of the night.
Abilities
The overwriting lends the body what survival asks of it: sharp hearing, patience, a sure footing in fog where others stumble, and a strength the person never used awake. Fear around it feeds the change, so a frightened household is more likely to turn than a calm one. It feels pain late and fights on wounds that would stop a waking person.
Uses and Dangers
The changed give the Held nothing but caution. They are one reason travel by night in the vale is close to certain death, and they make every ward-village wary of its own: a neighbour who goes out into deep fog may not be the one who comes back. The villages bar their doors at dusk, keep no one out alone in deep fog, and hush a frightened child quickly.
Lore and Belief
The changed are living people, and nothing dead wears them; but in the vale itself that is argued. Some of the Held say a changed one is a person still, sick with the fog, to be watched, bound, and nursed till morning; others say the person died in the fog and something wears the body home, and that it should be burned. A third view holds that the fog takes back those the old rite never fully hid. Outsiders know nothing of them at all; to the few who cross the desert's cradle end, the Hushvale is only a danger-mark.
The vale's ward-villages tell of a mother who went out into the deep fog after her changed son and brought him home bound across her shoulders, and of the night he woke.