The Choked

Overview

Look down into a Truthwell and the Choked look back. They are visitors who told the water a lie, or broke a promise sworn over it, and were drowned for it. Their bodies stay in the shaft, suspended and unspoiled, and their Echoes stay with them, held in the water until the lie each one told is confessed or formally named. They do not walk or speak. They are warnings, and every pilgrim who comes to swear or confess sees them first.

Appearance

The Choked hang upright or slowly turning in the clear blue-green water, at many depths, some just under the surface and some so far down they are pale smudges against the dark. The water preserves them perfectly: skin smooth and faintly blue, hair floating loose, clothes of every age and people still bright. Their faces are locked in the terror of the moment the water rose, mouths open, eyes wide. Bubbles never rise from them.

Their Echoes show only to those who look long. Then a faint second outline can be seen around a drowned face, as if the face were trying to shape a word. When a lie is spoken at the rim and the water churns black or red, the Choked sway together like weed in a current, and those nearest the surface seem for an instant to strain upwards.

Habitat and Range

They are found only in the Well that drowned them, and a Well holds as many as it has drowned: a little-used spring may keep one or two, an old oath-site with centuries of liars beneath it a whole silent crowd. The stone-skinned Water-Robed tend the Well, and leave the Choked where they hang.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Choked does nothing. Its Echo is fixed on the lie that killed it, aware enough to want release and unable to act. Those who have touched the water near one say they felt a pressing urge to speak a particular untruth aloud, the one the drowned man died for, so that it could at last be named.

Abilities

The Choked have no power of their own; the Well's law holds them. What they keep is knowledge: the lie each told, and the truth it hid. Under the Well's law of clarity, a visitor who asks the water about one may be shown that truth in a vision. When the lie is confessed, by the dead person's kin or anyone who knows it, or is spoken aloud at the rim, the Echo is released and the body at last begins to sink.

Uses and Dangers

The Choked serve as the Well's sermon: nobody who has seen them needs to be told what a lie costs here. Families come to free a drowned ancestor by confessing the lie for them, and lords and claimants sometimes come to have an old lie named, since a released Choked confirms the truth beyond doubt. The danger is only the Well's own: lie, or keep silent before its question, and join them.

Lore and Belief

Many people believe the Choked are damned for ever and must not be looked at, lest their guilt pass to the watcher; the Water-Robed teach otherwise, and the confessions that free them prove it. Others hold that the Choked were judged by a god of truth, but the water judges only what is said aloud and drowned them by its own law. Old oath-sites keep lists of who hangs in their Well and for what, read out at the rim on feast days, so that someone might yet name the lie.

Where It Appears

• The Truthwell